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Monthly Archives: October 2013

Cursillo- the fourth day

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Cursillo is like a combination of your birthday and Christmas and Easter and New Year’s and your wedding day, all crammed together in a weekend. And I don’t just mean the excitement of all that. I mean the symbolism and meaning of all that.

A lot of what makes Cursillo work is the surprise factor. However, you could be told everything that is going to happen and it still wouldn’t change the effect. It is the difference between reading a guide book on Paris and going to Paris. Experiencing something is far more powerful. I’m going to tell you something about it, but I can’t tell you everything, partly because it is different for everybody and with every team that is hosting it.

Cursillo is an intensely spiritual weekend. The Catholic Church has them, and the Episcopal Church licensed the concept from them. The Methodist church has a program called “The Walk to Emmaus”. They are all the same concept. The point is that by the end you will have had an encounter with the Holy Spirit.

I feel that this experience is mandatory for all adult Christians. If you take your faith journey seriously, go. It isn’t church camp for adults. It is a life-changing experience.

Going to Cursillo is like being upgraded from a 110 volt outlet to a 220. It is like being upgraded from a garden hose to a fire hose.

It is a modern day Pentecost. That was the time after Jesus had arisen from the dead and then ascended into Heaven. There was a long period in between where the disciples weren’t sure what was going to happen. Then the disciples were suddenly filled with the Holy Spirit and they gained the power to heal, speak in other languages, and minister to others in the same way that Jesus did.

Cursillo replicates that experience. It is an intentional calling-down of the Holy Spirit.

It is a bit overwhelming, especially coming from a non-evangelical church. I suspect Pentecostals and Church of Christ people are wondering what I’m talking about. They have this kind of experience much more often. In some churches, it has to be created, it isn’t a natural event. It really doesn’t matter how it happens, just that it happens.

I’ve written about some of what happened to me before. It is one of the posts in the “Strange but true” section.

Being filled with the Holy Spirit is a time of intense energy. There isn’t a lot of time for sleep. There is so much to do and learn. We are like little children who have just learned how to read. When we get it, that is all we want to do. When we get filled with the Spirit, we want to keep that connection going. Sometimes sleep isn’t really possible.

Coming back to the real world after such an experience can be very hard. It is called “the fourth day”. Sadly, they don’t give any advice on how to negotiate the world of work and family once you’ve been transformed. I’m going to try here.

Do everything slowly and carefully. Do everything with a sense of thankfulness and gratitude. You are like a new child at this point. You are relearning how to just “be”.

Like walking on water or handling snakes, it is a true test of faith. You are going to want to go back to your old ways of doing things, but your old ways were before you got filled with the Spirit. Breathe through this new experience. The Spirit will teach you what to do.

I found it helpful to make breathing intentionally a part of my practice. On the in breath, pray “Lord help me.” On the out breath, pray “Thank you
Lord” (or change Lord to Jesus).

Eat lightly. Consider going vegetarian. Meat is hard to digest during times of change and stress. Eat only half the amount of food that you normally would eat. Chew it slowly and thoroughly, giving thanks with each bite.

Avoid all spicy foods.

Avoid all stimulants, like sugar and caffeine. You are “high” enough. They will just tip you over the edge.

Try to stick with your normal routine – if you exercise, do that. Don’t make any sudden changes.

Things will look different. Expect that colors will be brighter. Things may have an extra layer of meaning to them. This is normal. The Spirit is revealing information to you that you have missed before.

Hymns and Scripture readings will have more meaning.

Don’t try to write everything down. Enjoy it. Soak it up. You will be overwhelmed with meaning at this time. Things will connect and make sense that you’ve never noticed before. This is normal.

It won’t stay at this level of energy forever. You can survive it. It is kind of like learning to surf – the wave isn’t going to be up for that long. But the best part – if you fall, you won’t drown. You are safe.

If you are woken up in the middle of the night, consider just following your intuition. The Spirit will lead you. You don’t have to lie there, wondering and fretting about lack of sleep. You’ll have as much rest as you need.

When I’m awoken, I get up and I go into my craft room. I’ll sit on the recliner, with a small blanket over my legs. I will turn on a small light so I’m not fully awake, and I’ll sit and see what the Spirit wants to reveal to me. Sometimes it means I need to write it out to discover it. Sometimes it means I need to read Scripture. Sometimes it means I need to draw. Whatever the means – there is something that needs to be uncovered, and I have some work to do. I’ve come to look forward to these middle-of-the-night conversations with God. They don’t happen a lot anymore, and I’ve gone from worrying about them (at first) to missing them. When they happen again it is like getting a visit from an old friend.

Welcome to this new life, this life of Spirit. It is kind of like learning how to read. Once you have been told about reading, and turned on to how to do it, that is all you want to do. Sadly, the “real” world isn’t into Spirit study all the time, so you have to integrate the two. I wish you luck in your path, as you learn your own special way to serve God in this world. Know that the Spirit is always with you for you to call on for help and advice.

Forward progress -beads and good habits

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Part of my blog is about the lessons that I’ve learned from beading. One of the most valuable lessons I learned was when I was making a rosary. It took forever to work on, and I took a lot of time in between. I’d work on it, get bored, or my hands would hurt, and I’d put it aside. I finally realized that when I got back to it, nothing had come by and taken away the work that I’d done. No “rosary elves” had shortened my project by five links. What I had done was still there. The same is true of our good deeds.

Any forward progress is forward progress, no matter how slow.

The only difference with good deeds is we don’t have something to look at to see our progress, so we tend to forget. We look at the time we took off, rather than the work we’ve already done. We look at the fact that we stopped, rather than the fact that we started again.

When we are trying to start a good habit, like sitting up straight, we will find ourselves hunched over, and suddenly remember to straighten. Then, five or ten minutes later, we are back, hunched over. This is normal. We straighten again, and we tend to think “Ugh! Why do I keep hunching over?” It is healthier to think “Hey! I remembered to sit up straight!”

Focus on what is working. Focus on what you are doing right. Ignore the mistakes and the pauses. That is part of the package deal of being human. It will become habit to do the right thing, but it takes a while. All good habits are learned, just like bad habits.

Having patience with the process is part of the process.

Healing negative self-talk.

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I have come to see a connection between self-hate and addiction. I have come to understand that negative self-talk is the same as eating junk food.

People know it is bad for them, but they keep doing it. Why? There has to be a payoff for any behavior we do, otherwise we wouldn’t keep doing it.

Children who misbehave do so because it gets them attention. Any attention is better than no attention. If the parents don’t make a fuss over them when they do something right, but yell when they do something wrong, the child will persist in the misbehavior. This seems paradoxical. You’d think the child would want to not get yelled at, but really the goal is attention. Getting negative attention is still getting attention.

There are plenty of people whose parents yelled at them all the time when they were growing up. They were constantly taught that they was bad, wrong, stupid. Their parents drilled into them how imperfect they were.

The bad part is that they often learn this lesson well. Even with their parents not around, they will often tell themselves the same things. They may hit themselves or curse at themselves the same way their parents did when they made a mistake.

Sometimes they will seems to set themselves up for failure. They will not plan enough time to do a project. They will leave things for the last minute. They are then constantly late and overwhelmed and making mistakes. It is a self perpetuating cycle.

The scary part – they are living up to their parent’s image of them. There is some odd negative validation going on. There is a strange payoff.

This self-abuse is the same as a person who constantly binges on junk food. Our bodies crave fats and salt and sugar, even though it is bad for us. We will overeat at a buffet and feel miserable, yet we will do it again and again. Why? We know we should eat less and eat better food, but we don’t? Why?

It is the same thing. We get a payoff. We like the feeling we get from overeating and from eating unhealthy food. We like feeling like we are bad, like we are rebels. We are rebelling against good by being bad. The “bad boy” is a hero.

We have to retrain ourselves to get pleasure from good things. Nobody gets excited about broccoli and lima beans. Nobody gets excited about going to the gym. The payoff is quieter. The payoff is slower. It is harder to notice.

Your brain works better. Your clothes fit better. Your knees don’t hurt. Your heart works better. Your health improves. These are pretty good payoffs, but you don’t see them right away.

The same is true with negative thinking.

Negative self talk is an addiction the same way that overeating and drugs are. And it is healed the same way.

We humans need habits. Instead of going on autopilot and living with bad habits running your life, fill up your time with good habits. Seek positive choices and do them. Leave yourself reminders. You’ll forget. That is a normal trick of the bad-habit brain. That isn’t you.

Sometimes our minds are like small children that just want attention. Just like with children, ignore the bad and praise the good.

Make an intentional choice to say good things to yourself. Know that it takes a long time to retrain your mind. Nothing is automatic or easy. It takes a long time to get well. Have patience with the process. Understand that you won’t have patience at the beginning. That too is part of the process.

When you do something good, notice it. Don’t dismiss it. Write up a certificate. Draw up an award. Write down a list of all the good things you did that day.

Don’t make a negative list (“didn’t wreck the car”, “didn’t get into a fight”). While those are good things, work on noticing the little things that you did right. They have a way of hiding at first. It will get easier the more you do this. Make it a daily practice to write down at least three good things that happened that day. When that gets easy, increase the number.

Give yourself easy goals to start with. You are taking baby steps, not running a marathon.

You have to choose to love yourself in a way you were not shown how to by your parents or the people who you were raised with.

Sometimes we have to re-parent ourselves.

Sometimes they broke us, because they themselves were broken. They didn’t know any better. That doesn’t excuse the damage they did. But it does explain it, a little. People tend to repeat bad habits. People who were hurt tend to become people who hurt other people.

You don’t have to repeat the same bad habits. You can heal that wound.

I’m not going to lie here – it hurts to heal that wound. Just like with a broken leg, sometimes it has to be broken to finally heal right. It is painful whether the wound is physical or emotional or mental. It takes a long time to heal.

But it is so worth it. Who wants to walk with an emotional limp all the time? Sometimes it is “the devil you know” so you stick with it, because change is scary. But trust me, press on.

That pain you feel from trying to make a good change is a sign of healing. Don’t run from it. Lean into it, breathe, and walk forward. It will get easier.

And know that you aren’t alone on this journey.

A lot of us hide our brokenness, because we were taught that our brokenness is shameful. It isn’t. It is part of being human, and being human is a messy thing.

pain-notes-poem

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Too much acid (stress) not enough sweet (soothing)

Pain is a symptom that the unconscious problems are about to rise to the surface. You are about to have a breakthrough. You are about to be born.

Take away the pain through counseling; the pain may come back in another way. The basic coping methods have not been changed. It is the same as a person who is an alcoholic who is suddenly deprived of alcohol. He may start smoking or over eating.

We have to have a way to fill those holes.

Quit digging them.

Learn to accept them and realize they will never be filled. You are human and holes are normal.

See the desire to turn away from getting better, from whatever positive change you are doing- is your unconscious mind trying to protect itself.

It doesn’t want these hard emotions to come out. It is afraid of being embarrassed. It is not wise enough to know that if they are cleaned out, the job is done. You aren’t embarrassed. It is over.

Or perhaps it is afraid – it thinks it won’t have a job anymore.

Our body craves sweets and fats when we are depressed, which only make us more depressed. If we stand up to it and impose our conscious will, we will choose good things and break the cycle.

The same is true of thoughts and actions.

Look for unconscious habits.

Add intentional good habits to counter them.

One size

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I think we have lost something with not making our own clothes. We have tried to fit ourselves into a certain mold that isn’t us.

There is no such thing as one size fits all. Sure, one thing covers all, but it sure doesn’t fit.

Premade clothes don’t fit our style in any meaningful way. We are all different and special. We are all one of a kind. Our clothes are extensions of our personalities and show the world something of who we are. How can we possibly express our uniqueness by picking something off the rack at Walmart? Why does Target get to tell me what I want to wear?

Then there is the idea of actual fit. We all have different shapes. Some are taller, some are rounder, some have bumps in different places. It isn’t wrong, just different. When we try to put our unique shape into something off the rack, we are guaranteed to feel that we don’t measure up.

This is a lie. We don’t need to measure up to a generic standard. We aren’t generic. We are each different and that is perfect.

So realize that if the clothes don’t fit, it isn’t your fault.

Beaten

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If you are a people watcher, working in the library is one of the greatest jobs ever. You don’t have to wonder about people’s stories. They come right up to you and tell you most of the time. But sometimes I get a real stumper.

Yesterday I saw a lady who had a sign taped on her bag with two-inch packing tape. It was a full legal sheet of paper where she had scrawled “John Smith had me beaten up”

Notice the verb tense. Not “John Smith beat me up.” It was something that was contracted out. So there was an extra party in this story.

Of course the name wasn’t John Smith. I don’t recall the name. Her handwriting was messy. The name looked like a Hispanic name, but that is all. I’ve chosen a generic name.

This confused me. Why would anybody do this?

Is she trying to shame him?

Is she trying to show she is a victim?

Maybe a little of both?

Or something else?

She was in her mid 50s, about 100 pounds and 5 feet tall. She wore sweatpants. Her hair was very black and very short. Her accent sounded like she was from New York. She was friendly enough, but a little jumpy. I’m giving you this information so you have as much to go on as I do.

Sometimes I only have puzzle pieces. I hope to see her again. This was the first time I have seen her. Perhaps I’ll ask her about the sign if I see her again. Obviously it isn’t a secret if she has it taped on her bag.

There are plenty of things I would like to ask patrons about, but I don’t because it seems like it is not my place. But the best part is, I usually don’t have to ask. They just tell me anyway. I have no idea if it is just part of the job or something they see in me that says “tell all your private information”. This never happened when I worked retail. Some days I feel like I’m in a confession booth or a counselor’s office. Of course, if I was, I couldn’t write about it.

Phone

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People. Turn your phone off. You can survive without talking on it all the time.

Show respect to the people around you by not sharing your personal information as you yammer on the phone. Be kind to the person behind the counter and don’t talk on your phone while you are checking out.

You don’t need your phone on all the time. It is ok to turn it off. Or at least turn off the ringer. Trust me. You aren’t going to get a call from the Pope. It can wait. Nothing has to be dealt with right away. It can go to voicemail.

You look crazy when you have a Bluetooth device in and you are using it. You look like you are talking to yourself.

My husband gets so upset when someone calls when he is driving or we have just sat down to eat supper. I tell him to not answer. The phone is there for him – he is not there for the phone. He is slowly starting to understand that it never is an emergency and people can wait. If it is an emergency, they need to call 911.

I once worked with a guy in his 20s who had a hard time grasping that he could not have his phone at the front desk. He said “what if my family needs to get a hold of me?” They can call the office phone and ask for you. He didn’t grasp that he wasn’t the person they would call in an emergency anyway. He was the one who constantly needed to be rescued.

I’m in my 40s. When I was growing up, nobody had cell phones and we did just fine. If our parents needed to reach us at school, they called the office. If our friends needed to call us, they called our home. If we weren’t there, our parents took a message. It wasn’t ever something that had to be dealt with right then.

It isn’t really that urgent now. Nothing has changed, except we have been trained to think that we have to be connected all the time. We are being programmed to do a lot of things all at once, and we aren’t doing any of them well. We’ve forgotten that tools are there to serve us. We aren’t supposed to serve them.

People will call the library to renew their items. I’ll ask for their library card number and they’ll explain that they are driving. They can’t give me the card number because it is on their keychain, so they can’t safely look at it. I tell them to call back when they are parked safely. There is nothing that needs to be done while you are driving that is more important than driving.

I know people who use the time they are driving to make all their calls and pay all their bills. What did they do before cell phones? Everything got done. Somehow we have forgotten this.

I think we have lost something in our need to multitask. We have forgotten how to remember what we were going to look up. We have forgotten how to take the time to be courteous to the people around us. We have forgotten how to do anything later and let things wait.

We have become addicted to doing everything right now, when really nothing is that pressing. The phone uses us more than we use it. It has convinced us that we have to have it. Consider turning off your phone, for even one hour. Do you feel twitchy’? How about a day? A week? Getting nervous yet?

Perhaps we need to start a 12 step program for cell phone addiction.

If you feel you have to use something all the time and it is something that you lived without before it existed, that is a sign of a problem.

Sure, cell phones and smart phones make things easier in certain ways. But they don’t seem to really improve our lives. We seem to have trained ourselves that we can’t do without them.

We’ve done the same with fast food and prepared meals. We’ve forgotten how to do things ourselves. We’ve forgotten how to take care of ourselves. In our “need” to multitask and do everything right away, we’ve forgotten how to do anything well.

Our lives have become like fast food by using cell phones. It is fast and not real. We have sacrificed quality for speed. Faster doesn’t mean more efficient.

Multitasking is newspeak for screwing three things up at once.

Kindergarten 10-23-13

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Today I was supposed to work with the same three that I’ve had the past few weeks, but I only had two. I didn’t have enough time to work with three, and I decided to skip one of them.

The list had V, the girl with the recovering mom, J, the boy who is severely delayed, most likely from dyslexia and/or a hearing problem, and S, the ever-smiling Hispanic boy. The list was in that order. I normally go in order but today I just felt differently.

Sometimes when we work with kids the goal is to build up their confidence. They need to work with easy things to get the confidence to do harder things. Perhaps that is what I was doing with myself. I just could not face the disappointment of seeing how far one of them had slipped over the fall break. He had just not been doing well before, and I didn’t know how to handle it if he had gotten worse.

These kids had just over two weeks off. I had a horrible feeling that they did not practice their letters or numbers over this time. I was honestly afraid. Sadly these feelings were borne out with V. She can recite her numbers to 20, but still can correctly identify maybe 5 letters. This will not work.

I’m sorry for her situation. I really want things to be better for her. I have no control over her home life, but I will do my best to teach her the letters and how to read. Reading is the way out of that hole. If you come from a terrible beginning, reading is the key out. Reading is the difference between poverty and success.

Then I worked with S. He did much better than V.

I skipped J. He did so badly the last time that I just didn’t have the heart to work with him. Perhaps this isn’t fair. By definition he needs me more. But I can’t do all the work. He has to do some of it. His parents have to do some of it.

Children require an immense amount of work. They can’t be ignored until they go to school, and expect the teachers to do all the work. Perhaps parents do this because they were treated the same way.

I don’t care. Don’t have children if you aren’t willing to raise them. Raising them means a lot more than feeding and clothing them. Raising them means teaching them values and morals. Raising them means teaching them how to be independent.

His parents are young and not together. It shows. He is very scattered and controlling. It isn’t his fault that his parents weren’t ready to be parents. He is the one who is paying for it.

As I was leaving, all the kids were lining up to go outside for recess. They were putting their coats on. I helped one with the zipper on his coat (always tricky at any age) and noticed V needed help with hers. I asked her if she would like me to help and she said no. She tried to work it but it was being difficult. I asked her again, and again no. She wanted to do it herself, and I respect that. But by the time everybody was filing out of the classroom, it still wasn’t together. It was too cold to not be zipped up. She said she would just hold it together.

There is something to be said for helping yourself, and there is something to be said for being OK with asking for help.

Recovery – you have to want to get well.

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I know a lady who spent $8,000 to learn how to eat.

She went to a group of chiropractors who have cross trained in nutrition. I’m not sure why this particular paring is becoming common these days, but it is. It seems odd that regular doctors don’t seem to care about nutrition, but chiropractors do. Mine does. I’ve heard of others who do. This seems odd because chiropractors aren’t seen as “regular doctors” in many people’s eyes, so even going to them for what they normally provide is seen as suspect.

Sadly, the nutrition part isn’t covered by insurance, so it was all out of pocket. This too seems odd – it is far cheaper to teach someone how to prevent disease rather than “cure” it after it has set in. But this is a foreign concept to insurance companies. They would rather pay to get you well than to keep you well.

She didn’t have to spend any of that money. She could have done what they did for free. They put her on an elimination diet. Strip away all the stuff that usually causes problems, and stick with that for a few weeks to get all the junk out of the system. Then start adding back suspicious things and see if there is a problem. The usual stuff is all processed food and anything with gluten.

We have a winner. She was gluten intolerant. The funny/sad part is that she had figured that out on her own years back. She had gone gluten-free and done much better. Her weight had gone down and her joints didn’t hurt. But she had dropped it. She thought it was too hard.

She did the same thing this time. She said that it was too hard to go gluten free on a fast-food diet. She drives a lot and works a lot. She is too tired to cook when she gets home so she gets food on the way. But this makes no sense. There are plenty of gluten-free options these days. Everything is marked whether it is gluten free or not. It isn’t a special diet – it is pretty mainstream.

The point is that she wanted a magic pill. She wanted something simple and fast and easy. It requires work and sacrifice to make any important change, and that was the part that she found too hard.

It reminds me of when people started to notice that I’d lost weight. They (always large themselves) asked me what was my “secret”. I told them – eat better and exercise more. Their faces always sunk. They wanted it to be something simple like “eat two grapefruit a day and keep on doing the same old things you were always doing”. It doesn’t work like that.

Anything worth having requires work. The easy way is rarely the healthy way.

The point is that if she wants to get well, she has to choose. Her health has to be the winner. If she cannot eat healthy and work the way she is working, then she has to find another job. Or she has to figure out that she can cook up a large pot of food that is healthy on her days off and freeze it and reheat it at work.

The point is that she doesn’t want to take care of herself. She is a miserable person. She sleeps all the time on her time off. She has admitted that she hates everybody and has no friends.

I cannot imagine living this kind of life. I cannot imagine anybody wanting to be in this life, just going through the motions. She goes to work and hates it. She goes home and sleeps. She is escaping everything. She is trapped in her body and in her life. I can’t comprehend why anybody would want to stay in this situation. By her choice she has said that miserable is better.

She was hoping to be able to retire when she gets to be 50. She didn’t check the retirement rules correctly. Sure, she can retire, but she won’t collect her pension until she is 65, and then it willl be greatly reduced because she didn’t work long enough.

She wants to retire early because her husband is significantly older than her. She is concerned that by the time she is able to retire, he will be dead. She would like to spend time with him now. The problem is, the way her health is going, it is highly likely she will die before him. The sad part is, she already has, she just doesn’t know it. By refusing to take care of herself and sleeping all the time when she is home – she has already decided to not participate in life. She is already not alive.

I hate this. I hate all of it. There is no reason for any of this. There is no reason for her to be miserable.

Sure, it is hard to swim upstream and take care of yourself. Sure, it would be great to have everything done for you, and done well. It just doesn’t happen. Nobody is going to exercise for you. Nobody is going to turn off the TV for you. Nobody is going to make you take care of yourself.

She reads a lot of books about health and talks like an expert on it, but still won’t do it. I feel like I’m just standing by, watching her drown. I can’t save her. I want her to choose to live, and live well. Right now she is just mimicking life, just going through the motions. She has to want to live. I can’t instill that in her.

I’ve realized that this situation is just like any other addiction or mental illness. If you don’t want to get better, no amount of outside intervention will help. You can only be committed to the mental hospital if you are a danger to yourself or others. Nobody can put you on the path to recovery – you have to do it yourself. This applies to regular life as well. She has to want to get better. I’d hoped that spending all that money would be the incentive to start taking her health seriously, but it hasn’t worked.

So I wait, and pray.

Life wasn’t made to be endured.

“God breathed” – on Paul’s words versus Jesus’ words

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People have used Paul to justify Paul to me. Paul says that “all scripture is God-breathed”. (From Timothy 3:16-17) They use this as proof that whatever Paul says is from God.

The problem is that Paul wasn’t talking about his own words. Paul was writing letters to other people. His words weren’t considered Scripture at the time he wrote them. That was many years later.

Scripture is indeed God-breathed. It is inspired, in-spired. To “respire” is to breathe. We get the word Spirit from that root – spirit and breath are the same. It means the same thing. So the Holy Spirit is the breath of God.

It is what makes humans different. When God created Adam and Eve, God breathed into Adam to give him life. God didn’t do this for animals.

Some of what Paul says is helpful, but some of it is divisive. Some of his words go against the basic command of Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves. There is nothing uplifting or loving about telling women to shut up. (1 Corinthians 14:34-35) There is nothing loving about telling gay people (or anybody) that they are going to hell. (1 Timothy 9-10, among others)

Judging people isn’t our job. Our job is to look after ourselves. Paul says that we are to nicely tell off other people in order to correct them (1 Timothy 5:20, among others).

Jesus tells us otherwise. Jesus says that we should look out for the plank in our own eyes and not the speck in our neighbor’s eye (Matthew 7:3-5, among others). Jesus tells us that whatever we use to measure others will be used to measure ourselves (Matthew 7:2). Thus – don’t judge at all.

It is important to always compare the words of anyone who says they act on the behalf of God with the words of Jesus. If what they say isn’t showing love to God and to all of God’s children (everybody), then what they say isn’t in fact “God breathed.”