I had been working with Pastor Aaron, I’ll call him, for 10 years when he came to my office one day with some distressing news: He’d had a heart attack. He and his family were shocked because he took good care of himself; his doctor didn’t know the cause. Aaron wondered where God was leading him and said, “It’s going to take me a long time to metabolize this experience.”

Metabolize. This word from biology rang true in several ways. I see my role as a spiritual director as helping others to digest signs of God’s presence in our lived experiences. We hunger for a sense of God’s presence in the world, we chew on those encounters through stories of human experience, and we trust the Spirit to be at work in something akin to an organic process.

Aaron’s sense of metabolizing also recalls the psalmists, who teach us to pray through the full range of our humanity: mind, heart and body.

Psalm 31 is one example of Scripture that resonates with this wisdom. In Hebrew tradition, the heart was seen as the center of the human person’s capacity for imagination, commitment and action. Psalmody, defined as the act, practice or art of singing psalms, relies in worship on this notion of heart. It models ways to bring the raw materials of human experience directly to God in prayer.

For Aaron, this holistic view of heart-full attention helped him metabolize his experience beyond just processing feelings or unpacking ideas. We have had several sessions in which we processed this; I’m sharing a composite description here with permission.

A whole-hearted conversation

Aaron sighs heavily as we begin, so I ask if he would prefer a little silence or a chance to get some things off his chest first. He chooses both, taking a few minutes to lay out his consternation about why the heart attack had happened. Then we quiet. I see the tension in his face and shoulders begin to ease.

When I ask what is on his heart, Aaron easily expresses waves of disbelief and anger: He had been doing everything in his power to be healthy! So we explore what other nuances the Spirit might be bringing into view, and he finds more subtle signs of fear and confusion.

We pull the thread. Aaron talks about his clouded thinking; his mind is racing without any real explanation to ground him. No wonder he finds it difficult to detect God’s leading. There is a fierce yet tender energy around this, so we try engaging his body.

I ask Aaron to gently scan his body from head to toe. In light of what he is hearing himself say, what sensations does he notice in his body? He instinctively covers his heart with both hands and begins to weep. We linger there, then pray.

Psalm 31 as embodied prayer

One gift of psalmody is the way it expresses embodied prayer through imagery and physical action. We can picture one psalmist sitting quietly like Aaron when we read, “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress” (Psalms 31:9) or another raising a fist, crying out, “Incline your ear to me” (Psalms 31:2). The genius of psalmody is in bringing the fullness of our experience and the rawness of its expression directly to God.

We too can practice noticing the constant interplay between thinking, feeling and embodiment. We can call upon the Lord and cry out when we fear shame or weigh moral distinctions or express trust. We can appreciate the deep feeling beneath the acts of exulting and rejoicing.

This interplay is natural and physical: We may be flushed with contradictory thoughts and a bright red face. While we might hide that flush in professional or pastoral settings, the practices of spiritual direction and psalmody normalize our needs to metabolize experience and embody their every aspect before God.

Accompany one another

After several sessions, Aaron set an intention to create a grounding ritual. He committed to choose some readings and music, but the central action, he decided, would be returning to the same bodily tenderness he had found in our work together. He would slow down his breathing, place his hands on his chest, and hold his beating heart while praying.

This experience reinforces lessons for me about prayer and spiritual direction. I find myself including more movement into my own rhythms because so much of my work is stationary. I am likely to take someone on a walk when they come to me angry or invite a person into silence when they need to let the tears come.

When I can remember that talking about our thoughts sometimes brings feelings to light, I can be more patient. The complexities of our times make our stories heavy, as people deal with grief, trauma, division and cries for justice, all of which we carry in our bodies. We must keep turning to the psalms for their enduring wisdom.

To accompany one another well in the process of embodying our prayer, we can treat our metabolizing conversations as rehearsal. Try extending invitations to yourself and others that dance between thinking, feeling and embodiment.

For example, we might use open-ended questions like “How are you thinking about that? What else are you experiencing alongside that feeling? Where do you notice that in your body?” When we accompany one another in these ways, we reflect something of God’s acceptance for our humanity and cultivate the courage to pray as we must.

We can only perceive and respond to the presence of God through the human faculties we have been given, so let us listen heart-fully as the psalmist appeals to our thinking, feeling and embodying: “Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord” (Psalms 31:24).