Training the Heart to Love Again

Spiritual formation when you’re not on a mountain, just in the suburbs

I wasn’t trying to practice asceticism when I gave up sugar for a month. I wasn’t trying to be holy when I deleted social media, either. I just wanted quiet. I wanted my self back.

The word asceticism has always reminded me of this YouTube documentary I watched about Mt. Athos, the hiding place for one of the last major Orthodox monasteries in the world today. I remember sitting at my tiny rolltop desk watching this documentary, eventually moving to my bed because the desk…well, like I said, it’s tiny and cramped. I admired the quiet grandeur of Athos. Each monk at his own work, silently doing the tasks appointed to him, content beyond anything I’d ever seen. One monk walked the inquirer through his task of making bread from scratch while another showed him the vineyard he tended.

My heart ached for the simplicity, the peace embodied in these monks.

I can recall the surreal rest preceding me throughout the next few days. It all stemmed from watching those gentle and soft-spoken monks, surely. I can’t name more than a few times in my life when peace truly did surpass my circumstances, bad or good. But after seeing these men, I thought to myself, It has to be possible, right?

It all felt too out of reach for a girl who listens to Taylor Swift, Florence + the Machine, U2. For a regular person who hates 9-5’s and struggles with leaving wet laundry in the machine too long. For someone living in the suburbs, no sea or cliff edge views for thousands of miles. Honestly, I don’t have it in me to grind flour by hand and make my own bread. Sure, I’d love to. But I just don’t think it’s viable for me right now.

Too bad Athos is for men only, or I don’t think I would be writing this at all—I’d be there, on that mountain.

Except, would I?

My desire to be a mother, wife, loyal friend, and dutiful daughter has kept me back from ever really seriously desiring the solitary Christian life like the praiseworthy Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe, God bless them. Hiking, dining with friends, burying my nose in an epic fantasy read—these are gifts from God to me, and I couldn’t find it in myself to imagine leaving it all behind.

After watching that documentary, I began to suspect this ascetic lifestyle had something to do with me. Was there a chance I could occasionally eat a piece of chocolate and peanut butter cake or admire someone’s Instagram photos? Maybe it wasn’t about moving to a mountain or abandoning my soft pillows. Maybe it started somewhere much closer. Somewhere like a ten-year-old girl sprawled in the gravel, a hot pink bicycle on top of her.

I remember that moment vividly: the air was dry and full of dust, the stones under-wheel sharp, and I was flying—until I wasn’t. One minute, I was invincible, zooming around the storage lot like I was born to win gold. The next, I was down. The handlebars dug into my ribs, the metal bit into my knees, and a pulsing fear rooted itself somewhere deep inside me. I knew I was hurt; I could feel a massive bruise forming, and I would feel it every time I sat down.

From that day on, I avoided bikes.

It seems ridiculous now. But something about the fall etched itself into my memory, branding the idea of freedom with the fear of pain. My body learned a lesson it never quite forgot: discomfort is dangerous. Control is safety.

Looking back, I wonder if that’s where it began—the quiet turning inward, the shrinking from hardship. I wonder how many of us have those moments, those small traumas that whisper, Never again. My own personal little devil perched itself on my shoulder, calling itself acedia.

And yet, life doesn’t let us stay safe. Eventually, the pain finds us again, when we grow up—in relationships, in illness, in the stillness of nights where our thoughts echo too loudly. Discomfort returns. Sometimes the instability and insecurity follow every footstep, and the fight, flight, or freeze response is on full blast 24/7.

Making deals with your inner demons becomes our gut reaction when the trade feels like an escape from worse things. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven and all that. Sometimes it’s easier to be in a drunken stupor, letting my passion overtake me, than to face the painful bright lights of what feels like some perverse reality tv show where I’m starring as the lead role. Just let me lie here. Don’t make me get up. Don’t make me see myself.

How much easier it would be sometimes, to lie down with dogs rather than dress up for the king. Less effort, less vulnerability… and practically no reward either.

What happens when you start to feel trapped by all of the passions you’ve decided to feed, though? What is the outcome of a life ruled by inner animal instincts that disgust even you? Those repellent behaviors that leave you isolated and lonely, nobody to turn to, not even yourself?

I’ve had my fair share of low mental states—ones where depression sinks in like some disgusting pest and feasts on my unhealthy inner life. I can safely say it never did me any favors to listen to sad love songs, eat a pint of ice cream, or binge-watch romcoms. There might be some of you who disagree with me, who haven’t shared that experience. And that’s fine.

But for me, stringing my sadness out for as long as it can be endured has always been a recipe for even bigger disasters and longer times of healing and restructuring. Rather, I have begun to see that life often stands before us one long uncomfortable exercise, and we have the option to crumble before it or shout out, ONWARD!

Asceticism is the way out, the way forward. It’s a key that is given to every victim who finds herself enslaved to a particular passion, which is really a fancy way of saying ‘inner demons’ or sin. The ascetic life isn’t really about punishing the body. It’s about renewing it.

A View of Mount Athos and the Pantokrator Monastery Greece, Edward Lear

St. Gregory of Nyssa once said,

“Sin is a deviation from nature, and the ascetic life is a return to nature—as God intended.”

That hits differently when you realize how far you’ve wandered from what you were made for. And who you could be if you were brave enough to throw everything at God’s feet and beg for strength to cut away the dross in your life.

I don’t enjoy discomfort. I avoid it, like most people do. But I’m learning that healing mostly requires a whole lot of rebreaking and then dealing with recovery afterward, and anyone who has had any kind of medical procedure done knows recovery isn’t always a cakewalk. AA attendees don’t just go from several beers a day to nothing at all after their first meeting. Therapy clients don’t find themselves walking out of their first appointment, no anxiety in sight—at least, I know I didn’t.

We think of gluttony as indulgence—too much chocolate, one more episode, a scroll that never ends—but what if gluttony is really the fear of emptiness? What if we binge because we’re afraid of the silence that waits when we stop? Asceticism, in that light, is less about deprivation and more about exposure therapy—unlearning what we think we need in order to be okay.

Exposure therapy places patients in contact with what produces the most anxiety: e.g., arachnophobes must be in a room with a large tarantula or have it placed on them. Even closer to the mark, ERP—or exposure and response prevention therapy—is the process of exposing a patient to a fear stimulus and then teaching them to actively refuse to respond to the fear by fleeing or retreating.

I’ve had to sit with myself, in the quiet, no music, no noise. I’ve tried praying with nothing but a candle lit in the dark, the window cracked open to the sound of night air. Sometimes it feels profound. Sometimes it feels like a waste. But always, there's something shifting underneath—an undoing of the constant pull toward consumption. Or should I say, a pull in one direction—consumption—and a pull in another—freedom.

Lord, why do you feel so distant, and I feel so far away?

Orthodox tradition calls these compulsions I’ve been musing on passions—habits or sins that distort our true nature. That steals away from us the freedom of loving God. Lust, pride, greed, gluttony, and anger. They begin as thoughts, become behaviors, and eventually root themselves as second nature.

I’ve struggled with viewing ascetic lifestyle choices as legalistic, repressive, and emotionally unhealthy, but what is the alternative? To succumb fully to our pseudo-human tendencies, to warp our realities with the shackles of a false life? Asceticism is not repression—it’s awareness. It’s recognizing the places in us that are out of tune with who God is and who we are. It’s spiritual therapy, in some ways, uncomfortable but necessary, retraining our responses so we can move again with freedom.

We fast, not because food is bad, but because we’ve let it become a god. We limit screens not because media is inherently evil, but because we’re exhausted from numbing. We practice silence because the noise keeps us from hearing the One voice that matters.

I’m not good at this.

Sometimes, I still reach for the donut. I still scroll when I’m anxious. And I definitely avoid the metaphorical bike, whatever shape it takes that day. But asceticism isn’t about being good at it. It’s about showing up—again and again—with our weakness, our wandering thoughts, our distracted hearts. It’s about offering God the bits and pieces of our broken attention. Asking Him to do the work inside.

When I first read Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, it challenged me to rethink what it means to feel rightly. “The little human animal,” he writes, “must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.” That’s what asceticism does—it trains the heart to love the right things again.

And isn’t that what we all want? Not to live in fear of falling, not to be enslaved to what once comforted us but now controls us—but to love rightly, live freely, and walk face-to-face with God?

I’ve been unemployed—not a detail I like to linger on. But it’s forced me to face something ancient and nameless, until I finally found its name:

acedia—

a wandering sadness. A spiritual inertia that feels like drowning in slow motion. Namely, I’ve felt utterly adrift in the world, nosediving ever deeper into an abyss I have no wish to drown in. During the day, I have felt a heaviness settle into my bones, and I found out it’s called acedia. Considered to be one of the major passions in Orthodox Christianity, I’ve woken up to how much I desire to disengage from it, escape its nasty, wily embrace.

The Nightmare, Fuseli

This little niggling demon finds me in places I don’t even notice unless I’m painfully aware of myself. It attacks me in the hot afternoons when my lazy body drifts off into fairyland. When I’m in the middle of reading a paragraph and realize that I don’t even know what I’m reading, and probably haven’t even been sentient for the past hour. Or when I’m scrolling endlessly on job websites and my eyes glaze over, my thoughts wander, and I shut my laptop, almost without knowing what I’m doing, finding myself instead at the pool tanning.

It’s the feeling that all of the days are blurring slowly past and there’s no concept of time anymore. Nothing much matters, not even God.

Naming something gives power to the one who names it. I woke up from the daze I was in and looked around me. Slapped myself across the face and said, What the heck am I doing with my life? I’m almost 22, I’ve got my whole life in front of me, and I’m wasting away like some 95-year-old on the brink of death. This little demon had a name, and so it had a cure—called manual labor and painful mental exercise.

Spiritual discipline is the opposing team in this game, and I knew that I had to start serving the right side rather than allow one more moment to drift by with me on autopilot. I’ve learned over the past couple weeks that the cure to any passion that ensnares us is to think and do the complete opposite of that passion: i.e. gluttons must avoid not only overeating but eating enough to satisfy, until that niggling demon has perished from our inner lives. Or, in my case, anytime I feel the urge to lie down and just sleep, pushing myself to go for a run or weed the backyard must be what I choose to do.

The Pause app, thoughtfully created by John Eldredge and the team at Wild at Heart, has been instrumental in creating space for my vulnerability to be embraced in the arms of God. Meditating on the icon depicting Christ as the Good Shepherd, gifted to me by a dear friend, while dimming the lights and allowing silence to envelop me. Walking around the block with whispered prayers on my tongue as I take in the twittering of afternoon birds and notice little posies scattered in the neighbor’s yard.

It’s summer, and that means swimming and lying in the sun are finally available to me. Since the days have been rainy, I’ve only had the chance to read by the pool a couple of times. But each time, I feel myself finally relaxing, taking in the reality of my heart pumping blood, children chattering and splashing around me, while surrounded by the quiet atmosphere of a gentle novel.

These things ground me, keep my feet from wandering, my mind chasing restless and needless worry.

I still think about that bike. I still think about the fall. But more than that, I think about what it means to get back on. To try again. To trust that discomfort can be holy. That the pain of unlearning isn’t punishment—it’s mercy.

It all takes time. Years, in some cases, moments, in others.

Yesterday at church, my pastor said that people are unsatisfied with happy endings to films because we have become skeptical that happily ever afters even happen to us in real life. Sometimes I think I approach spiritual formation like a film that I already know is going to end in tears or disappointed expectations. I make a half-hearted (or worse, half-assed, excuse my language) effort and expect to feel transformation from within. I expect to experience life as I was always meant to, but without the painful cutting away of diseased parts. Deep down though, I don’t really think it’ll change my circumstances, all this wasteful hoping. Maybe somewhere along the road, I found myself giving up on there being a satisfactory ending to it all.

But, I’m learning—

Asceticism in practice doesn’t have to look like Mt. Athos. It might look like putting the phone down. Like fasting with intention. Like silence in the morning before the world wakes up. It might look like tending a garden, folding laundry with prayer on your lips, or walking in the woods with no earbuds. Knowing, it is all leading somewhere, somewhere so wonderful that I won’t look back on the struggles I had with my passionate lovers outside of the one Union that really matters.

It’s a fight—but one already won.
It’s a discipline—but also a return.
To Eden. To freedom. To life as it was meant to be.

He speaks still.
I’m learning to listen.
Will you?