Ear of the
Heart
Reflections, guidance, and gentle stories for listening deeply — to yourself, your loved ones, and the world around you.
Grief as a Spiritual Practice: Learning to Hold What Hurts
For a long time, popular conversations about grief tended to suggest that healing meant gradually moving away from grief. Even though contemporary grief work offers a much more complex picture, many of us still carry an expectation that we should eventually reach a place where the loss no longer affects us quite so much.
What if healing asks something different of us?
Finding Your Rule of Life Through Simplicity and Flow
A Rule of Life offers one way to pay attention to that feeling. Despite the word rule, it isn't necessarily a list of requirements or a program for becoming more disciplined. At its best, it can provide a gentle structure for noticing what sustains us, what matters most, and what helps us live with greater intention.
It asks a deceptively simple question: How do I want to live?
Creating Sacred Space at Home: Simple Ways to Invite Peace
A sacred space can offer that kind of pause. It doesn't have to be a separate room, beautifully decorated, or filled with objects traditionally associated with spirituality. It doesn't even have to be permanent. Sacred space can be as simple as a chair beside a window where you sit quietly each morning, a corner where you light a candle when you need time to reflect, or a few meaningful objects you take from a box and arrange when you want to create a place for prayer, meditation, Reiki, grief, or rest.
Walking the Labyrinth: A Journey Inward and Outward
There are seasons in life when the path ahead feels uncertain… In those moments, many of us instinctively search for answers. But sometimes, what we need most isn’t another answer. Sometimes we simply need a path.
One of the oldest contemplative practices in the world offers exactly that: The labyrinth.
The Spiritual Practice of Boundaries: Saying Yes, Saying No, Staying Whole
For those in caregiving roles, helping professions, ministry, or deeply relational lives, constant yes-ing can begin to feel like proof of compassion and commitment. But over time, always saying yes can leave us exhausted, resentful, disconnected from ourselves, and unable to offer care in sustainable ways.
Boundaries are not the opposite of love. Often, they are what make love sustainable.
The Wheel of the Year: Living the Cycle of Life, Death, and Rebirth
There is a rhythm to life that we don’t always notice… until something changes. A season shifts. A loss occurs. Something ends, and something else, quietly or unexpectedly, begins.
In many spiritual traditions, this rhythm is understood as a cycle. One of the most well-known expressions of this idea is called the Wheel of the Year.
The Language of Stillness: What Silence Can Teach Us
In many areas of life, we are taught that words are the most important part of communication. We learn how to explain, persuade, and comfort through language. Yet in some of the most meaningful moments of life—grief, prayer, deep listening, or sitting beside someone who is dying—words often fall away.
What remains is silence.
Sacred Ordinary: How Everyday Moments Become Meaningful
The Sacred Ordinary is the practice of recognizing that everything—washing dishes, walking the dog, holding a loved one’s hand—can become a spiritual act when we slow down and pay attention.
It’s not about doing more. It’s about noticing more.
When we attend to the smallest details of daily life with presence, gratitude, and love, we begin to sense that the sacred isn’t somewhere else, it’s right here.