Tag: Slow down

Categories
death grief psalm

Psalm 23 – part 4

Photographed by myself Jan 2022. A lonesome tree on the top of the hill

How often do we feel like that when we are going through something awful? Something tough? Like we are exposed and alone?

He guides me along the right paths
    for his name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk
    through the darkest valley

Psalm 23:3b-4a

Do you know we only split the Bible into chapters and verses because some bishop decided it? The divisions started to happen in the 9th Century but really came into their own in the 13th Century. David, when he wrote this Psalm would have just written it as a poem with the lines as they are but to be read as whole.

For some reason this jumped out at me – of us being guided along the right paths for God but that sometimes they would lead us through a dark valley – through the valley of the shadow of death, as it says in the NKJV. For those who have gone through dark times, whether the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a redundancy, a lost opportunity, etc, it can feel like walking in the shadow of death. I believe any time of grief is a time of death – death of a dream as much as loss of a person.

Someone I care about deeply is going through a dark time but, standing back a bit, I can see that if they don’t go through this dark valley they will never be freed from certain things. This dark time for them will cleanse them.

I can’t find it but in one of this last week’s Henri Nouwen meditations he talks of how grief can be a place of growth. In Richard Rohr’s blog someone talks of how in our culture we try to ignore grief and dark times and run away from them. That we just want to get over it. But here if we run these verses together and don’t allow for the verse break it says that God, our Shepherd, will guide us this way. So does this mean that it is good for us?

Perhaps this is why we we are lead in those calm quiet places first – so we are refreshed but also have developed our relationship with God. Dark times are hard if we don’t know we are loved unconditionally and don’t know that God “has our back” so to speak. We need to get to that place where we can trust that we are being led – that we will be led through not left there. But that in the going through we will …

I will fear no evil,
    for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
    they comfort me.

Psalm 23:4b

Maybe then we can support and lead others through their valley of the shadow of death at God’s pace rather than rush them through because we don’t like them being sad and depressed.

God lets people grieve so should we – and that includes ourselves.

Categories
seeing True freedom

Being True to Ourselves

https://www.sidetracked.com/a-delicate-line/

Exhausted but content. As she realises that the complete journey is almost at an end, that she has done it – and on her own terms, at peace with the choices she has made – she feels the bond with this mountain of spirit growing strong.

https://www.sidetracked.com/a-delicate-line/

This article on Sidetracked is amazing. Not just that Anna Tybor climbs the 8th highest mountain in the world without oxygen and then skis back down again collecting all their equipment from the three camps her and her three companions made between base camp and the summit, but it is that she did it on her own terms. She made choices, like not using the oxygen and collecting their detritus which other climbers would not have done, and it is this that give her peace. It would seem that because of this she feels a bond with the mountain. Read the article because this mountain doesn’t work with her on the trip.

Not all of us are called to climb mountains, even little ones, but all of use are much more at peace when we do things on our own terms.

The more I find my true self the more I know what my terms are and the more I can let those things happen not with force but with gentleness because I know it is what I want deep in my heart. Sometimes that might make things harder for me – like with Anna’s thing of clearing up the mountain behind them – but when I go the way I know my heart feels is right then I connect with something higher/greater than me – whether that is God, The Universe, the environment I’m in or the people around me.

I think when we don’t do what we know to be right for us – and again this comes down to seeing ourselves truly and not seeing ourselves as we think others want us to be – we feel a hurt. Often we dismiss this hurt and move on but it stays with us building into something bigger. Then we scream at someone for pulling out in front of us, leaving the top off the toothpaste, etc etc. Often it is that we’ve let those things that aren’t right for us build.

I’ve been running writing workshops for the last 7 1/2 years. Over that time I’ve learned that the ones that work best for the participants are the ones where I am true to myself in them. I run the writing groups that work for me. I do them on my own terms and that gives me peace and causes harmony within the group. When I try to run a group to please someone else then I feel the tension in me and those groups fold.

So practically how can we be true to ourselves and be at peace with our decisions and choices? I will always say that the first way is to get some healing and see what the blocks are that stop us from being true to ourselves, and sometimes that can be not knowing ourselves. Think back to those times when you felt totally at peace and see what you did/didn’t do.

I also think we need to slow down and not just into things. Emails and text messages and phone calls shout at us to do something now but it is ok to wait, to say to the caller “I’ll get back to you” or just leave the text or phone call. I find even if my heart says “yes” I will still wait in case actually I’m going back to people pleasing rather than my own terms.

As a Christian I would say that my final thing with making a decision is that I allow “the peace of God that transcends all understanding to guard my heart and mind” and from there I can go with my peace.

Important note – what I believe to be the right decision is the right decision, the right choice for me, and the more healed I become, the more at peace with myself I become, I can let other people find their own peace and make their own choices on their own terms.

Categories
Listening Still

Relearning!

made by https://www.sethceramics.co.uk/

I’m sure I’m not the only human being who is a bit thick at times. Yes I talk about listening with my heart but as it says somewhere in the bible “The heart is fickle” or something like that. Well I’m not sure about you but my heart can get lost in its own stuff at times and it takes a few things to nudge it out again. And the nudges came in shed loads over the weekend.

As you know I’ve got this part time job 4 afternoons a week. It is great. It is right. It also helps that the rotas are not confirmed until the Friday of the previous week so I cannot get into planning because I don’t know when I’ll get that day off. The last couple of weeks it has been a Wednesday but the couple of weeks previous it was a Friday and who knows what for next week. So I have to be patient and wait.

I said to someone when I got this job that it was good because it meant I would have to say No to things but instead I have been filling up those mornings with things. Made all the more sneaky in that they are great things, all of which felt right. But what all these great things did was not only did they stopped me writing they also stopped me from pondering, from thinking, from knowing how I felt.

I managed to justify it all by saying to myself that these were the right things to do. In fact a couple of them were things I had been hoping to do for years. Why is it sometimes those things you had set your heart on are not what you should be doing? At least not at this moment in time because they get in the way of the bigger thing.

The bigger thing in my writing. Not just these blogs but the other projects that need peculating time. But not just that. I have also learned that I need, like we all do really, to have time to feel my feelings and to really know my heart.

It is always interesting how taking time out to know ourselves and be the best version of ourselves is so overlooked!

So on Saturday I’m at a writing workshop and am saying to one of the group that I haven’t written much and she almost gives me reassurance that this is ok because we are all busy. My heart jumped. Busy is a key word and so I tucked it away.

Then on Sunday we went to a ceramics show. Firstly I chatted to a woman who now makes huge slab bird baths and she told me her story; of how she had once been a renowned collectable potter but had felt a call to something else and she’d had to spend time pondering until she found out how all her things connected. Again I felt that heart bump and had to stop and write down the key things that she said

Follow your interests. It is your interests that will take you where you should go. But take time out to find what they really are. It is about being brave enough to take time out.

Then I came across a lady who made the Caretaker bird in the photograph. Some of the info about these birds says how they came out in lockdown but now have disappeared. This bird is about resting, being, drinking tea, listening. I could not leave it behind. I was going to keep it in my study but it now sits on the hall table so I see it as I come and go. And it reminds me to take things slower, to listen, to drink tea, to be rather than do, to have time to look around, to not have to fill my day, my diary, with stuff.

I sat on the grass, wrote a bit on the backs of the business cards I’d picked up and listened to God/The Universe as my husband continued round talking to potters. I realised again I had filled my time so I did not have to listen to my emotions. They had been telling me for a while to give up a voluntary position but I had been ignoring it because I really wanted to do this. But I had to listen when I was getting bombarded on all sides to slow down.

So I cancelled something that only took up 2 mornings of my week but actually took up a lot of my headspace. Once I had made that decision emotions around a family thing came flooding in. All I could say was it was like slit being disturb on the river bed. Now if I hadn’t stopped this thing I think the slit would have stayed put. I think that’s why we keep busy. To stop the slit being disturbed. But the silt isn’t good. It stops the river of me from flowing freely.

So I’ve put in place some QEC time and also been able to spend the last 2 mornings pondering and being. I have felt such peace and not having to fit things in around other stuff. Pondering isn’t something you can fit in anyway. Neither is listening to your heart.

Yes we do all have things we have to do but too often we fill our days up with things we think we ought to do – to look good, to be busy, to feel we belong, etc. Stopping does hurt for a bit but it is better to know and to feel truly than to keep blundering through and taking one’s unhealed bits forward into something new.

I know I’ll falter at this. I know I’ll fill time up again. But I am hoping Beaty, the Caretaker bird on my hall table will keep reminding me of my true purpose.

Categories
signs Slow down

Signs Part Two

Yesterday I spoke with my youth group about the Wisemen and about Signs and from that felt I had to do a follow on post from what my co-leader said. I love my youth group because there is no us and them but we all chatter away as equals, just some of us have been doing it longer than others!

Why did Herod’s chief priests not see the signs of Jesus’ birth? I think it was because they were too busy. They were trying to please Herod, fit in with the ruling powers, fit in with each other, do “the right thing”, and were following the status quo. Maybe too they didn’t want to look because it would unsettled the lifestyle that, even though they might not have been comfortable with, they were using all their energies to fit in to.

I think too often even if we don’t like something we try hard to fit in, to stay with it, because it is all we know. Too often we don’t get healed because this is all we know. There is a story where Jesus says to the blind man “what do you want?” and it is obvious. But actually it could have been that the man was used to his lifestyle and actually might have said cash. Peter and John, after Jesus’ resurrection, say to the crippled man “silver and gold we don’t have” as though maybe that was what it looked like he really wanted.

Last night got me thinking – how often are we too busy to look at the signs? Not because we don’t want to know what is happening but because we are too busy, carrying too much trauma, believing what we see and read on the news, on social media, from our friends. We allow our group, whether that is friendship group, church group, work environment, even our towns we live in and our good projects, to be where our energy goes. We do not sit back, slow down, gaze at the stars, try and put together what is the Universe saying, what is God saying.

Last night the comment was made about taking time out to pray to know what one was meant to do, but it was followed by the comment “and then we would find other projects to fill our time”. As if the whole point of clearing diaries, finding out what we were meant to be doing, was so that we could take a bit of time out before filling things up again. But really maybe we need to stop and just spend some time looking at the signs, and the going to worship the miracle God might just be doing that we are too busy, like Herod’s chief priests, to notice.

We need to not just slow down for a season but only walk out in what our hearts, the Universe, God our leading us into. Can we do it? Or will it fall to someone outside, as it did with the wisemen, to notice what is really happening? To come into alignment we need to go much slower.

Categories
heart Viewpoint

How We View Things

photograph by Diane Woodrow
Beauty or showing off?

With the way the media has been portraying things recently I have been pondering how we view things. For example take birds. We marvel at eagles, we use cuckoos as a herald for spring, and we are superstitious about magpies. Yet each of the birds kills the chicks of other birds but I have only ever heard magpies be condemned for doing it in a big way.

So now we look at one side of a conflict/war/atrocity as a hero and the other side as evil. It can even switch sides if something happens to do that viewpoint. For instance England fought against France for hundreds of years and yet in the First World War many British men died fighting with the French. And then for a brief period France, Germany and Britain were all in the EU together.

I wonder what makes us view things in a certain way?

Yesterday I got upset with someone I was having coffee with. When I took time out to examine the why of how I felt I realised she reminded me of something in my past and it was that wound I was reacting to. I’ve had similar things with projects that come to an end. It hurts more than just a freelancer being insecure about where the next job comes from. But again if I slow down and listen to my heart I realise where that hurt comes from.

So I wonder as we go into the good guy/bad guy, good thing/bad thing way of labeling things we need to slow down, check with our hearts and ask ourselves why we are doing this. Is it to do with the present situation we are in or is it to do with some greater hurt or fear?

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll do a blog on my thoughts on why the Bible tells of man eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil rather the tree of knowledge because I think this explains something.

So next time you think about labeling something or someone good or bad slow down, listen deeply to your heart – that bit of your heart that doesn’t get heard too often, and see if you can find the real reason. Then give your heart a hug and be kind to yourself for over reacting, as I did yesterday.