The spiritual practice of a single daily priority, and how it carries your soul's work forward when there is far too much to do.

There are days when the mind is a wide, bright field, and every part of it is asking for you at once, the song you have been meaning to write, the book that keeps tapping at your shoulder, the exercise program, the gathering you want to attend, the friend you have been longing to sit with, the practical work that pays the bills and holds the house together, and all of it arrives together, and all of it feels important, and you have one body and a small handful of hours to give. I know this field well. My mind is active, my guides are many, and the enthusiasm and the passion and the desire to make so many things at once are always running in me. And so the real question is not whether you are capable. The question is what, out of everything, you are being called to move forward today.

Some days your energy is a nine or a ten. Some days it is a one or a two. Your commitments shift, your work asks for you, your family asks for you, and the honest hours that are truly yours to spend as you wish keep changing shape. This is the dance: your values, your priorities, and the precious few minutes that belong to you to deploy. There is a way through it that is simple, and steadying, and gentle with you, and it begins long before the overwhelmed morning ever arrives.

One

Before you can choose, you have to see the whole of it. I keep a planning rhythm: a session about once a week, and a longer one in the last five days of the month for the month ahead. I am mostly faithful to the weekly one, and sometimes it becomes every ten days, or every two weeks, depending on how full the calendar has grown. In those sessions I write out everything that matters, everything that has to get done, and everything my heart is calling me toward, and the items on my life plan for the year, and the resolutions I made when the year began, and the deep dreams that are most important to me: to write the song, to write the book, to begin training for the marathon, to go to the spiritual gathering and sit among the people you sense you belong with, to join the book club and read the book, to visit the friend or the family member and savor the quality of that connection. Put all of it on the page, the soul callings and the ordinary practical work of the month together, until the entire field is in front of you.

Two

Here is where it becomes workable, and I want to give the credit plainly. I learned this from the astrologer Molly McCord, who shared it on her most recent tour, and I have used it ever since. From the long list, whittle down to about twenty-five things you most want to accomplish in the month. Then set the space: put on meditative music, do a little smudge, call in your guides, and ask them to rate each one for you on a scale of one to a hundred. A hundred is the most urgent, the most important, the task that will have the greatest positive impact, the one you are most in alignment with, the one most connected to your soul's purpose in this moment that you are actually available to move forward. Go through all twenty-five, and let each one receive its number, and then keep only the ones that score ninety or above. When I did this, seven things cleared ninety, and seven was manageable, and every one of them went straight into the calendar.

Three

Now the practice narrows all the way down, and this is the part that asks the most of me, and it may ask the most of you. Schedule one of those seven for a given day, only one, and let one part of one project be the whole of the day's ambition for your soul work. Priority is a singular word, and we can only ever hold one, the way we can only ever hold one thought, the way we are only ever doing one thing at a time. We move quickly between things, and if you are a parent with little ones it can feel like ten things at once, and still, underneath the speed, it is always one thing, and then the next one.

The gift of choosing one is that the one you have been avoiding rises into plain view. If the project is to write and record a song, to make the music and the lyrics and lay it all down, and somehow you never quite arrive at the chair, and suddenly the house must be cleaned and the laundry must be run and the lawn must be mowed and the messages must be answered and the inbox must be checked, that whole flood of small necessary things is resistance. All of it is real, and none of it is the song. When the one thing is the only thing on your list, everything else shows itself for what it is, which is not the one thing. So you sit, even for fifteen minutes, and you move it forward, and you get to mark that it moved. What I find, far more often than not, is that once I am through the first fifteen or twenty minutes I am fully in it, and fifteen minutes becomes an hour, and an hour becomes an afternoon, because it was the one thing, and it was always the one that mattered most.

Four

The practice needs quiet to survive. Turn off the phone, unless the phone is the actual tool for the priority in front of you. Turn off the screens, and close the door. I have walled myself into my office, and I have risen half an hour early, and I have stayed up late, all to protect a small window and to simply begin, because beginning is most of it. The world is loud now with a thousand things asking for your attention, and nearly all of them are ones we have invited in ourselves, and you are allowed to set them down for the length of a single session and give that time to the thing your soul asked you for.

Five

Before you step through the resistance, come back into the body first, even for five or ten minutes. Move to a song you love until your attention drops out of your head and settles into your center. Sit, and breathe, and feel the weight of yourself, the long line of the spine, the place where your feet and your sits bones meet the pull of the earth. There is an earth star a few feet beneath the surface of the ground, a steady point of gravity, and it draws the excess down and away, the stress and the buzzing and the scattered energy, the way gravity draws every loose thing home. A little yoga will do it, and a little Tai Chi will do it, and underneath they are the same movement: attention returning to the body, to this moment, to right here, because right here is the only place where the decision is made and the action is taken.

The promise the guides keep bringing me back to is this: when you move one true thing forward, and then another, and then another, the momentum begins to carry you, and the dream that has waited so long begins to become real. The practice of finding the one thing that holds the resistance and stepping through it strengthens something in you, a fortitude, a will that grows a little stronger every time you use it.

If you take this on, the weekly inventory, the rating, the single daily priority, I would love to hear which soul project finally moved for you. Share it in the comments, and come find the others who are doing this quiet, steady work beside you. We are becoming a community of people who choose their one thing and carry it all the way through to finished.

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— Juli Martin, The Love Lady