Category Archives: Being Human

Let God call you “Sweetcakes” for Christmas.

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This Christmas, let God call you "sweetcakes."

Forty years ago my dad died while skiing in Keystone, Colorado. That event put the cherry on top of the decade that undid me. I’d been mostly holding myself together through my parent’s divorce when I was 12, my big brother and eventually my little sister leaving to live with my dad, my dad’s subsequent three marriages, and my mom dating and marrying a man who violated me. Despite all that, I was still remarkably intact. Until December 15, 1979.

That sunny December morning shattered me. From that day on, the world felt lined by broken glass.

As children do, I made sense of my dad’s sudden death and all that had come before by concluding that I must be a bad person and I deserved this pain. So I renewed my efforts to be a good girl who followed the rules and did as she was told. Like many women living under patriarchy, I had a deep sense that I just wasn’t good enough, so I practiced other-focused, people-pleasing behavior and created a life that was too small.

I was desperate for ways to make life not hurt so damn much. Sharp surfaces, piercing nails, rattlesnakes with poisonous fangs – they seemed to be everywhere. So I stayed little and quiet and I stuck to well-trodden trails, striving to pad myself and blend in and make myself useful. A bad person pretending to be good.

I spent forty years seeking solace outside myself, searching for places that didn’t hurt. Trying to find answers to the wrong question. Looking outside myself, when what I needed to do was see the lie and let it go. I was trying to figure out how to live in a world of broken glass, since that seemed to be what I deserved, rather than allowing myself to see that I’d made the world of broken glass with my own mind.

I’ve realized that forty years is long enough to wander in the wilderness of suffering and self-loathing. The meaning I made from that terrible decade – that I’m not worthy of love and respect, that bad things only happen to bad people – is a lie. I know it’s a lie because I feel hard and separated from my soul when I believe it.

This lie of self-loathing can only be healed by choosing to believe the uncomfortable truth that God doesn’t make junk. Even squirrels have value and worth. All creation is holy and worthy and beloved, just because it exists. Value is intrinsic. It doesn’t have to be earned. We are born perfect.

The false belief my clients have in common, the core thought causing them distress, is this: “I’m not good enough. I have to try harder. I have to pretend to be perfect.”

Focusing on that false belief doesn’t heal it. Focusing on the false belief only cements it deeper. That belief is a habit. That’s all. We break old destructive habits by building new, better habits.

So shine a light on that false belief just long enough to identify it, and then set about gently dismantling the lie. Don’t take the wrecking ball to the lie, or do battle with it. Just focus, instead, on healing your brain by believing new, life-giving thoughts. “I am okay. I am enough. I am necessary. I am priceless.” Just five minutes a day will begin to weaken the old false beliefs and begin to build a home for the ages. The too-small dilapidated house you’ve been living in will slowly crumble and blow away.

Gently give your heart, who’s known all along that you are beloved and precious, light and rain and warmth.

The seed of your true self has been waiting for just such conditions to sprout.

She will burst her armored shell, break forth, and sing. Your small life will be broken open and will never be the same. The world changes when you become yourself.

I know now the World cried with us when my dad died on that mountain. Holiness was in the trenches with me as my world fell apart. Light was shining through the broken glass. Love has been holding my hand all along, leading me out of the wilderness back home to myself.

Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, is God saying “Yes” to us. The Divine is telling us this fleshy human life is beautiful.

This Christmas, hear Holiness say, “You matter. You are necessary. You belong. You are perfect.”

This Christmas, hear God calling you “Sweetcakes.” She says it every moment of every day. Listen. Let Love in.

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Kaylin Haught, From The Palm of Your Hand. © Tilbury House Publishers, 1995.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

What would it feel like to be free?

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Girl in field of daisies: You are holy. You are perfect. You are beloved. You are safe.

I wonder what it would feel like to be free. What would it feel like to know that I am perfect just as I am? To know I can be 100% me in the world and I would be safe? To know I can say what I think and share how I feel and I would still be valued and belong to a community? To know that I could tell the truth and have a family and friends who love me?

What would it be like to truly comprehend that, in reality, hiding and not sharing myself is what creates loneliness and division?

If you think your true nature is too outrageous and loud and uncouth, or too quiet and sensitive – if you reject your true nature and judge yourself as unacceptable and wrong – then no external healing on the planet can touch that inner disconnect.

That inner disconnect, your self-loathing and lack of love for your authentic being, reproduces itself in your outer reality because of this cycle: Thoughts create feelings. Feelings drive actions. Actions produce results. Results accumulate to become the circumstances of your life. Then you think more thoughts about your results and circumstances, and the cycle continues.

If your foundational thought is “I’m not okay. I’m not good enough. I have to pretend to be someone I’m not to be safe and loved,” then you will feel fear and shame. Fear and shame drive actions that probably look a lot like being good, accumulating achievements, and meeting others’ expectations. These actions produce results that accumulate to create your life – a life that doesn’t fit who you really are. Your life becomes an illusion that must be maintained so you feel okay about yourself. Maintaining the illusion takes a tremendous amount of energy and is ultimately unsustainable.

Living a lie is always unsustainable. Your belief that you’re not okay, you’re not good enough, and you have to pretend to be someone you’re not to be safe and loved is a lie. I know it’s a lie because it causes suffering.

The way back to the truth is not to believe something else really hard.

It won’t work to tell ourselves over and over that we’re fine just the way we are if we still, deep down, believe we’re shit. We have to drop the lie that’s causing suffering. We have to see the lie for what it really is, and replace it with the truth.

The source of your self-worth is ultimately a faith question. Your innate worthiness, your guaranteed belovedness, your essential holiness, can’t be proven. It can, however, be experienced and remembered. There was a time in your life when you were deeply connected with your innate preciousness. You didn’t question it. Even if your mind can’t pull up those memories, your body remembers. That connection still exists. You just have to find the connection and strengthen it. Even though the spring has gotten blocked, the source of the flow remains. The blockage just has to be dislodged so the water can flow. The lie of “not okayness” is the blockage. And the water wants so badly to flow through you.

Try this. Put one hand on your heart and the other on your belly. Breathe deeply. Feel your heart beating. Now imagine that you’re holding a baby or a cat or a dog in your arms. That tender, perfect creature is in your care, and they’re completely safe. Just resting on your chest, being completely who they are. Now imagine that you’re that baby or that animal, and you’re resting completely in the arms of a loving presence who’s got you and is never going to let go. Call that presence what you want – God, Universe, Mother, whatever. You are holy. You are perfect. You are beloved. And you are so, so safe.

This is the truth. You were born perfect. You’re still perfect. You’ll always be perfect.

Freedom is knowing that the thoughts keeping you caged are lies, and they’re flimsy as dust. Freedom is living as the perfect, holy creature you are.

Choose to believe the truth you’ve always known. Choose to be free.  

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash, edited on Canva

Thoughts create feelings. Feelings motivate actions. Actions determine results.

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How to work with your thoughts so you create the life you want and value.

“When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation, or accept it. All else is madness.” ~Eckhart Tolle

Does that quote piss you off just a little? It does me. There are things I feel I ought to be able to complain about. Things that just aren’t right, but that don’t seem to be within my power to correct. Things like White nationalism, the persistence of misogynist patriarchy, and rampant capitalism, for example. But what good does complaining about any of that do? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. At least for me.

I believe Eckhart Tolle is correct. I make myself a victim when I complain. If a situation is truly intractable, the only sane course of action is to accept it. Because the above-mentioned forces are man-made (deliberate use of “man”), they are changeable. It’s just that changing them requires such hard work and an eye on the long game that they feel intractable.

I also see in myself a tendency to complain about situations I could leave or change, if I were willing to live with someone else’s anger or my own discomfort. I blame others for my choice to remain in situations that I don’t like. We complain when we don’t want to change, or when we feel powerless because the problem is so damn big. We choose not to change because we’re afraid of the hard work and the consequences.  

I learned something in life coach training that blew my mind: Thoughts create feelings. I always thought it was the other way around. Nope. Here’s how it works:

Thoughts create feelings, which create actions, which create results, which lead to more thoughts, which create more feelings, which create more actions, which produce more results, which lead to more thoughts … on and on, around and around …

You can see how we can get ourselves pretty deep into a gnarly clusterf*ck if we don’t understand how this works.

Your thoughts create your feelings which motivate your actions which produce results. You then have thoughts about those results, which create feelings, which motivate actions, which produce more results. All of these results add up to your circumstances.

Of course, all of this is happening within the complex human ecosystem which is you. You exist within a matrix of material reality interwoven with Holy energy. And, as mentioned above, we live in a culture that privileges Whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and wealth, which certainly affects your life.

If you’re an adult and you’re reading this, your present circumstances are largely a product of your actions. You did this. Every step of the way. The circumstances in which you find yourself are the result of actions you took in response to feelings produced by your thoughts.

Although we like to blame others for our adult circumstances, unless you’re being held captive, that blame is probably not accurate. I’m NOT saying you caused your cancer or depression or whatever. I AM saying that if your cancer or depression or whatever is creating unnecessary suffering, you can allevate that suffering by taking responsibility for it. It may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility.

If you’re looking around at a life you didn’t intentionally create and you’re not thrilled about, it’s because you didn’t know about this cycle — how it works and how to create meaningful change for yourself.

How do you take responsibility for this cycle and the results it’s produced in your life? By understanding it and learning to intervene in it skillfully. To grow up is to understand this cycle and to use it to create the life you want.

Circumstances we don’t like and feelings we don’t like are where we usually notice distress, so it’s natural to think they are what we need to fix first.

We would be wrong.

Thoughts and actions are the only places we can break the cycle and put ourselves back in charge of our lives.

When we try to fix feelings without attending to the thoughts that drive them, we deny our feelings or numb them with addictions and compulsions. To alleviate uncomfortable feelings, we take impulsive actions, or no action at all because we feel paralyzed. These careless actions are useless at best, destructive at worst.  

When we try to fix results of our clumsy actions without addressing the feelings and thoughts that drove those actions, we simply recreate the same circumstances over and over again. We all know people who’ve moved, changed jobs, coupled up or broken up, gone back to school, had a baby, or something else to alleviate the discomfort of their circumstances and feelings. Heck, I’ve done this myself a time or two. Wherever you go, there you are.

Unskillful interventions create more suffering in the long run, and they don’t produce lasting change and healing.

Skillful interventions, on the other hand, reduce suffering and result in long-term change and healing.

How do we intervene in this cycle skillfully and effectively?

A good place to start is to notice what you’re complaining about. If you complain about a circumstance in your life, you’re making yourself a victim. Stop it. Stop and look at what’s really going on. Follow the cycle backwards. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What actions have I taken that resulted in this present circumstance?
  • What feelings was I having that drove those actions?
  • What thoughts created those feelings?

(A coach or other careful listener can be really helpful here, because we’re often blind to how the cycle has worked in our lives. If we could see it clearly, we’d make different choices!)

Actions: If you’re choosing destructive actions to alleviate feelings you don’t want to have, stop it. Are you overeating? Overdrinking? Overspending? Yelling at your kids or your spouse or the driver in front of you? And recognize that simply ceasing an action without attending to the feelings and thoughts that drive that action is unsustainable in the long run. Will power isn’t infinite.

Feelings: Uncomfortable feelings won’t kill you when you feel them. Feel your feelings all the way, and they lose their power. You’ll discover that you can feel your feelings and survive. Learning to feel feelings without needing to act on them in ways that are destructive to your life and your integrity – that’s freedom. That’s maturity.

Thoughts: The most effective and sustainable place to intervene in this cycle is with our thoughts. This is the bulk of the coaching I do, because most of us need help hearing our thoughts and changing them to thoughts that serve us.

Here’s an example from my own life. I feel embarrassed to share it. I also believe many of you can relate, so here goes.

I often crave potato chips, even when I’m not hungry. The cycle goes like this: I see potato chips and I think, “I deserve those today, I won’t be able to stand not eating them now that I see them, and a few won’t hurt me.”  So I want them, I eat too many of them, and I feel overfull and not proud of myself. I haven’t acted in my own best interests and according to my values. This is what I did just a couple of days ago.

I could have interrupted this cycle in two places. I could have noticed the wanting, felt it all the way, and not eaten the potato chips. This is what I usually manage to do. The most powerful place to intervene, though, is with the thought, “I won’t be able to stand not eating them.” Because I know if I can just let that craving be what it is, it will eventually dissipate and I’ll be fine. The craving is just neurons firing in my brain, after all. Although it feels lethal, it’s not. This is getting easier and easier for me to do as I rewire my brain. I hardly ever eat when I’m not hungry anymore.

Now, for most of us, potato chips aren’t the end of the world. But sometimes, because we don’t know how this process works, we make choices with destructive consequences that are life-altering.

Looking back on my life, I can see how I’ve gotten where I am, both the good and the bad. I can draw a line from the circumstances in which I’m living now, back to the actions I took to manage the feelings I was having, and then even further back to the thoughts that drove those feelings, and the circumstances that created the thoughts, and so on and on and on.

Here in my 60s, I can see how choices I made when I was in my teens and 20s have resulted in a life that doesn’t fit in important ways. I can stop doing the things that hurt me, but it’s working with my thoughts that has created and continues to create lasting change and healing.

Because of what went down in my childhood family, I believed I wasn’t worthy of living my own life on my terms. My choices flowed from that core belief. The only way I’ve been able to heal is to examine those tangled beliefs, and to begin to learn to think different thoughts. It’s not easy. Lasting change rarely is.

Now that I know better, I can do better. So can you. Start with where you’re complaining, and work backwards. Contact me if you want to talk.

How to feel joy.

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Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance. ~Mary Oliver

This is the piece I was ready to post last week. And then “A letter from God to her daughters who resist joy” showed up and wanted to be shared instead. Here’s my more cerebral, left-brain answer to the question, “Why do we resist joy?”

Two weeks ago I wrote about how to feel sad, and I heard from a few of you who were grateful for the encouragement and instruction. Today I want to encourage us to feel our joy.

Joy. Why would we resist feeling joyful and happy? It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Pushing away sadness makes sense. Sadness, grief, sorrow – they hurt. Joy doesn’t hurt, right?

Well. Maybe, maybe not. We might not resist joy like we resist sadness. We resist joy in different ways – we might rush past joy, not stopping to take it in.  We might hold on to it with a death grip, grasping and needy, not trusting that there are moments of joy yet to come.

We might believe that if we let joy in, it will only make our inevitable sorrow more acutely painful.

And we’d be right.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Kahlil Gibran

Feelings are unpredictable. Feelings ebb and flow. Feelings arrive, fresh-faced or tear-stained, without words, yanking on our skirts and distracting us from our to-do lists. They require our attention at inconvenient times.

Feeling our feelings, all of them, is a choice. We don’t have to do it. We can numb and distract and talk ourselves out of our feelings until we die. Many lovely people choose not to feel their feelings. You probably know a few of them.

Our dominant culture excels at teaching us to ignore our true feelings.

So, why bother? Why feel at all? Why rock our little human boats that we try so hard to keep afloat and on an even keel? Why make life harder than it already is? Why choose to feel deeply? Why not leave well enough alone?

Why choose to get back in touch with our emotions? Our emotions live in our bodies. When we cut off our emotional lives, we cut off our embodied existence. We live from the neck up, dragging our bodies around like machines controlled by our brains.

You may have vacated your body and moved into your head at some point, probably in self-defense. It was the best strategy at the time. Vacating your body was how you got through the painful stuff.

If so, it’s time to come back home.

Why? Because, when you cut off your embodied feelings, you also cut off your connection to Soul. Our souls and bodies are intertwined. Your soul does not live in your brain or your mind.

Feeling your joy and sorrow is how you reconnect with your body. Reconnecting with your body is how you connect with your soul and your soul’s Source.

Cutting off your body because it hurts too much and you feel uncomfortable is to cut off your connection to God. Refusing to be in our bodies severs our connection to Holiness. Your holiness. My holiness. Earth’s holiness. Holiness Itself.

Besides, it takes so much energy to keep stuffing and resisting our feelings! Just think what you could get done if you just let your feelings move through you and got on with your day?!

If you want a less woo-woo, more sciency reason to feel your feelings, consider the neurobiology adage “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In the words of Rick Hanson, “Passing mental states become lasting neural traits.” He’s got some good instructions in this 13-minute TED talk.

When we pay conscious attention to joyful moments, experiences, and memories, we heal our brains. A healed brain is more resilient and flexible. A healed brain is more resistant to stress and the cascade of destruction and disease caused by stress.

We inhabit our joy only when we also attend to our sorrow. They walk together.

Mary Oliver:

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider

the orderliness of the world. Notice

something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow cricket

whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,

shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.

Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,

like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world

and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

Does this resonate? Want to explore further? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!

Photo credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

How to feel sad.

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"Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer... when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings." Pema Chodron

Are you feeling sad? I am. Lately, I’ve been feeling sad pretty much constantly. I have abundant reasons for sadness these days – gun violence, climate chaos, divisive politics, and the accumulated losses of my last six decades among them.

But I don’t enjoy feeling sad. I’d really like not to feel so damn sad. But not feeling sad doesn’t work. If I don’t feel my sadness, it just keeps hanging around asking for attention, getting more and more demanding.

In my 60s, I’m learning to accept that sadness and her cousins grief and pain are necessary ingredients of this whole embodied enchilada.

I’m starting to suspect that sadness will be my constant companion for the remainder of my journey, and the healthiest course of action is just to plan for that.

Because to reject sadness – to numb it through distraction or addiction, to push it away – is to reject Joy.

Sadness, pain, and grief are necessary companions of joy and love. They walk together. They’re a package deal. We simply cannot have the good feelings without the awful ones. It just doesn’t work that way. We don’t work that way.

Yes, sad or mad or scared feelings are uncomfortable. They hurt. They make us cry and rage and cower. They feel terrible. And most of us weren’t taught how to live with the discomfort of so-called negative emotions. We were likely taught to push away sadness, fear, and anger in all their permutations.

But resisting our uncomfortable feelings makes us brittle and mean. Resisting our uncomfortable feelings makes us less compassionate toward ourselves and other beings. Resisting our uncomfortable feelings turns us into pale ghosts of who we could be – shadows afraid of our own shadows.

So, let’s learn how to feel the hard stuff. Let’s be the bad-ass warriors we are, and learn to be with the emotions that make us dig deep and grow up. Learning to be with sadness, especially, is how we heal.

Not wallowing. Not denying. Just giving sadness a place at our abundant table.

Feelings are meant to be felt, not rejected, stuffed, and numbed. Your emotions will not overwhelm you if you feel them. Feelings are simply sensations that carry information.

You can survive a feeling. You can be with yourself, all of yourself, and receive the gifts of your uncomfortable feelings.

Here’s one way to be with a painful feeling (adapted from Dr. Tara Brach’s RAIN process):

  • 1. Notice the feeling. This is often the hardest step, because we’re so used to pushing painful feelings away.
  • 2. Allow that feeling to be what it is. It’s surprising how quickly feelings pass when we just allow ourselves to have them without judging ourselves.
  • 3. Give kind, curious attention to the feeling. Where does it show up in your body? Is it hot or cold? Heavy or light? Open or closed? Does it have a color? A shape? A message for you?
  • 4. As the feeling wanes, give yourself kindness. You might want to mentally tell yourself you’re safe, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m here. You might want to put your hand on your heart. Experiment to find what words and gestures bring you comfort.

And why do we do this, again? Why would we choose to feel challenging feelings?

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön puts it this way:

When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.

In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things, the genuine heart of sadness.

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet when we don’t close off and we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.

Only when we embrace all of ourselves, including uncomfortable feelings like sadness, fear, and anger, can we truly embrace other beings. Only when we embrace all of ourselves can we be a true fountain of healing water for our thirsty world.

Some Resources:

Buddhist Psychologist Tara Brach’s RAIN of Self-Compassion, from whom I’ve adapted the process above.

Pema Chödrön: When Things Fall Apart

Contact me if you’d like to explore feeling your feelings further. I offer a free, no-obligation consultation and would love to walk with you through this process.

Photo by Aliyah Jamous on Unsplash, edited on Canva

The Cathedral and the Well

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(Act One)  The setting is a desert which, like all deserts, has to be crossed. In the middle of this desert is a well, fed by an underground spring of fresh, loud, rushing water. This particular well is fortunately located just at the point where thirsty pilgrims need refreshment if they are to survive and continue on their way. So in those days news got about that it was relatively safe to cross the desert as long as you listened for the sound of the spring and stopped to drink from the well. Generations of pilgrims were able to cross the desert and head into the wilderness — which is where God’s people were usually traveling.

(Act Two)  Many years later news spread of a building in the middle of the desert, a cathedral of great beauty. Throughout the years pilgrims, when they passed, had dropped stones (some fancier than others) to mark the location of the wellspring, an improvement which they hoped would show their respect for the well. Soon a cathedral stands in the middle of this desert, one stone buttressing another. Pilgrims stop, look up, and admire the cathedral from a distance. Yet most of them are close to death from thirst when they approach. They can neither hear the sounds of rushing water nor see the well, now covered by stones.

(Act Three)  Centuries later, in the same desert, one very thirsty pilgrim dares to approach the cathedral, now overgrown by weeds after years of neglect. She (most late medieval pilgrims were women) notices that a stone is loose. Pulling it out, so that she might replace it correctly, she hears the sound of rushing waters! She rediscovers the well and invites her companions to drink of its life-giving waters. Soon news spreads of the cathedral and of the well. The cathedral was imperfectly built, always standing in need of repair; the well, which stood in its midst, is free-flowing. Future generations of pilgrims, sighting the familiar landmark of the cathedral, draw close to the well, drink of its springs, and live to cross the desert.

If this parable of thirst, courage, and spiritual renewal speaks to you, here are some possible ways to interact with it.

1. Ponder where in your life the living water flowing from your Source into your soul has perhaps become blocked. Are you requiring certainty before you move? Are you taking literally what was meant metaphorically? Are you resisting the next step on your journey because you feel afraid? Are you trusting external authority at the expense of your own experience?

2. Use the story as your text for Lectio Divina.

3. Put yourself in the story. Be the thirsty pilgrim crossing the arid desert and approaching the cathedral. Be the thirsty pilgrim pulling aside the loose stone and hearing the sound of water. Hold the stone in your hands. Drink deeply of the cool, living water. What do you hear and feel?

4. If you’d like to chat about what this story may be saying to you, contact me for a free no-obligation consultation call.

Friends, may we drink deeply of the free-flowing, life-giving water of Love.

~Barb

Photo by Rubén Bagüés on Unsplash

*Parable source: Fredrica Harris Thompsett in We Are Theologians

Forging a grown-up faith.

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Muddy Meseta Shoes
Muddy Meseta Shoes

I’ve been receiving more requests for coaching rooted in spirituality after writing “A letter from God to her daughters who observe Lent.” These writers are seeking coaching based in progressive Christian faith and practice. I want to help, and so I want to be transparent about my own spiritual life.

My husband and I walked the Camino de Santiago in 2014. Experiences of God were common for me on the Camino, although it was still mostly walking. One of those experiences has shaped my spirituality — how I imagine and connect with the Divine — in profound ways.

I was alone for a few hours on the 17th day of the 35 days it would eventually take us to walk to Santiago. We were walking between Castrojeriz and Fromista, across the vast central Spanish plateau called the Meseta, on a cold, rainy day. Jed stayed behind in the village we’d just walked through to buy lunch. I continued up the next hill alone, surrounded by other pilgrims also walking up a hill in the cold Meseta rain through the sticky Meseta mud. Gradually I became aware of a presence beneath me, in the earth, sustaining me and communicating with me. This presence felt muscular— “a womb-like heart,” I wrote in my journal. The presence felt incredibly big, and it overflowed with love. I knew this presence was love. I was connected to it, and through it to the pilgrims walking around me, to the trees at the top of the hill, and to the hill itself.

I was connected to everything in the universe through this deep loving presence.

I understood that day that the only thing God requires from me is to accept this connection, maintain it, and strengthen it. To stay connected, and to flow with what comes through the connection. That’s it.

This Camino experience was deeply physical, a mosaic composed of feelings and images. There were no words. I simply and clearly knew something then that I hadn’t known ten minutes earlier. And I still know it.

Here’s the thing we often forget about religion. It’s made up. It’s constructed. Religion is a container created by humans to hold experiences of God, Other, Ultimate Reality, Oneness, whatever you want to call the Divine. In Christianity’s case, it’s an invented response to experiences of Jesus – a Jewish peasant healer killed by the Roman Empire because of his love-based, rebellious, socialist message. His followers experienced his presence after his death, and they told resurrection stories about him. A loosely organized religion began to coalesce. When Constantine converted to Christianity, the church become aligned with dominant culture and spread across the Roman Empire.

Once created, religious containers take on a life (or a death) of their own. Communities begin to protect and pass on the container at the expense of the experiences the religion was created to hold. A couple of millennia later, that container sits on our shelf, cracked and dusty but still prominently displayed and precious.

I’m a child of the Christian church, gestated in mainline Protestantism. I was born into an Episcopal family, and the Episcopal Church has been my Christian place for the most part. I’m a member of “the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement.” My personal experiences of Jesus, both in church and not in church, are precious to me. Yet I seem to have most of my experiences of the Divine outside, under trees, on mountains, beside rivers, swimming in lakes, sitting on rocks in the sun. I also find much wisdom and solace within Buddhism.

People who contact me to explore coaching together usually want to answer these questions: How do I reconcile this Jesus-shaped place in my heart with my adult knowledge and experience? How do I navigate this uncharted territory with integrity and faithfulness? And how can I be true to what I know about God while keeping the peace in my family?  

For me personally, the question I’m living is: How do I reconcile my adult experiences and beliefs — my Camino experience, loving Jesus, and the oneness I feel with God in creation among them — with conventional church affiliation and Sunday morning worship?

I don’t know yet. This is a work in progress and probably always will be.

Here’s what I do know:

I’m not required to accept any authority but my own. I can trust my own authority and experiences of the Divine. I’m connected to the deep heart of God. My job is to stay connected. That’s all. That’s it. God will do the rest. My spiritual practice is doing whatever helps me allow, maintain, and strengthen my connection to God, and, through God, to all beings. Sometimes my practice is going to church. Sometimes it’s sitting on a rock with my feet in a river, praying. Sometimes it’s Vipassana meditation. Sometimes it’s none of the above.

My spiritual practice is doing whatever strengthens my connection to God, and, through God, to all beings. This is my call.

When I look at the Christian tradition through this lens, here’s some of what I see:

  • Language that places God outside or above creation weakens that connection.
  • An emphasis on sin, on our badness instead of our belovedness, weakens that connection.
  • I experienced the presence that day on the Camino as most like a womb, yet beyond gender. Patriarchal words and ideas weaken that connection.
  • Eucharist strengthens that connection.
  • Jesus stories strengthen that connection.

It’s not heresy, and it’s not sin, to melt that cracked, dusty vessel down and forge a new one. I believe this is our responsibility and our vocation. Death and resurrection is, after all, what Jesus was all about.

I wish church on Sunday morning was right there with me. It’s not. So I’m very intentional in my church attendance. Sometimes I don’t go for weeks, and I choose mountain or river or studio church instead. And then I go back, because something in me needs this occasionally anachronistic Christian tradition to feel whole. I’m focusing on letting go of what doesn’t serve me and choosing to live in unknowing for as long as it takes. I suspect this is the work of a lifetime. This work feels uncomfortable often, especially because I’m married to the rector. I’m working to find that elusive and shifting balancing place where I’m living in integrity, being present for my husband, and feeding and being fed by others who love Jesus.

I want community to do this work within – the work of forging adult faith, engaging the sacraments and stories, and participating wholeheartedly in rituals that allow, maintain, and strengthen my connection to God’s deep heart and, through Her heart, to all beings.

I say “forge an adult faith,” not “find an adult faith,” because, for me, this process requires melting down and separating out what’s useful from what’s not. Forging faith requires acceptance and endurance of the refiner’s fire. Forging faith requires discernment of what nurtures us and our world. Forging faith requires courage to honor our experiences. Forging faith requires trusting resurrection and joining with God to make something new. Forging faith means creating a new vessel for the Holy One in our midst, and holding that vessel lightly.

This all sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? So why bother? Why not walk away? My rational, quantitative left brain asks this over and over.

Walking away is the answer for some of us. It’s not my answer. Since you’re reading this, walking away probably isn’t your answer, either.

My current response to my brain’s protestations is that my heart knows things my brain doesn’t. My heart remembers what it felt that day on the Camino – the bottomless peace and love flowing from that bigger, deeper, holy heart  – and it won’t let me walk away from this spiritual journey. To live in integrity, for me, requires that I take faith and spirituality seriously. To be whole, for me, requires forging an adult faith, one component of which is Christianity.

If any of this resonates with you and you’d like to talk further, please contact me to schedule a free no-obligation consultation. I’d love to connect!