if you're still doing all of it — turning up, doing the job, keeping the routine, saying the words — and it's gone completely hollow, teresa of ávila is the person who wrote your season down four hundred and sixty years ago, in more detail than most people could bear to.
she was born in ávila, spain, in 1515, and entered the carmelite convent of the incarnation there in 1534, at nineteen, over her father's objections. she nearly died of an illness soon after and was paralysed for a stretch. and then, by her own arithmetic in the autobiography she wrote decades later at her confessors' order — the life — she spent 'eight-and-twenty years' as a nun before her real turn, more than eighteen of them in what she calls a battle between wanting god and wanting the world. her own summary: "nearly twenty years on this stormy sea, falling and rising, but rising to no good purpose."
the useful thing is how specific she gets. this wasn't a nun who quit praying. she kept mental prayer going the whole time — she later says that's the single thing that saved her. it had just gone dead. she writes that she was more taken up with wanting the time she'd set aside for prayer to be over, and watching the hourglass, than with anything good. she dreaded the room itself: "the sadness i felt on entering the oratory was so great, that it required all the courage i had to force myself in." and she names the split exactly: in the world's pleasures, remembering what she owed god made her sad; "when i was praying to god, my worldly affections disturbed me." at home nowhere. that's the numbness.
what she doesn't do
she doesn't call it shameful. she treats it as ordinary — a shape the road took for a long time — and she's honest about her own part in it: friendships and diversions she kept while pretending they didn't pull against her. and she never, looking back from the far side, calls those years wasted. her claim, plainly, is that showing up through them, hollow, is what kept the thing alive until something changed. if she'd waited to feel it before doing it, there'd have been nothing there when the change came.
going through the motions with nothing behind them isn't the practice failing. in her account it's the practice surviving until something can happen.
the statue
the turn came around 1554, when she was about thirty-nine, and it's important that it wasn't a technique. she came upon a statue in the convent — a christ 'sorely wounded', brought in for a particular feast — and the sight of it went straight through her. she wept, and begged never to offend god again, and something shifted that didn't shift back. from that day her prayer stopped being a wall to push against and slowly became the ground everything else stood on.
everything she's famous for came after: the reform of the carmelite order; seventeen small, strict, reformed convents starting with st joseph's in ávila in 1562, founded over local opposition; the first reformed men's house with john of the cross in 1568; the interior castle in 1577 — her picture of the self as a castle with seven sets of rooms you move inward through, whatever the weather is in any one of them. she died in 1582, at 67. in 1970 she became the first woman named a doctor of the church.
the honest ledger
numbness wasn't her last hard season: visions from 1559 that the church investigated, and in 1576–79 real institutional persecution and an inquisition inquiry, charges dropped by 1579 — a genuine, damaging conflict, not 'part of the path'. quotes are from the 1870 david lewis translation of the life. and the line hung on her everywhere — about christ having no body now but yours — appears in none of her writings, so it isn't here.
for numbness: what's the practice you're still showing up to, empty? her whole testimony is a case for not stopping — and for letting the turn, when it comes, arrive from outside your effort. can you keep the door open that long?