Can I Get a Witness? I Choose LIFE

Since Thursday, I have been feeling the need for much calm and stillness. I am building a life where there is as much silence and stillness as I want/need. So the silence and stillness are there for me when amazing breakthroughs happen and I recognize and honor the need to let my psyche catch up with what breakthroughs imply for my life.

Thursday was a day of a HUGE coming together of many kinds of inner work, prayer, therapy, spiritual direction, and the work for this class. I met with my spiritual director before I listened to the audio, and a number of memories clicked to show me the source of so much of my anxiety and fear: the “rules” were ingrained in me from my birth, that my entire purpose was to meet my parents’ needs (including sexual needs of my father and emotional needs of my mother) within the closed system of the nuclear family. So all the ways I have resisted these rules:

doing my inner work,
becoming whole,
working hard to become competent in many ways,
seeking health, beauty, comfort and order in my life,
longing for love, truth, and integrity and seeking where they might be found,
letting in joy, color, music, movement and meaning,
and probably other ways of living my gifts and growing into my potential;

All of these have generated resistance to resisting the rules (“dueling resistances”!), in the forms of fear, isolation, numbing, anxiety, sabotage, self-hate talk/actions, destructive behaviors.

Then I came home and listened to an audio by Brene Brown (author of The Gifts of Imperfection, a life-changing book on developing shame resilience, and the focus of the eight-week on-line course I am in), on cultivating calm as an alternative to the “anxiety as a lifestyle” of my family-of-origin (and of much of society), and also felt so affirming of the work I have done. I studied Family Systems Theory for years (in the context of doing ministry, using Ed Friedman’s Generation to Generation), and I knew there was a LOT of anxiety and that it was getting in my way. And FST brought me a lot of insights and releases from some of this anxiety, but on Thursday the combination of spiritual direction and the audio focused intense and clarifying light on the choice(s) between anxiety and calm, and helped me to recognize how committed I am to calm (perspective, understanding, and mindful/managing of reactivity). I saw in new light the messages I had received that I have no right to life separate from my parents, no right to meet my needs, no right to joy, no right to love or health or beauty or success.

So I am going to replace the old “rules” that I have allowed to get in my way, with commitments that I now share with you:

I am responsible for only my own needs, and ONLY I am responsible for meeting my needs.

I will ask for help from people AND from God.

I am doing the work to which I am called (spiritual direction, writing, and witnessing to the healing process).

I am no longer waiting for the fear to stop; when I feel fear from my inner child/old self, I will use that as a guide to do the opposite of what the fear is telling me to do. (Insight from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield)

I let in beauty, comfort, health and order to all areas of my life.

I embrace the risks of letting in love, health, success, and prosperity.

I CHOOSE LIFE, SO HELP ME, GOD!

(“This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Therefore choose life.” Deut. 30: 19)