Hi, I’m Annette, and I wanted to talk for a minute about one of my favorite practices, which is reading with intentionality. Often we think of reading as not necessarily a spiritual practice unless it is a spiritual book or it deals in some way with spirituality. But any book can be a spiritual exercise, or we can learn from any book at any time.

One of the ways that we can make this more of a spiritual practice is by keeping up with a list of books that we come across that people recommend to us, or that we encounter in one way or the other. We think I’d like to read that book at some point, do this on our phone, in our Notes app. We could actually jot this down somewhere. If we keep a book journal, we could keep a page in our book journal so that when we’re ready to read, we can go to that and we can see what’s coming to me right now. What is it that I’m really drawn to? Where’s the energy around this list of books?

When we choose from that TBR then we brought intentionality into that practice.

After we’ve read the book, we can bring intentionality by jotting down a few notes about it, maybe how it made us feel or what we want to remember, how we are different from when we started reading that book. There might be a few quotes that we’d like to jot down as well.

I think it’s also important to consider who we might share that book with, who might be interested in reading that? Books find us at just the right moment, I think. And so remembering to share those with others also makes reading a more community process and connects us to other people. We often think of reading as solitary, but it’s actually a community process because we as readers connect with the author and we connect with the other readers.

So I hope that you’ll consider reading on a different kind of level, no matter what it is that you’re enjoying reading. And yeah, happy reading.