When the Practice Goes Quiet
On dry seasons, pushing through, and the wisdom to know the difference
There are mornings when I sit down with my practice and everything is alive.
The gate opens easily. The well is full. Something genuine happens in the quiet, some actual exchange between my soul and God that I can feel in my body — a settling, a warmth, a sense of having actually arrived somewhere real. These are the mornings I want to tell everyone about. These are the mornings that make me understand why people have been doing this for centuries.
And then there are the other mornings.
The ones where I sit down and go through the motions and feel like I am tapping my fingers in sequence with no heart in it at all. The gate is there but it feels like a door to an empty room. The well is there but the water level isn’t rising. I am doing the thing, hitting all the right spots, saying something approximating prayer — and feeling, quietly and uncomfortably, nothing in particular.
I used to respond to those mornings by eventually stopping showing up.
Not dramatically. Not a crisis of faith. Just a gradual tapering off — skipping one morning, then two, then a week, then longer — because I didn’t like the way the practice felt and I didn’t know what to do instead. The lifelessness felt like failure, and the failure felt like something I’d rather quietly avoid than sit with.
What I have learned since then, slowly and not always gracefully, is that a dry morning is not the same as a broken practice. And that there are actually two very different things happening on the mornings when it feels like nothing, and the wisdom — the part that takes years to develop — is learning to tell them apart.
The first kind of dry morning is what the contemplatives called aridity. It has nothing to do with you. It is simply a season — the spiritual equivalent of a cloudy day, where the sun is exactly where it always is but you cannot feel its warmth. The practice feels mechanical. The words feel empty. The gate opens onto silence.
The right response to aridity is to stay anyway.
Not because the performance of the practice matters. Not because God is keeping score of how many mornings you showed up. But because a pilgrim who only walks on sunny days doesn’t get very far. The path is still there under the cloud cover. The well is still full even when it doesn’t feel like it. And there is something that forms in us specifically through the unglamorous faithfulness of returning on the days when nothing seems to be happening — a kind of rootedness, a steadiness, a trust that goes deeper than feeling.
Thomas à Kempis, who understood aridity better than almost anyone, wrote about this with characteristic directness: the soul that endures a dry season without abandoning its practice comes out on the other side with something it could not have acquired any other way.
So sometimes the answer is simply: keep going. The dryness is not a signal. It is a season.
But there is a second kind of dry morning, and this one is different.
This is the morning where the lifelessness is not aridity but misalignment — where what you are doing has stopped being what your heart actually needs. Where the practice that was once alive has become a container you have outgrown, or a form that no longer fits the season you are actually in. Where pushing through is not faithfulness but stubbornness, and the dryness is not a cloud in front of the sun but the quiet signal of a soul that needs something different.
This kind of dryness requires not perseverance but discernment. And the response is not to push through but to pay attention.
Sometimes starting again means trying a new approach to the same practice. A different time of day. A shorter, simpler version. Letting go of the elaborate architecture and returning to the most basic elements — just the gate, just the pulse, just one breath and one moment of genuine attention.
Sometimes it means something more different than that. A walk instead of a chair. Silence instead of words. Rest itself as the practice — not the absence of God but a different way of being with Him, less formal, less structured, more woven into the ordinary movements of the day.
There is no wrong answer. The question is not am I doing this correctly but what does my heart actually need right now? And the honest answer to that question changes with the season, the circumstance, the particular quality of this particular dry spell.
What I wish someone had told me earlier is this: abandoning the practice because it has gone dry is almost never the right response. But neither is grinding through something that has genuinely stopped serving the life you are trying to tend.
The middle path — the one that takes the most wisdom and the most gentleness with yourself — is simply to stay curious. To notice when it has gone quiet and ask, honestly, what the quiet is telling you. To know the difference between a cloud and a signal. To show up even when it feels like nothing, and to have the courage to change when the nothing is trying to tell you something.
The practice is not the point. The Gardener is the point. And the Gardener, it turns out, is remarkably patient with both the showing up and the starting again.
He has been tending this garden far longer than you have.
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Darlene Hull is a pragmatic contemplative by nature, a spiritual companion by calling, and the Keeper of the Hand Psalter.
She is also a Certified Mental Health, Human Flourishing, and Insight Coach who guides Christian women to structural peace. Drawing on years of contemplative practice, Spiritual Formation coaching, and the rich heritage of Celtic Christian wisdom and ancient practices of the church, Darlene’s focus is simple: dismantling the exhaustion of spiritual performance and leading clients into the stable rest (Menuchah) secured by Christ’s finished work.
Darlene is in her novitiate stage in the Order of Imago Christi (OIC) and a vowed member of the Order of the Mustard Seed (OMS). She works from her home in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. When not writing or coaching, Darlene rounds out her life with long walks, voracious reading, endless cups of strong tea, and a ridiculous amount of laughter.
Note that Darlene is NOT a therapist, counselor, or psychologist. PraiseWalker coaching and resources are designed for spiritual and emotional support and are not a substitute for professional clinical therapy or medical care.
Find out more about Darlene here: PraiseWalker.com
Photo from Magnific
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All Biblical quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
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