Excerpt from Less Helping Them, More Healing You: The Transcendent Gifts of an Ancient Spiritual Practice, by Jean P. Kelly

AT ONE TIME, I pictured myself in a nursing home of the future where family and friends would complain about my pockets full of notes—shreds of paper with handwritten quotes—stashed there and everywhere in case I forgot good advice. I also imagined an avalanche of books, anthologies, and memoirs bristling with post-its, on a bedside stand, never shelved just in case I needed to find, in doubt-filled moments, an inspirational passage, paragraph, or prayer.

Words of others—especially in books—have always offered solace to me: comfort, companionship, escape, insight, and challenge. So when some ten years ago I learned that reading can be prayer, I was hooked. Ever since discovering the ancient spiritual discipline Lectio Divina, “Spiritual Reading,” I’ve been on an intentional path back to myself, one page at a time.

That I was lost at all was a surprise revealed over months and years of integrating the method of slow reading, meditation, response, and contemplation into my busy life.

I was only aware I needed a rest, even a momentary escape from the feeling that it was my responsibility alone to navigate my nuclear family of five toward security and success. As the proverb tells us, a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, which for me was carving out just fifteen minutes a few days a week for myself. For solitude. For silence. And for reading texts that took me inward, but ones that eventually demanded I make out- ward changes.

With practice and determination, that “me” time grew to twenty minutes every day. Often before my three daughters and husband awoke, I would ponder my life with a book in my lap. I was still. I listened. Just below my consciousness, I heard a whisper about what was and was not healthy–in my heart, in my soul, and in the relation- ships where I had invested both.

Loving relationships are gratifying until they’re not. But most of us aren’t nearly as equipped as we think we are to recognize deep dysfunction without outside input. We hardly hear our own mouths utter the word “but” after we make statements like “I love him” or “She loves me” when what we are really doing is justifying unequal, incomplete, or manipulative entanglements. If twisted definitions of familial loyalty and responsibility drown out our soul’s symphony of needs, we fall back on the ever-present chorus of “helping,” “fixing,” and “keeping up appearances” with practiced lies and half-truths that say what we have is the best we can hope for.

If control is a familiar tune, we whistle it in the dark. Only our heart hearkens the empty echoes. Spiritual Reading can provide both the space and the grace to un-mute our truest desires and turn up the volume on the truth about love. With time and practice of four simple steps in this book, the off-key voices of self-denial can be replaced by sweet harmonies of self-acceptance, which sing alongside the wise guides found in texts of all kinds— including music, art, and life experience. Their refrain is a powerful truth: genuine love is never earned.

Spiritual Reading offered me not only a rest stop, but also an unexpected path toward healing that is so remarkable I am compelled now to show others the way.

Learn more by ordering Less Helping Them, More Healing You: The Transcendent Gifts of an Ancient Spiritual Practice, by Jean P. Kelly.

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