Becoming Yourself

Developing a Better You

Tag: Richard Rohr (Page 1 of 8)

Find Healing by Embracing Your Wounds

October 12, 2024 / / 0 Comments

SPECIAL NOTE: I’m on book tour in October and may be in your area. I’d love to meet you! If interested, see details at the bottom of this post.

Being human means being wounded. 

The world is beautiful and deadly. Life is wonderful and painful. Simply existing eventually leads to hurt. 

The question is this—how will we choose to deal with our wounds? Richard Rohr rightly said that those who do not transform their pain transmit their pain. Hurt people hurt people. It’s up to us to acknowledge our wounds, grieve well, and use the experience to deepen our becoming.

But how can we do that? Each of us must find our own path. Therapy can help. Talking vulnerably with trusted friends can help. Prayer can help. Serving others can help.

Ultimately, we must allow ourselves to feel our pain. We can’t stuff it, avoid it, sanitize it, or numb it. We must face it. Experience it. Go through it. 

Author and teacher Henri Nouwen put it this way:

You have been wounded in many ways. The more you open yourself to being healed, the more you will discover how deep your wounds are…. The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you can analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down to your heart. Then you can live through them and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.

As you encounter your wounds, take a breath. Face them. Name them. Talk them through with your trusted circle and your Higher Power. Allow yourself to feel them deeply. Then take their lessons and let them go. If you do, you’ll find growth and healing, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

SPECIAL NOTE: I’ll be on book tour with my author wife Lisa McMann from Oct 11-26, 2024 with events in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and Texas. I’d love to meet you. For details, see the graphic below or visit my website HERE.

As featured in the Daily Meditation from The Henri Nouwen Society. Text excerpts taken from “You are the Beloved” by Henri J.M. Nouwen © 2017 by The Henri Nouwen Legacy Trust. Published by Convergent Books.

The Moral Duty of Finding Inner Peace

June 1, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.

Etty Hillesum

Etty Hillesum wrote those words in her journal while she was an inmate at a Jewish prison camp in 1943. She was killed at Auschwitz soon after at the age of twenty-nine. I am in awe that such wisdom and maturity came from someone in that bitterly cruel circumstance, let alone someone so young. 

Her description of the cultivation of inner peace as a moral duty really struck me. I often think of my pursuit of peace as a self-centered endeavor, one sought for my personal benefit. But upon reflection, it’s obvious that my having a greater sense of peace also benefits those closest to me. We all know there is a distinct quality difference between spending time with a prickly person or a peaceful person. So it makes sense to extend that idea beyond my immediate inner circle. The more I am at peace, the more peace I bring to every situation and person I encounter, and therefore the more peace I spread into our troubled world. 

So how do we cultivate inner peace? For me, there are both surface things and deeper things that help. The surface things are schedule balance, rest, a day off each week, prayer and meditation, time alone, time with family and friends, serving others, exercise, and hobbies I enjoy. The deeper things are having a sense of meaning and purpose, loving and being loved, and experiencing hope and security. I find those later elements in my relationships with God and the people closest to me. When my surface habits get out of rhythm, or I neglect those deeper relationships, I lose my sense of peace.

So how about you? How’s your inner peace these days? What surface activities help cultivate it? What deeper elements do you need? Establish peace-generating habits. Prioritize peace-giving relationships. Focus on expanding your inner peace today, for yourself and our world. If you do, you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

This post (originally published in June 2021) was inspired by a meditation by Richard Rohr, founder of The Center for Action and Contemplation (www.cac.org). You can read more of Etty’s profound wisdom in that post here. The featured quote was by Etty Hillesum in An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Henry Holt and Company: 1996) p. 218.

The Freedom of Finding Your True Self

May 11, 2024 / / 0 Comments

One of the main reasons I started this blog in 2017 was to map my own journey toward finding my true identity. The real me. My deep self. Who I am apart from the various fleeting hats I wear. Teacher and author Richard Rohr has been an important part of that journey. In his recent Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation, he spoke so compellingly on that topic that I wanted to share it with you. I hope it helps you on your own journey toward Becoming Yourself.

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, four quartets

In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard speaks about the spiritual path that winds both away from and toward one’s true home:  

The first going out from home we can say is the creation of the ego. While this is a necessary creating, it is also the creating of a separation. It’s taking myself as central. We probably need to do that, at least until we reach middle age. But then we need to allow what we’ve created to be uncreated. Maybe I was a great basketball player, but that’s gone now. Or maybe I was good-looking, but that’s gone now.  

When we can say “yes” to that uncreation and still be happy, we’ve done our work. My True Self is in God and not in what I’ve created. My self-created self gave me a nice trail to walk on, and something to do each day, but it isn’t really me. It might be my career or my vocation; yet as good as it is, it isn’t my True Self.  

In the metaphor of life as a journey, I think it’s finally about coming back home to where we started. As I approach death, I’m thinking about that a lot, because I think the best way to describe what’s coming next is not “I’m dying,” but “I’m finally going home.” I don’t know what it’s like yet, but in my older age I can really trust that it is home. I don’t know where that trust comes from or even what home is like, but I know I’m not going to someplace new. I’m going to all the places I’ve known deeply. They’re pointing me to the big deep, the Big Real. I do think homecoming is what it’s all about. [1] 

Father Richard continues to reflect upon finding his home in God in this season of his life:  

Well first, I have to say, I don’t fully know how to live there. I’m used to living for 80 years out of building an education, a persona, a reputation, a career. When we’ve worked at those things for so long, on a very real level we don’t know how to live without them. But thank God, they’re taken away from us. God slows us down, I think necessarily, or we won’t fall into the True Self.  

My understanding of the second half of life is mostly homesickness for the True Self. I want to learn to be who God really created me to be. And I think all God wants me to be is who I really am. [2]  

As shared in the May 6, 2024 Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org) [1] Adapted from Mike Petrow, Paul Swanson, and Richard Rohr, “Tips for the Road,” Everything Belongs, season introduction, ep. 5 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2023), podcast. Available as MP3 audio and PDF transcript.  [2] Adapted from Mike Petrow, Paul Swanson, and Richard Rohr, “The Two Halves of Life with Brené Brown,” Everything Belongs, season 1, ep. 1 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2024), podcast. Available as MP3 audio and PDF transcript.

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