Living A Contemplative Life

If I were to say, as I sometimes do, that Alumah was created to help us live a contemplative life, what does that actually mean? It’s a question worth sitting with. Not because the answer is complicated, but because the word itself, contemplative, has a way of sounding more distant than it is. We hear it and imagine monks in candlelit rooms, years of silent retreat, or a level of spiritual seriousness that feels out of reach in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. But that is not what I mean.

Contemplative is a rich word with layers of meaning depending on its context. But at its core, to be contemplative means to cultivate a quality of deep, attentive presence. It means to practice a way of being that moves beneath the surface of our typical busy, reactive thinking lives toward a quieter and more receptive awareness, even when that quiet awareness is expressed through emotions as full and alive as joy, grief, and wonder. Contemplation is not the absence of feeling. It is the willingness to feel with more intention, more honesty, and more depth.

An important aspect not to miss here is that the intent is to live a contemplative life. Without living, there is nothing to contemplate. It is in holding the tension between living and reflection where I believe our spiritual and personal growth actually happens. If we focus only on the living, rushing from one moment to the next, always doing, rarely pausing, we may lose sight of where we are headed or the impact our choices are having on ourselves and others. We can spend years accumulating experience without ever quite learning from it.

Yet at the same time, when we lean too far into spiritual study, meditation, or contemplation without grounding it in our lived experience, we can easily find ourselves spiritually bypassing difficult truths. We reach for transcendence as a way of avoiding the ordinary, the sometimes painful work of being human. Seeking to find and live in the tension between action and reflection, between doing and being, that intersection is where the real transformation happens. There is no place to arrive, only a place to return.

One of the first descriptions I wrote for Alumah when first submitting it to the app store was simply beyond meditation. I have since thought about updating this description because without context, I am not sure my intent will be properly understood. But let me try to explain what I meant by those two words.

I believe meditation and other practices such as centering prayer are critical for anyone wanting to become more conscious of how they move and live in the world. These are not small things. A regular sitting practice, a daily moment of silence, the discipline of returning inward: these reshape us in ways we often can’t fully articulate. Yet the practices themselves are not the end. I see them only as the means to something more sacred: living a heart-centered life.

Because when we are able to go beyond our thinking, beyond the noise of our reactive minds, we discover our heart. And it is in this sacred space where joy, faith, hope, discernment, and love are nurtured. It is in this sacred space where the true treasure of contemplative life waits. Meditation opens the door. Living a contemplative life means actually walking through it, again and again, into the fullness of who we are becoming.

Many spiritual traditions converge on a similar insight: that human consciousness, in its untrained state, tends to be noisy, self-referential, and reactive. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism each carry their own contemplative traditions, their own practices designed to help us step back from the noise and touch something deeper. The sacred, however you name it: God, Creator, awareness, presence, or simply the ground beneath everything.

What strikes me about these traditions is not their differences but their shared conviction that the surface of life, as busy and full as it is, is not the whole of it. That something quieter and truer runs beneath. And that with practice and through patience and humility, we can learn to hear it.

Striving to live beyond the surface of our lives through contemplative practice is more accessible than people often realize. The difficult part isn’t the practice itself. Instead, it is recognizing that this is something to keep returning to; not a goal to achieve once, but a rhythm to grow into. It is less about what you do occasionally and more about who you gradually become. The person who keeps showing up, imperfectly, is the one who is changed by it.

Simple Practices for the Contemplative Life

Start with stillness. One thing every tradition agrees on is to carve out a small amount of daily time for silence. Not to achieve anything. Our minds will often want to begin a practice like this and expect a reward, a feeling of peace, a clear insight, a sense of progress. But instead, try to find that moment itself as the reward. Silence is not empty. It is where we begin to notice what has always been there beneath the noise.

Find a sacred word or phrase.  Mantras or a single sacred word of centering prayer can help gather your presence back to the moment when the mind seeks to scatter it. The word is not magical in itself. What it does is give you something to return to—a gentle anchor when thoughts pull you toward yesterday’s worry or tomorrow’s to-do list. Choose something that carries meaning for you, and let it do its quiet work.

Become aware of your breath. This may be the most underestimated practice of all. A single conscious breath, truly noticed, is a genuine contemplative act available in any moment. You do not need to set aside time for it. You do not need a quiet room or a meditation cushion. You need only to pause, breathe, and notice that you are here. Right now. That pause is not small. It is the doorway.

Slowly, intentionally read sacred text. Whether you choose Rumi, the Psalms, the Tao Te Ching, or whatever else draws you, practice reading less and sitting longer. Most of us have been trained to read for information, to cover ground, to finish. Sacred reading invites something different. Let a single line land, sit with it, and let it ask something of you. Consider reflecting on what that text means to your life instead of only the content of understanding what you read. 

Pause for gratitude. This is not only a mindfulness technique, but a practice across traditions; finding what we are grateful for helps shift us from anxiety to presence. Gratitude is not pretending everything is fine. It is a deliberate act of noticing what is real and good even amid what is hard. When practiced honestly, it quietly retrains the mind to look differently at the life it is living.

Walk with awareness. How often each day do we walk to our front door, or down a street, and yet how rarely do we take in how our body moves, what we can sense, what is actually around us? Thich Nhat Hanh made this central to his teachings, the radical act of being fully present with each step. Try making each step deliberate. Not as a performance, but as a quiet act of arriving in your own life.

Journal. Whether it is to reflect on what you are grateful for, document your dreams, or sit with your emotions, writing has a way of helping us see what is already in us. Something shifts when thought becomes language on a page. We can see it. We can question it. We can hold it at enough distance to learn from it. Journaling is not just record-keeping; it is one of the most honest forms of self-reflection available to us, and it has been central to contemplative life across cultures for centuries.

As I look through these practices, I see how we have woven support for them throughout Alumah. Not because an app is what makes a contemplative life, it is not. But because structure matters. Because the right tool, held lightly, can make it easier to begin and easier to return. Alumah was created with the intention to hold space for these practices: the journaling, the breathwork, the reflection, meditation, the daily rhythm of showing up through daily plans.

I recognize that Alumah is a piece of technology. But behind it is a genuine conviction: that people deserve a simple, private, grounded place to do this work. A place that does not tell you what to believe, does not prescribe your path, and does not add pressure to something that needs to be approached with patience and care. Just enough structure to help you begin. Just enough space to make it yours.

While these practices are accessible to all of us in this very moment—no app required, no perfect conditions necessary—it is in returning to them where we find we are able to unlock what is deepest in us. Not what we achieve. Not what we produce. But the quiet, steadier self that has been there all along, waiting to be listened to.

I invite you to explore Alumah, and I encourage you to create your own sacred space—one small practice at a time—as you choose to return to yourself.

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