Spiritual Practices for Resilience: Finding Balance and Grounding in Difficult Times
Listen to my podcast episode on this story.
Today I want to tell you a story about myself as a child.
When I was around ten or eleven years old, I discovered a practice that helped me find balance when I was upset. It helped me find my center. It gave me a way to feel grounded when my emotions felt overwhelming.
For me, that practice was going into my room, climbing under the covers, opening the Bible to the book of Psalms, and reading.
There was something about the Psalms that met me exactly where I was. If I was sad, they held sadness. If I was angry, they gave me language for anger. If I felt joyful or hopeful, they made room for that too. Somehow, the words of the Psalms soothed me. They comforted me. They helped me feel less alone and more connected to God in the middle of whatever I was carrying.
But it wasn’t only the words themselves. It was also the practice of retreating to my room, claiming that space for myself, and recognizing that I needed tools in my life to help me find balance again. I discovered that practice as a child, and I carried it with me through my teenage years and into adulthood. Looking back, I can see that it was one of my first experiences of spiritual resilience.
The Psalms as a Practice of Resilience
I tell this story often because the Psalms have been such a meaningful part of my life and work. For the past five years, I’ve hosted a podcast called Psalms for the Spirit, where I explore the Psalms as a lens for understanding spirituality and resilience. Part of the reason I’ve spent so much time with this subject is because of my own experience with it. But it’s also because, over the years, I’ve heard from so many other people who have found the Psalms to be a source of strength in difficult times.
People have shared how the music of the Psalms, the prayers, and the honest language of the text have helped them through moments of grief, fear, uncertainty, and pain. For some, the Psalms have offered courage. For others, they’ve created a space to process emotions that had been sitting inside for a long time. Again and again, I’ve heard stories of people finding comfort, strength, and grounding through these spiritual practices.
That fascinated me. I wanted to understand why spiritual practices like these could be so powerful. Why do they help us? What is happening in us when we turn to prayer, sacred reading, music, or silence in the middle of difficult moments?
Spiritual Practices and Resilience
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to take resilience skills training through the Community Resiliency Model offered by the Trauma Resource Institute. That experience gave language to something I had already known in my own life, but hadn’t yet fully understood.
As a minister and spiritual director, I had long believed that spiritual practices matter. But this training helped me see them through the lens of resilience. It helped me understand that the practices I had been drawn to as a child ~ reading the Psalms, retreating to a quiet place, finding comfort in prayer ~ were not just spiritually meaningful. They were also helping me regulate, recenter, and return to a place of balance when stress or emotional overwhelm threatened to pull me away from myself.
That insight changed the way I think about spiritual life.
When we feel stressed or threatened, whether the stress is large or small, our bodies often slip into survival mode. We become anxious, reactive, overwhelmed, or disconnected. We need tools that help us find our center again. And for many people, spiritual practices are exactly that: tools of resilience that help us return to groundedness, calm, and a sense of God’s presence with us.
Finding Shelter in the Storm
This is one of the foundational ideas behind this podcast and this work: spiritual practices can help us find shelter when life’s storms come our way.
They can help us stay present instead of getting pulled into the past, replaying something that has already happened, or getting thrown into the future, worrying about what might come next. They help us return to this moment. They help us notice God’s presence with us here and now. And in doing so, they can restore a sense of grounding, clarity, and courage.
For me, that’s one of the great gifts of spiritual practice. It helps me come back to what really matters. It helps me remember that I don’t have to live in the swirl of fear, anxiety, or overwhelm. I can return to the center. I can rest in God’s presence. I can take the next step forward from a place of greater steadiness and trust.
What Spiritual Practices Can Look Like
Spiritual resilience doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, I think it’s often found in simple, faithful practices that we return to over and over again.
For some of us, it may look like reading a Psalm each morning before the day begins. For others, it may be a practice of prayer, silence, journaling, sacred music, or lighting a candle at the end of a difficult day. It may be creating a quiet corner in the house where there is room to breathe, reflect, and reconnect with God. It may be singing, meditating, or simply sitting with a passage of scripture until it settles into the heart.
What matters is not perfection. What matters is having practices that help us return to the center.
These are the practices that remind us who we are when stress threatens to scatter us. They help us find rest and replenishment. They give us strength and calm. And they offer us a way to stay rooted in what is true when life feels uncertain.
A Question for Reflection
As I think about spiritual practices and resilience, I keep coming back to a simple question:
What are the spiritual practices that have helped me find balance in the past?
Maybe there are practices you still turn to today. Maybe there are practices you’ve neglected that once gave you a deep sense of grounding. Maybe there are rhythms of prayer, sacred reading, music, or stillness that have helped you feel centered, focused, and connected to God.
I think this is an important question for all of us.
What are the spiritual practices that keep you grounded?
What helps you stay focused on what really matters?
What keeps you present to God’s presence in everyday life?
What gives you courage, hope, strength, and calm when things get hard?
These are the questions I want to keep exploring, because I believe they sit at the heart of resilience.
We Need These Practices ~ and We Need Each Other
One of the things I love most about this conversation is that it’s not one we have to have alone. Spiritual resilience is something we can learn from one another. We can share the practices that sustain us. We can encourage each other. We can remind one another of the tools that help us stay grounded when life feels overwhelming.
So I want to invite you into that conversation.
What are the spiritual practices that give you grounding and balance?
What gives you courage, strength, and hope when life gets a little tough?
What helps you find your center again?
I’d love to hear from you. Share in the comments or come join the conversation in the Facebook group. Let’s encourage one another as we begin this journey together.
Final Thoughts
At its heart, resilience is about finding ways to return to center when life pulls us away from it. It’s about learning how to rest, replenish, and reconnect with what sustains us so that we can know how to move forward. Spiritual practices are one of the ways we do that.
For me, that journey began in childhood, curled up under the covers with the Psalms.
And it continues today.
The spiritual practices that ground us may look different from person to person, but the invitation is the same: to pay attention to what helps us feel rooted, held, and restored. To make space for those practices in our lives. And to trust that in returning to them, we are also returning to the God who meets us there with comfort, courage, and peace.
Listen to my podcast episode here: https://spiritualpracticesforthesoul.substack.com/p/1-the-spiritual-practice-that-helped
