To be heard, to be seen, to be encountered

Not everyone wants nor feels they need, to be heard, to be seen, to be encountered, but to have one’s soul touched is a serene and eternal gift, much as a gentle massage is.  It takes us into a comfort our soul always craves, much as it is when we’re mesmerised by a fountain or flame.

Those who bear trauma, and so many of us do, those who are open to going down there, into the fissures where pain resides, can find that those areas can be massaged into healing.

We don’t go there with any fabulous or trite formula, as if there are rules to abide by.  No, we go there by faith of unknowing.  Much as I do with my counselling process, I ensure I know nothing so I can be an instrument of God who requires empty vessels so they can be filled properly for the anointed moment.

Anathema for men is to go into the sensitivities of sensuality.  It feels like it’s for women.  But it’s for everyone.  True mysticism is entering into many varietals of the unknown, learning to trust the adventure as hazardous in no way.  Isn’t it ironic that those who put on the façade of strength cannot be weak enough to enter healing, for only in weakness is there strength in the paradoxical economies of faith and eternity.

There is so much healing to enjoy in the presence of many peaceful things, much that healing is not most of all a destination.  God is greatly good to the extent that we can experience healing, and the more we access it, the more we know our way there, and we can choose for it more and more.

A sweet wafting cooling breeze, a mist to buffer summer’s heat, a fly walking on the skin of the forearm, a gentle rhythm of song or melody, and so much more, is peace.

How shall I end this?

Everyone seeking healing will prosper from being heard, from being seen, from being encountered.  And that’s our privilege as we extend it.  When another enjoys it, the presence of healing is profound—not simply for the one, but for both.

That is to hold space.  It’s simply to empty me of me so not only God but the other can fill me.  What a great thing for the senses to be empty of oneself and fully devoted to another for a time.  Counselling is that unique relationship.  For a moment, a minute, ten, an hour or a day.

There’s nothing like being heard or hearing within the totality of presence.  There’s nothing like being seen, and by being seen I mean, accepted for whom one is, a complete lack of judgment, and no condemnation.  When there’s guilt, how could judgment help.  The shame and guilt are evidence that judgment and condemnation are wrong.

The honour of honours in this life is to be encountered, to have one’s soul touched by another soul, which is to be gifted something of the Kingdom of heaven.

Anyone who seeks healing shall soon see.  Find your wounded healer and allow the Spirit to teach you how to do it as you experience your wounds being healed so that you too can be that healer of wounds that your world needs.

The exhaustion that hides beneath emotional vulnerability

“Sometimes we can do more for people in our absence 
than we can do for them in our presence.”
— Ruth Haley Barton

Having endured the past two very challenging years, and perhaps having also endured some variety of other challenges or hardships in life, you may have arrived in a season where your emotional vulnerability bleeds out from within into your external world.

It may be frustration, irritability, fear, sadness, loneliness, a loss of hope, the need to withdraw in ways that neglects those who depend on you or, just as bad, violent behavioural responses of rage.

Not all of our emotional vulnerability is due to exhaustion, but a lot of it is.  Exhaustion comes from ‘being strong for too long,’ from being too accessible, from being unbalanced for an extended period.

Exhaustion drives down into your soul and ultimately it leaves you spiritually dry, and it all manifests in patterns of emotional vulnerability.

There’s a good reason why Jesus often withdrew into the wilderness.  He needed to reconnect with himself and be in communion with his Father.  Jesus modelled what we all need to do.  We all need our “ME” time, and we need a rhythm of it.  Such timeout isn’t just for introverts.

“ME” time can sound like selfishness, but if I don’t look after me, I have little resource left to care for the person who depends on me—and we all have people who depend on us, just as in any healthy life we depend also on others.

So, we can look at this “ME” time in the frame of whatever it is that replenishes—noting that much selfish “ME” time is NOT oriented toward renewal but sloth.  Time to reconnect, be it with a book, or time in nature, cherished fellowship with a mentor, exercise, or any other productive use of time is vital for each of us.  Good self-care requires diligent effort to plan and execute.  Blessed are those who take responsibility for organising this time.

When we find ourselves in a pattern of emotional vulnerability—and this is most underscored in the final analysis as anxiety and/or depression—we might be genuinely encouraged to identify the reason: exhaustion.

I say encouragement for this reason: we customarily condemn ourselves as less-than when everyone undergoes the same thing when exposed to a sustained overload of stimuli, whether it’s burnout, a cacophony of loss, conflicts that can’t be reconciled, abuse and trauma, and the like.

There’s no reason to feel alone in being emotionally vulnerable.  Given the same circumstances that you face, the next person would feel the same way.  And besides, there are just so many people who are emotionally vulnerable, again, because of degrees of exhaustion.

~

Here are ten sources of exhaustion, which is an adaptation of the work of Ruth Haley Barton’s Invitation to Retreat: The Gift and Necessity of Time Away with God:

1.            Being too plugged in

It’s the curse of the modern social media and email age.  Most of us spend far too much of our lives connected to devices.  Without tempering this excessiveness of electronic stimuli, we risk burnout simply because we have a fear of missing out (a.k.a. FOMO).

2.           Trying so hard and juggling so much

Few of us truly want to disappoint people, because, let’s face it, even if we’re selfish, keeping people happy makes life easier.  We’re often prepared to do more just to keep the peace. And just because we do this doesn’t mean we’re “people pleasers.”  It’s often just strategically wise to keep people happy.  But the more we say yes, the more exhausted we become, unless we ensure that we always chisel out time to replenish our resources.

3.           Functioning out of an inordinate sense of ought and should

This is about listening to our language, or even what we’re saying to ourselves about making needs out of wants.  We place a lot of pressure on ourselves.  We should do this, or we ought to do that.  If you’re exhausted, you know how it goes.

4.           Finding it difficult or even humiliating to receive help from others

It is far easier for us to do things for others than to “owe” people.  But if we can’t receive others’ help, we will find life exhausting.  It takes humility to allow others to love us.

5.           Living more as a performer than the person God created you to be

We are human beings not human doings, but all the same, we act as if all that matters is our performance.  I know how hard this can be having had employers that I found impossible to please regarding performance—yep, just didn’t know how.  I know that conditioned me to see my worth in what I do and what I have to offer rather than seeing my worth as who I am.  God is far more interested in who we are than what we do.

6.           Few or no boundaries on my service and availability to others

Priding ourselves on saying yes to everything, without ensuring we have recovery time, is the sure road to burnout.  Let me just leave that there!

7.           Always feeling you should be doing more because there is always more to do

There will ALWAYS be more to do, and the more we do, the more we SEE the things that need to be done.  We don’t need to be the ones to do what needs doing.

8.           Carrying the burden of unhealed wounds – sadness, unresolved tension or conflict, toxicity in relationships

This one’s loaded.  Grief, unforgiveness and untenable relationships will do us in if we let them.  We will have grief.  We will.  We must take our sadness to God.  And we must find ways of resolving tension (which takes intuitiveness and courage) and putting in place boundaries in toxic relationships—or ending them.

9.           Information overload

Just about every adult alive at this time knows a world where information bursts toward us like out of a firehose.  We need to protect ourselves against the relentless deluge.

10.        Just being plain willful (as opposed to being willing)

This speaks to our narcissism.  Yep, it’s in us all.  Only the ones who can see it are those who are probably low on the narcissism scale.  Most of us know what we want and, if we’re honest deeper down, we insist upon having it.

You, your mental health and others’, this Christmas

It’s been a rough year.  Remember when we naively hoped that 2021 would usher in relief as we sought to ditch last year with true ‘2020’ hindsight?  2021 has been a doozie in many ways.

We did our annual drive around to see the Christmas lights last night (Christmas Eve – yes, it’s very early Christmas morning here).  As I turned one corner, I did what all of us drivers do, and I turned a corner and had headlights bearing down on me.  The driver sped up, put their high-beam lights on, and because they were driving aggressively, I sought to turn left at the next convenient corner, so then I got a blast from their horn.

I understand the anger.  And I understand the frustration of someone ahead of you not going fast enough – we just wanted to look at lights when on suburban streets.  Anyway, that said, we meandered home.

There’s a lot going on these days in people’s emotional worlds.

There’s a lot of fear and there’s also a lot of scepticism and cynicism, together with frustration, loneliness, and just plain tiredness and exhaustion.  Many, many manifestations of garden variety anxiety that pounces and pushes hope to despair.

The only thing that can help in all these situations is a little kindness.  Just a little bit is all it takes to execute grace, to forgive the mistaken instant, to issue a smile instead of a frown.  But we must make that agreement first; it needs to be arranged as an intention.

Your mental health and mine is tenuous at present.  We’ve all been pushed that little bit harder this year. We’re all just a little more fragile.  And this is not to mention the losses going on in so many lives that I’m aware of right now.

We need to go gently with ourselves and with others.  When we’re gentle with ourselves it tends to work out that we’re gentle with others, so let that be our bearing.  “I’m not being kind to people at present, so does that mean I’m not being kind enough to myself?”

Worth pondering.

Christmas is symbolic as a time of peace and goodwill to all humanity.  But it’s also a real pressure point for just about everyone.  Most people either have too much busyness going on or the opposite reality bears down – forlorn loneliness.  Lonely Christmases are the pits, so if that’s you, receive a portion of my empathy, please!

Let’s take care of you and me this Christmas, hey?

The very best thing about death

There are many different directions I could take this article, and many of them would be true.  But to be faithful to the vision given to me, I must limit my focus to one.

The very best thing about death is the life 
that emanates out of the imagination of it.

When I go to funerals, I don’t hear people saying, “life’s not precious.”  To a person, I hear people awestruck in many manifestations of wonder for the certainty of mortality.  Death brings us to attention.  Being something we cannot resolve, there’s benefit in resolving to accept it.  Once we’re there, there is a cosmos of blessing to be had, because our life purpose is activated.

The end of a person’s life is the most incomprehensible thought, and there’s nothing like it to motivate the right kind of action.  “I must be here for something!” becomes the soul’s catchcry.

One thing Sarah and I discovered when we were losing Nathanael—through an anonymous friend, actually—is there was life in making every effort to make the very most of every moment we were given to have him, there, alive, in the womb, with us.

It’s like the title of a recent article I saw but hadn’t read (didn’t need to): “I’m thankful to cancer for one reason – we did so much living while my husband was dying.”

It wasn’t until my first marriage failed and my father had had a serious and debilitating surgery that both of us—brought to our knees by the circumstances of our lives—were able to embrace each other in a manly hug.

When life breaks us, those feelings of loss connect us to a deeper empathy and intimacy.

Again, in the specific context of funerals, I’ve so often seen the real person emerge, even momentarily, because they were ravaged by grief.  Masks and facades fall and smash in the brittle oblivion of irrelevance in the sight of loss.  Only those who are truly shells of humanity won’t bow to the ‘weakness’ that reveals authenticity.

One of the best gifts we can give ourselves is to live out of the frame of the imminence of death.  We take others we love and care for must less for granted.  We watch what we say and do and are more compassionate toward others.  We recognise the immortal wisdom of reconciling our restorable relationships.  We don’t delay important things.  We stop doing things that really don’t matter.  We tell people that we love them.  We say our yeses and no’s with much more sincerity than ever before.  We imagine that all we possess will soon pass into other hands, so we covet less, and we become more generous.  We begin to allow ourselves the freedom of wonder about things we cannot explain, like questions science and philosophy cannot yet answer.  True wisdom and understanding begins to take hold in our lives.

Another thing, if we can get over our fear of death and dying there literally is nothing else left to fear in life.  Think about it.  If the fear of ceasing to exist in this physical realm is stopped, we’re free to live the days that we have left, and perhaps we afford ourselves time to reflect over precious memories.

We cannot shake the reality that we’re only here for a certain length of time, and it’s our opportunity to make the most of every moment of every day.  Besides, if we can just imagine what’s eternally in the divine eye—an unconditional love beyond human comprehension—we might just believe in the reality of ‘heaven’ that so many who say ‘rest in peace’ believe in.

The very best thing about death is what it 
causes us to do when thought of death is close.

When we carry about ourselves the concept of our death, it literally is the spark in the eye for appreciating the moments of life that we do have.