Christina Baldwin has now taught seminars internationally for over twenty years and contributed two classic books to the field of personal writing. Her first book, One to One, Self-Understanding through Journal Writing (M. Evans, 1977, revised edition 1991) is a ground-breaking work that has remained in continuous print since its original publication. Her best-selling book, Life’s Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest (Bantam 1990) takes the art of writing and expands it into spiritual practice. Christina has always conducted her teaching in circles. In the early 1990’s she began exploring how to help people bridge from explorations of personal consciousness to spiritually based social action using the circle as the primary source of support. This exploration led to the concepts presented inner most recent book, Calling the Circle, The First and Future Culture (New edition, Bantam 1998). She founded PeerSpirit, Inc.™ an educational company, with author and naturalist Ann Linnea.

Silveira: Where did the Seven Whispers come from?

Baldwin: The whispers came to me in little moments I no longer specifically remember, but they must have been moments when I was listening receptively. One little phrase at a time came into my mind during a period of several months during a time when I was really searching for personal guidance to go on believing in my own life path and in the larger life path around me. One day I just wrote down: “maintain peace of mind.” I didn’t lose that slip of paper and I didn’t lose the thought. So then another phrase came to me: “move at the pace of guidance.” And I wrote the two together, like a couplet. But then another idea came: “practice certainty of purpose…” And eventually the list grew to seven phrases of spiritual commonsense that I now say every day.

Maintain peace of mind
Move at the pace of guidance
Practice certainty of purpose
Surrender to surprise
Ask for what you need and offer what you can
Love the folks in front of you
Return to the world

Silveira: Pick any one of the seven whispers and tell us how you use it in daily life.

Baldwin: Well, my life is like a lot of people’s in the rush of modern America: if I live in the race of expectation, I’m not following any of these whispers— I’m just caught up in the rush, rush, rush. So one of the whispers I use a lot in a day is the reminder to move at the pace of guidance. Someone calls me on the phone and offers me work. I look at my calendar, start talking with them about the opportunity, and before I say yes or no I find a way to check-in and ask myself: “Is this work beneficial to me and to this client? Are we a good match? Can I handle it?” And if I’m really moving at the pace of guidance, I ask even more deeply: “Is this opportunity what Thou would have me do?”

The responses to such questions rise instantaneously in the mind if we pay attention. I believe that intuition, or guidance— whatever we want to call it— is constantly talking to us with an inner voice, the question is: are we paying attention? That’s why the sub-title of the book is “listening to the voice of spirit.” It’s our part of the relationship to ask and remain still enough to perceive response.

Silveira: How has reciting the seven whispers changed your life?

Baldwin: Most people admit that we would benefit from slowing down enough to listen to this dialogue with Spirit as we make decisions throughout the day: but how? If we could move through the workaday world in a state of meditation, we could perhaps live tapped into our wisdom without reminder. However, most of us don’t know how to practice that level of connection. I don’t. But I can remember these seven little whispers. When I need them, one goes through my mind like a little airplane pulling a banner. When I am irritated at life’s frustrations, here comes that little airplane pulling the saying, “maintain peace of mind.” When I’m angry at somebody, here comes that little airplane again to remind me, “love the folks in front of you.”

When I remember these sayings they create space in my mind and heart for me to take a breath, get centered again, and behave the way I really want to, not out of impulse or rushing in the moment. That’s an immensely valuable breather to me. Because these sayings are woven into my morning prayers and I have been reciting them for three years now, they are constantly playing in the back of my mind. They help me stay in connection with Spirit— not in a way that other people might notice moment by moment, but inside myself, I notice.

Silveira: Have other people told you how they are changing their lives?

Baldwin: Well, people are telling me the whispers are working in their minds in a similar fashion to how they work within my mind. They were a gift: and their applicability speaks to their universality. People like how simple the whispers are to remember, and how interconnected they are— not really a list but a circular string of sayings. And they are making their own lists, which I really encourage. These are wise little sayings, but they are not the only spiritual commonsense that comes to people so I like it when they tell me, “Your whispers inspired me to add some of my own.”

Silveira: In the book you say the whispers are an invitation to look at daily spiritual practice. What you do mean by this? Is spiritual practice different from prayer or from going to church or temple?

Baldwin: Spiritual practice is whatever we do to stay aligned with our higher values, our integrity, our purpose, our relationship with Spirit on a moment by moment basis. If we believe we are living within a spiritual dimension (some people do, and some don’t) then spiritual practice is whatever we do that reminds us of that dimension and puts us in dialogue with it.

The difference between spiritual practice and however we might “go to church” is that practice is woven into our daily actions. I can be in my practice while engaged in a conversation or driving my car or working at my desk, but when I’m in church (or temple or mosque), I’ve stepped out of daily action to worship. These are certainly two ways of holding spiritual dimension that reinforce and sustain each other.

Silveira: Do you think America is in a spiritual crisis? Why or why not?

Baldwin: I think America is in grave spiritual crisis. We pay lip-service to phrases like “One nation under God,” and we print “In God we trust” on our money— just about the biggest whisper there is!— but collectively we don’t really behave as though God has a significant role in our daily affairs. If you walk down an urban sidewalk at midday people are rushing about talking on cell phones, grabbing a quick lunch, making the next deal, the next meeting, the next financial score, or just trying to keep their work and life-styles going. The professed reliance on spiritual guidance implied in our national slogans doesn’t seem very evident. We use spiritual language to justify political and economic decisions that run counter to spiritual guidance in any faith tradition.

Silveira: What does spiritual crisis have to do with economics or war?

Baldwin: I had a stunning conversation in a bookstore a few weeks ago. About 35 people came to a reading on an evening after the day’s news was particularly disturbing. The US president was posturing the possibility of nuclear war if he felt it was necessary to rid the world of terrorism. People were angry and afraid. I suspect there were people in this conversation from both political parties who shared distress at the abuse of political power and were seeking for ways to make the spiritual frame meaningful in these circumstances.

It was a conversation right out of the introduction to The Seven Whispers where I say, “… millions of us are looking for some connection to spirit so real, so unmistakably authentic, that it will release our capacity to make an enormous shift in how we treat each other and the world.”

People entered a dialogue with me and with each other about how a spiritual practice such as the seven whispers, could give us the hope to believe in a better world, and the courage to act so that we are contributing to the world’s betterment. We decided that holding the spiritual dimension does matter and that when our actions are grounded in the belief that we do have human goodness, then we can ask the hard questions and do the hard work. What is the gift we are supposed to be giving each other and the world? What is our contribution to the web of life? If we’re not making that gift and contribution, how do we arrange our lives so we can?

We took two things to heart from the book: first that it is the actions of millions of ordinary people who will really decide the fate of the world; and two, that we need to return to the world. We need to pledge our deepest allegiance to the earth itself, to the biosphere that has made us, and to protect our home, upholding life-affirming values in all that we do.

We made a commitment to practice active citizenship at least 20 minutes a week: through phone, email, or letter to engage our leaders and let them know what we really want, what we really think, and that we expect them to take action toward these values. Everywhere I go, I’m telling this story… and continuing to have conversations that link the seemingly tiny significance of a spiritual practice, such as the seven whispers, with a sense that we can impact the world around us.