Let Your Light Shine.
The duty of Christians toward their fellow men and women is to let their light shine, not to force on them their interpretations of God’s designs.
— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 43
Category: Connection
10 Posts
Being Known
When you keep your relationship with God exclusively fact-based and rational, it’s easy to make judgments about others and yourself. Such judgments reduce your anxiety and increase your sense of safety and protection. However, this way of being also has the curious effect of increasing the isolation you feel, both from others and within your own mind.
If you allow yourself to be known by God, you invite a different and frankly more terrifying experience. You are now in a position of vulnerability. If you permit others to know you, they can make their own assessment of your worth. They can react to you. You give them power to be affected by you and in so doing to affect you. You grant them the option to love you or to reject you. In essence, you must — must — trust another with yourself.
However, I will argue that it is only through this process of being known that you come to know yourself and learn how to know others. There is no other way. To be known is to be pursued, examined, and shaken. To be known is to be loved and to have hopes and even demands placed on you. It is to risk, not only the furniture in your home being rearranged, but your floor plans being rewritten, your walls being demolished and reconstructed. To be known means that you allow your shame and guilt to be exposed — in order for them to be healed.
— Curt Thompson, MD, Anatomy of the Soul, p. 23
Wholehearted Living
Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
An Allelujia Chorus
Being with real people who warm us, who endorse and exalt our creativity, is essential to the flow of creative life. Otherwise we freeze. Nurture is a chorus of voices both from within and without that notices the state of a woman’s being, takes care to encourage it, and if necessary, gives comfort as well. I’m not certain how many friends one needs, but definitely one or two who think your gift, whatever it may be, is pan de cielo, the bread of heaven. Every woman is entitled to an Allelujia Chorus.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 348
My Job as a Parent
It is always a relief to be reminded that my job is not to control, or judge, or change my son, but simply to help him remember, with words and touch, who he really is. Loving him this way, I am better able to find within myself the faith and patience necessary to survive his painful transformations. I know to hold a space for his beauty, even when it slips from sight. And I come a little bit closer to understanding his true essence, to remembering the goodness that resides just beneath the surface of even his very worst behavior, behavior that is usually rooted in fear and confusion and self-protection.
— Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, p. 169-170
Listening
Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and by others.
In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless.
Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
— Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 219-220
Connections
Perhaps the healing of the world rests on just this sort of shift in our way of seeing, a coming to know that in our suffering and our joy we are connected to one another with unbreakable and compelling human bonds. In that knowing, all of us become less vulnerable and alone. The heart, which can see these connections, may be far more powerful a source of healing than the mind.
— Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 140
Real Intimacy
At the heart of any real intimacy is a certain vulnerability. It is hard to trust someone with your vulnerability unless you can see in them a matching vulnerability and know that you will not be judged. In some basic way it is our imperfections and even our pain that draws others close to us.
— Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 113
Happiness Is Not Selfish.
Happiness is made to be shared.
The martyr ethic is built upon a number of erroneous and fearful beliefs about happiness, the major one being that happiness is selfish. Another great fear of happiness to the practicing martyr is that my happiness denies others their happiness. In other words, it appears to the martyr that there isn’t enough happiness to go around. Other fears of happiness for the martyr include: Happiness leads to conceit, my happiness has no value to others, and being happy is inconsiderate in a world where there is suffering.
The fear that happiness is selfish is not only untrue, it actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Psychology researchers find time and time again that it is the depressed people, and not the happy ones, who are intensely self-focused and self-absorbed. Happy people, by contrast, tend to be outgoing, sociable, generous, loving, and kind. They’re also more tolerant, forgiving, and less judgmental than people who are depressed….
In truth, your happiness is more than okay. Your happiness is also a great gift. It is a total inspiration, a wonderful example, and a great service to the world. Your happiness contributes so much more to the world than your suffering.
— Robert Holden, PhD, p. 114, 118
Teaching Ourselves
You cannot teach others that they’re guilty if you’re to be free of guilt yourself.
It’s important to understand that, on the level of consciousness, thoughts are never given away; they’re always shared. Therefore, if you teach others that they should be guilty, you’re simultaneously teaching yourself that you should be guilty, too. Also, when you judge someone as unworthy of happiness, you are in that very same instant telling yourself that you are also unworthy.
The reverse of this principle is that every time you affirm others’ goodness, their inner light, their original blessing, their innocence, you’re affirming these qualities for yourself.
— Robert Holden, PhD, Happiness Now! p. 98