January 30,2011, Nancy Bieber presented a workshop on spiritual discernment as it applies to our individual decisions for Salem Quarter at South Shore Meeting. What you will find here is just a little of the material and one of the exercises she led us in. If you find this useful you will want to purchase Nancy's book: Decision Making and Spiritual Discernment: the Sacred Art of Finding Your Way which you can find at http://www.nancybieber.com

Nancy describes the relationships between willingness, attentiveness and responsiveness as a braid, rather than 3 successive steps. They intertwine as we seek to understand and live guided by God's wisdom and light. Here is how she describes the three strands...

Willingness... Being willing to open ourselves to the Spirit's light and wisdom acknowledges our limited ability to make good decisions on our own. It means we are. willing to receive, actually expecting to receive, loving guidance. An attitude of willingness is a combination of "Help!" and "Yes." It's an approach to God that admits that we are in too deep, even if we're only "in" a couple of inches. We need a guiding hand and a brighter light to find the way that is right.
...I urge you to take time for willingness. Because we usually like to be in control in our lives, acknowledging that there may be a divine Light greater than our own insight can be hard. Being willing means we release our tight control and engage with God to discover the best way forward. This is fundamental to spiritual discernment.
...Attentiveness. Being attentive to what is true and real is at the heart of spiritual decision making. We pause and consider carefully who we are, who we dream of being and the life situations in which we find ourselves. We discover what we already know, though we often didn't know we knew it. We discover mysterious yearnings and see them more clearly in the divine Light. We often find ourselves filled with contradictions and confusion because we are enormously complicated beings.
The word discernment is about paying attention, about noticing those fine differences that are complicated and hard to distinguish. It's not the black-and-white decisions, but the gray choices to which we have to pay attention. ... we need all the light we can get to study the colors of our possible choices. He waits for morning sunlight to stream into the room. We lean on God's illumination.
Responsiveness... (W)e respond to what we've been attentive to, what we've learned through God's illumination of ourselves and our situation. It may seem as if we're finally doing something, making a decision, taking some steps, getting somewhere. This may be the most visible part of spiritual decision making, but it's not the end point. It simply continues the process of creating with God. We continually renew our willing openness to the Light and pay attention to the landscape within and around us.
Responding is like conducting a complex experiment. Even when we've been attentive and thoughtful, we don't know for sure how it will turn out. We sort through and take stock of what we know. We consider what the next step might be, and we learn from both the paths that are open to us and those that are closed. Sometimes our responding is simply waiting, but waiting attentively for what is to come next.

These questions lend themselves to several structures. You might use them to guide you in journaling (and you could make this a periodic subject for your journal...) Or a group could get together and use one question at a time to prepare for meeting as part of a practice of supporting each other in spiritual discernment...

While every season of life brings change we don't always pay attention to the season we are in - the aspects of it that release us and the aspects that limit us. We use this exercise to look at what season we are in now and name how it has limited and freed us.
1. Name the season of life that you are in now. You may need to be creative to truly name your current season. It could be "between the degree and the first real job" or "happy with my job, my situation, my life - for now."
2. Reflect an the aspects of this stage that limit you. These are things like responsibilities, relationships, economic security, energy levels, health.
3. Reflect on the aspects of this season that release you. Being released is sometimes challenging, as when it stems from losing a job, but it opens you to a new way of living. You have the freedom to choose how you live with the loss.
4. What about this season does both - limits and releases you at the same time. For example, having young children takes a lot of time and frees you to share childlike pleasures and activities!
5. As you reflect on your responses to these questions, use them to remember your desire to live this season guided by God's wisdom and light. What would it be like to live the limitations gracefully? What would your life look like if you really embraced the freedoms offered by this season?