The Spirituality of Symbiotic Connection

We are connected.  To God, to life, to others, to ourselves, to our world.  But we don’t always take mindful advantage of these truths.  We can even negate such realities through addiction, poor choices, bargaining, compromise, and many forms of dissociation.  

I think symbiotic connection is a gift of intimacy.  We are intimate beings, geared for intimacy.  We were made to connect.  Deeply.  Zealously.  Without fear.

Intimacy is about being vulnerable, trusting the space we’re in, trusting others, trusting God, and yes, trusting ourselves.  But it has a prerequisite.  That’s safety.  We need to feel safe.  We need to break past and fast from the strains of the trauma bonds that constrain us—that can be an insurmountable challenge, but we can practice feeling safe a moment at a time.  Yet, the fact that we cannot let go and be vulnerable also gives us bearing for where we feel we need to go.

We will not be alive for very long, even if a whole year or decade seems long.  The older I get, the more conscious I am of the fleetingness of life.  This ought to motivate us to really fully experience what life has to offer—as much as we can.

Empathy is born of such a thing as the spirituality of symbiotic connection.  It is an amazing gift for ourselves and others.  We were made to empathise.

Highly sensitive people (HSPs) have a gift around this connection, but paradoxically, HSPs are also prone to trauma because they’re hyper-attuned.  Unfortunately, the world is sensory overload, and that’s felt deeper and harder by HSPs, yet to get the most out of life we have the head start.

Not everyone feels but to feel is to live—positive feeling.  We often don’t associate difficult feelings as if to live, but living in the moment of hardship, accepting the moment all the same, is the zenith, a spiritual pinnacle.

There are certainly gifts of cognition as well, and connecting with ourselves, others, and God—making meaning, going to unknown depths, perceiving miracles of discovery.

The spirituality of symbiotic connection is about adding experiences and information from experiences, deriving meaning from all these, and making meaning, and connecting all this with and attaching to the dynamics of others, ourselves, and God.

Identifying the source of your mental health crisis

Stepping our way through anything is a wise way of handling any challenge in life.  And it’s no different with a mental health crisis — whether it’s suddenly descended on us or has loomed large for a while.

I can think of two sample sources of mental health crises that serve as examples.  The first is relationship stress or breakdown.  The second is an identity crisis or a crisis of purpose.  It is helpful to at least recognise the component parts of causation to the crisis.

I find personally that I can deal with very large amounts of workload stress, but as soon as a key relationship is fractured or under strain, my resources of resilience are chewed up doubly quick.

Depending on our personality, too, we might find that crises of purpose and meaning can arise when suddenly we’re not needed.  Of course, it is actually a gift when we’re not ‘needed’ but if we derive our sense of value from being needed, we can quickly descend into despair because we may feel unworthy or surplus to requirements.  But time is a gift if only we can re-purpose the time and develop some structure of things that WE want to accomplish.

When relationships are strained or broken it can leave us overwhelmed with what to do, how to do it, how to respond, and it’s even worse when we don’t have any agency of control.  

Even knowing we don’t have control over certain situations helps somewhat, just in the identification of the fact.  It may seem forlorn to face the fact that we have no control, but then we can choose to let it go as there is no decision or action required of us, except to let go of what we cannot change.

It’s similar for those times or seasons where we’re devoid of purpose or meaning.  It feels horrible, of course.  But if we re-arrange our thinking to imagine that we have space to create or explore new initiatives, we feel empowered.  

If it means we simply need to look for work, we can resolve to courageously be open as we explore the possibilities with an open heart.

Knowing the source of our crisis is one step of awareness closer to action.

Often times we need the help of professionals, mentors, family, or good friends to identify the steps of recovery.  Navigating our way to recovery is a step by step process augmented by hope that we will arrive.

We can and do make it to our cherished destinations of peace, and the reclamation and the personification of joy, if we don’t give up.  

Identifying the source of our struggle is the important first step.

My personal model of chaplaincy

PRESENCE is the most important concept of quality chaplaincy.  But presence is initiated and further augmented by connection, faith, and timing.

My personal model of chaplaincy involves a deep interdependency between presence and connection, one assisting the other.  A little of one enables a little more of the other.

When I arrive at a critical incident or meet someone for the first time who has been triaged toward me, the suffering is often obvious.  “Showing up and shutting up” is the easy bit, and it’s 80 percent of the overall task.  

It’s what I personally love about chaplaincy: I don’t bring a lot other than myself as an empty container willing to be filled with the other person and their situational need.

The little amount of vocal involvement I’ll bring—because I’m there to listen and hold space mainly—is offering something to connect with the other person or people.  (Other than that, little things said to encourage.)  

This is the advantage of having a lot of lived experience and life experience.  

Inevitably, there is a moment early on where I’m able to develop a semblance of affinity with the other person.  A thing, a person, an experience, or situation in their life that connects with a thing, a person, an experience, or situation in my experience.

Establishing symbiotic connection with the person
I’m helping augments the presence I’m working with.  

All I’m inputting is a sense of connection that says, “I’m similar to you,” i.e., “Even though I’m not you, I can relate with you.”  Often people are looking for this connection with another human being—whether they know it or not—especially someone who is there to help them.  

Coming with an open heart of personal vulnerability,
the connection created generates trust
because of the safety between us.

I couple this presence-connection dynamic with exemplary listening and attending skills.  In this is empathy at its core: whilst it’s impossible physically, this is about being IN a person spiritually.

I’m looking for opportunities to serve the other person as I imagine Jesus would.  Anything.  A cup of cold water at the right time, how to hold a straw to the mouth, where to place an item within reach, when to withhold speech, when to smile or weep, when to touch or be touched (spiritually or physically), when to say something, particularly something encouraging—which must come from authenticity to have power. 

I also use the power of apology to build trust.  I’m the kind of person who has the ‘spiritual gift’ of making mistakes.  I’m fallible.  The mistakes are not the issue.  People readily forgive mistakes and errors.  Especially where there’s no intentionality.  The key is to own the wrong.  I find being a committed and skilled biblical peacemaker helps my relationships and ministry hugely.

What underpins my approach to chaplaincy
are also faith and timing.  

By faith in the moment I empty myself to be filled up by another person, the person I’m helping.  It’s faith because I actively leave my own life to enter another person’s life.  Frequently I’m cognisant that all my own personal worries and cares must be abandoned.  I’m also trusting in God’s timing that a deeper connection between us will aid their support, but by faith I diligently watch for where God is in the conversation and I join God there.  

If God hasn’t directed a particular leading and the moment of connection finishes, the moment of connection finishes.  All desire to achieve ‘a goal’ must be surrendered at the foot of the cross.  Goals neither dignify the human before us nor ourselves.  There is a trustworthy integrity in this.  There is no ‘manipulation’ done ‘in God’s name’.  Good chaplaincy trusts God for the leading every step of the way—by faith in His timing.

Presence, connection, faith, and timing, all ordained by the Spirit of God.  

Extreme Ownership Resilience

Having sojourned nearly 60 years of life—the last 20-odd in many ways the toughest—I have developed a way of living or should I say coping that I think serves anyone.

In wellness terms, we often talk about not just surviving but thriving.  In real terms, as is the nature of life, we are not always thriving, no matter what inner work we’ve done.  I still have the odd day where I’m just surviving, and sometimes that feels a struggle—fortunately, it’s only a day here, a day there.  I hope you find that validating.  I have certainly had seasons of life where I battled most days for weeks and months.

What emerged for me out of a season of being a single father (2003-2007) was the concept that I could do it all—I could manage everything thrust my way because at times I was the only adult/parent around.  Not all these circumstances felt good or fair, indeed many were incredibly hard.

This merges with the idea of extreme ownership.  Retired Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, authored the concept of leadership responsibility, high personal expectations of one’s own performance, and individual accountability.  

The concept of extreme ownership is transformative:
it assumes we have some agency in every circumstance of life,
that we can make anything better by simply accepting
that taking ownership for our place in it is the key.

Faith plays a crucial part—indeed, it IS faith:
Having trust enough to acquire and maintain
an attitude of ownership—doing our best.

Biblically, it’s “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters,
when you face trials of many kinds…” (James 1:2)

The rest of the James passage reveals the purpose in suffering.

This is the secret weapon of both success and joy, and I find it aligns with the biblical witness of wisdom as well as great secular models.  Simply put, as us AAs put it, it works if you work it.

For me personally, no external thing can crush me if I don’t allow it.  An important juxtaposition is being vulnerable enough to BE crushed for a time.

Life is crushing at times.  It’s okay, even important, to BE crushed.  But we don’t stay there.  Extreme ownership dictates that we have immense personal agency to respond well when we simply OWN where we’re at, where we choose joy, accepting things may be dire, but there’s no reason they ought to stay that way.

We thereby choose to make the best of what we have, to open our minds to innovate out of our predicament, always honouring those about us, believing through the power of hope that things will get better.

For me, this is true resilience, the capacity to take stock at our lowest, knowing we have the power of response.

Broken by Suffering or Broken Open?

As a writer, I’m continually on a quest to discover wisdom my mind’s heart has always yearned for.  How to describe the juncture and journey of suffering, for one instance.  I have attempted it numerous times, but I’ve fallen short compared with the following:

The following wisdom I feel compelled to share with you (with some of my own thoughts below the quotation marks):

Political and cultural commentator, David Brooks says: “We all have moments of suffering, but we can either be broken by those moments or we can be broken open by them. Some people are broken. They build a fragile shell and they curl in. They are afraid to be touched. They just shell, over the part of themselves that is hurting. Those people usually lash out in anger and resentment. There is a saying that pain that is not transformed gets transmitted.1 (Attribution here below to Father Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return)

“But other people get broken open. They get more and more vulnerable and more open. They live their life at a deeper level. The theologian Paul Tillich said that moments of suffering interrupt your life and remind you that you are not the person you thought you were. They carve through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul and reveal a cavity below and then carve through that and reveal another cavity below. You just see deeper into yourself than you ever knew existed, and you realize when you see into those depths that only spiritual and emotional food will fill those voids. So you begin to live life at a deeper level.”2

~~~

The amazing simplicity of life is this: those who take consistent, day-after-day responsibility for their being ‘broken open’ — those who resist being broken or staying in the broken place — these are the ones who get better.

In Rohr’s words, they transform their pain.  They refuse to transmit it.  They execute self-empowerment for growth by refusing to blame others.  Even though they know they’re not entirely responsible for their pain, they take full responsibility for their ‘response’ to it.  They prove ‘able’ to respond and are therefore response-able.

Those who heal allow themselves to be broken open, to be transformed, to lose that part of themselves they can no longer keep, that part of themselves that is vanquished.

Using Paul Tillich’s metaphor, even while it hurts, they dine on the emotional and spiritual food that nourishes their present and future.  In this, they express the faith of letting go of that which can only poison them; that constraining knowledge that something reprehensible has been done to them.  

They somehow understand that there is no other recourse but to work with what is, accept it, and move deeper into it, against the flow of the logical proclivity to react hard against it through bitterness and resentment.

They devour hope and their appetite is insatiable.  They consume hope for the ‘return’ of a deeper peace than they’ve ever had.  Back to the future, they survive and even thrive in the liminal space of a suffering that pushes them more open and more vulnerable, where they’re forced to learn the resilience of risk — audaciously, they stay there and in their suffering is the agency that could not have come otherwise.

If they’re fortunate enough, part of this feast is the Lord Jesus Christ, who Himself suffered, who proved a model of and for suffering, who was prophesied as such, e.g., in Isaiah 45-55, and who even calls Christians to a life of being driven deeper into a precious sanctification through an embracing of their suffering; for the glory that awaits those who are broken open in His glorious name.

This secret code is only learned by those who practice it, who are immersed in the baptism of fire, who are not scorched by suffering’s flames but survive and thrive.  Yes, I’d agree that it sounds bizarre, but the incarnation comes alive in us by the Holy Spirit as we partake in the suffering the Incarnate One took on.

Be broken open, not just broken.

Remain open by faith,
and God will see you through it.

1. Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (New York: Crossroad, 2004), p. 37.

2. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), p. 56; also pp. 52–63, 161–62. See also Brooks, Road to Character, pp. 94, 206.

Resilience isn’t a race

I get some of my best ideas to write on whilst I’m mowing my lawn.  Today, it occurred to me that resilience isn’t a race—no matter how much we want to be resilient, growth’s a slow process and recognising signs that we’ve grown can seem elusive.

Resilience can be one of the most discouraging of concepts
because we compare with standards that seem unattainable.

But there is encouragement in all this, especially when we consider resilience through a Christian lens.  The encouragement is this: 

The greatest peace and best base for resilience
is accepting WHERE we’re at right now. 

Throughout my life I’ve sensed
God continually reminding me,
“Relax, your striving for perfection is futile;
not only do I not expect perfection from you,
I’ve made it impossible to attain in this life.
So don’t stress and put undue pressure on yourself.”

As I heard many years ago, we have nothing left to prove, and nothing more to gain.  To have our salvation is all we need in the context of eternity both here and now and life ever after.

It’s wonderful to know that we can PRACTICE resilience by simply accepting our present moment, not needing to be anyone else than ourselves.  This is a gift of peace that can only be practiced.

There is wisdom in the simplicity of SITTING with ourselves, at times bereft of understanding for what we’re feeling, but in the same breath, able to smile contently, or simply shed a tear, and every emotion between or otherwise.

Faith meets resilience.  Faith, the practice of resilience.  Faith agreeing that things are not what we would have them to be, but with the strength to continue onward in hope that things might change eventually whilst contentedly accepting the situation as it is.