Developing a Better You

Tag: spiritual growth (Page 2 of 4)

3 Metaphors for Healthy Spirituality (Part 3): The Cosmic Egg

The best egg I’ve ever had is a cosmic one.

In part one of this series, I laid the foundation. In part two, I told a story of my spiritual struggles. In this post, I’ll share the first of three metaphors that helped me through those difficult years – the Cosmic Egg. I learned about the Egg from author and teacher Richard Rohr, who adopted it from The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce.

Picture healthy spirituality as an egg. The center yolk is My Story. The white surrounding the yolk is Our Story. The shell containing the whole is The Story. The three Stories form a collective whole, one nested inside the other like the parts of an egg.

The yolk of My Story

Most of us begin life almost exclusively focused on the yolk of My Story – my needs, my desires, my dreams, my ego, my hurts, my personality, my agenda, my problems, my experiences. The lens through which we view life is largely self-referential. Our first thought about most things is, “How does this affect me?” This is a normal and necessary starting point for virtually all of us.

The egg whites of Our Story

As we hopefully mature, we move into the egg whites of Our Story. In this stage, we begin to identify more strongly with our place inside of groups. Our family, our state, our country, our race, our religion, our gender, our team, our occupation. We learn to better interact with others, to compromise, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. We experience both the benefits and the difficulties of belonging to a larger unit. In addition to our My Story view, we now see ourselves and the world through the lens of our associations.

The shell of The Story

If we continue our growth journey, we finally move into the shell of The Story. Containing both My Story and Our Story, The Story is where we move beyond the biases and limitations of our identity groups. We recognize not only our personal shortcomings in My Story, but also the failings of Our Story, realizing at last the essence of The Story – that all of humanity and creation is an interconnected whole, held together by something bigger than us all. What that something is depends on what you believe. For me, it’s God. The Story is the realm of transcendent meaning where we find the highest virtues to which we aspire – unconditional love, real forgiveness, deep humility, true self-acceptance, authentic goodness, unshakeable peace. These lead us to a total, loving inclusion of everyone and everything, including ourselves.

A Unified Whole

Each of the three Stories is good and necessary, one building on the next. The skills acquired and lessons learned in the smaller stages prepare us for the larger ones. Each must be experienced. There is no “spiritual bypassing.” And once The Story is encountered, the goal is not to eliminate My Story or Our Story but to hold them as a unified whole. Like three notes sounding in harmony, they collectively bring beauty and color to our life’s music. That is a healthy spirituality.

Even if we’ve done the hard work necessary to reach The Story, there is no static state where we can declare, “I’ve arrived.” We slide in and out of that sense of wholeness all the time. But with experience, we can more quickly recognize when we’ve slipped into too much My Story thinking, which leads to narcissism, or too much Our Story thinking, which leads to being judgmental and exclusionary. It becomes easier to once again focus on The Story and work our way back to a unified whole.

How The Cosmic Egg helped me

The Cosmic Egg metaphor clarified my spiritual struggles and helped me understand why I’d grown increasingly dissatisfied with some of mainline Christianity’s teachings. While Our Story gives much needed context to My Story and a wonderful sense of belonging, it also opens the door to the great danger of thinking that OUR Story is THE Story. This is the trap I’d fallen into – believing that only the Our Story of Christianity provided the true path to The Story.

I had a desperate need for a stranglehold on the truth. To be right. To have all the answers. Because if someone else’s spiritual Our Story was equally valid, then my Our Story must be wrong. It took me a long time to realize that my exaggerated Our Story view was blocking my full understanding of and appreciation for the beautiful inclusiveness of The Story. The God whom I now find at the heart of The Story is bigger, more amazing, and more loving than my previous worldview allowed me to imagine.

Eating The Cosmic Egg

Unfortunately, an overly inflated view of Our Story isn’t unique to me or to Christianity. We see this on full display in American politics and culture. White nationalism is a glaring example of an Our Story gone horribly wrong. The belief held by former president Trump and some of his most ardent supporters that the 2020 election was stolen from them, without evidence, is another example of an Our Story creating its own false reality. While those are recent examples, inflated Our Story problems can be found in virtually every political party, country, religion, and group.

The metaphor of the Cosmic Egg provides a wonderful path to healthy spirituality, but as the above examples show, the painful difficulty often comes in moving from one stage to the next. In my next post, I’ll share a second metaphor that helped me make those transitions – The Three Boxes.

So where are you in The Cosmic Egg? How’s your balance of My Story, Our Story, and The Story? What does your version of The Story look like? How do you live it out? Chew on these questions. Talk about them with people you trust. Have the courage to take an honest look in the mirror. If you do, you’ll find your way to a healthy spirituality, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

For a deeper look at the Cosmic Egg metaphor, I highly recommend Richard Rohr’s Cosmic Egg written meditations and podcast on Another Name for Everything.

3 Metaphors for Healthy Spirituality (Part 2): My Story

I’d like to tell you a story.

In my last post, I gave an introduction to this series, which will focus on three metaphors that I’ve found extremely helpful in my spiritual and personal growth. If you haven’t seen that post, it would help to do a quick read here.

These metaphors can be incredibly powerful tools for nearly everyone, regardless of where you’re at on the spiritual spectrum. I’ll share the first of those next week. For some necessary context, let me give you a bit of my spiritual history and recent struggles.

I was raised in a Christian home and grew up going to church. After a meaningful spiritual experience when I was ten years old, I began taking my personal relationship with God seriously. I attended a fairly relaxed Christian liberal arts college where I studied music performance, then spent twenty-six years as a full-time musical worship leader in various contemporary, evangelical churches. I stopped worship leading several years ago to pursue writing full time.

Over the course of the last seven years, I have gone through a significant and often difficult spiritual journey, during which I questioned many aspects of my faith. My belief in and relationship with God continued to grow during this time, but I began to struggle with a number of the teachings and positions of mainstream evangelical Christianity, including the lack of validity of other faiths, the existence of hell, and the role and interpretation of the Bible. This led me into many years of deep study, thought, and prayer, as well as endless hours of wrestling with these topics in the company of spiritual mentors and close friends.

At my current point in my ever evolving spiritual journey, I no longer call myself an evangelical Christian. This is partly due to the development of my beliefs, but also because that label has been widely adopted by people whose worldview is vastly different than my own. I would not say that I have left the Christian faith, but that I have built a worldview which, as author and teacher Richard Rohr says, “includes and transcends” my former belief system.

What does it mean to include and transcend? As I continue to grow spiritually, I retain some of the basic tenants of Christianity that still ring true for me. These include a belief in the existence of a loving God as the creative force behind the universe, the humanity and divinity of Jesus, and that the best use of my life is to know, love, and follow God. At the same time, I have let go of some tenants that I either no longer believe in or understand in a significantly different light. Some of those I listed above. I liken my transition to setting aside shoes that served me for a time but began to feel too small. I would now call myself a Christ-centered theist who seeks to know and follow Jesus. To me at least, that’s an important distinction.

Some of you who know me from my former church roles may feel confused or even shocked by this. I understand. It’s okay. This evolution in my beliefs is simply the continuation of my life-long spiritual growth arc, the result of many seasons of bare-knuckled soul searching. Though imperfectly, I have walked with God for the last forty-one years. I have no intention of giving up now. I am at peace with where I am at with God and where God is at with me.

The three metaphors I will share in the rest of this series were lifelines for me during that difficult period, when I felt adrift in a stormy spiritual sea. They were candles, lighting my path through a dark and often lonely wilderness of doubt and struggle. My wish and prayer is that these tools will be of value to you on your own journey, whether or not your story resembles mine. I hope you’ll join me next week with an open heart and an open mind as I share the metaphor of The Cosmic Egg. If you do, I sincerely believe you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

Drowning in the Sea of Bad News? Here’s a Lifeline

A global pandemic. Financial insecurity. Social isolation. A tattered economy. Racial injustice. Broken social systems. Loved ones suffering. And it’s only July. We still have six more months before 2020 releases us from its tumultuous grip, and – spoiler alert – 2021 is making no promises. It’s no wonder so many of us feel pummeled by the onslaught of stress and bad news, overwhelmed to the point of drowning.

I want to offer you a lifeline. A practice I discovered about a year ago has been an incredible gift, helping me to survive, and even thrive, in these trying times. It’s called benevolent detachment. This is about letting go. It involves caring and engaging with the suffering of the world to a certain point, then releasing that burden.

Benevolent detachment is NOT:

1. Ignoring other people’s pain

2. Closing yourself off emotionally

3. Being selfish or narcissistic 

Benevolent detachment IS:

1. Recognizing that you have mental and emotional limits 

2. Doing your part to alleviate suffering within those limits

3. Letting go of your worry about people and situations, trusting others and a higher power to do what you cannot

This practice allows me to care about and help others in a manageable, sustainable way. It helps me sleep at night. It helps me get other things done. It helps me still feel joy, even in difficult seasons.

I learned about benevolent detachment from author John Eldredge. He writes this:

Mature adults have learned how to create healthy distance between themselves and the thing they have become entangled with. Thus the word ‘detachment.’ It means getting untangled, stepping out of the quagmire; it means peeling apart the Velcro by which this person, relationship, crisis, or global issue has attached itself to you. Or you to it. Detachment means getting some healthy distance. Social media overloads our empathy. So I use the word ‘benevolent’ in referring to this necessary kind of detachment because we’re not talking about cynicism or resignation. Benevolent means kindness. It means something done in love. Jesus invites us into a way of living where we are genuinely comfortable turning things over to him.

John eldredge, Get Your Life Back – Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

You may be suspect of this approach, feeling it’s an abdication of our responsibility to help others. I assure you it is not. Each of us should do our part to alleviate pain in this world. But bearing one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2 in the Bible) does not mean being buried by them. Being demoralized is not a virtue. Neither is being traumatized, so affected by the world’s suffering that it hinders us from really living. From fulfilling our other responsibilities. From experiencing joy. Even Jesus did not heal everyone and often turned away from the needy, clamoring crowds to rest (Mark 1:29-39 in the Bible).

So how do you practice benevolent detachment? To avoid the danger of using this tool to ignore our shared responsibility to help others, first find and commit to doing your part to ease suffering. I wrote about how to do that here and here. Once that’s in place, here are a few simple steps to benevolent detachment:

  1. Close your eyes and take several deep breaths
  2. Ask yourself what specific person or situation is causing your worry or stress. Is it a sick friend? Your finances? Racial injustice? Your child? Contracting coronavirus? Your job?
  3. Visualize yourself holding the object of your anxiety in your hands, feel the weight of it
  4. Gently, lovingly, open your hands and let it go. Try picturing yourself setting it down, or dropping it, or placing it in the lap of your higher power.

Benevolent detachment is really simple in concept, but it’s a skill to be learned through repetition. The stress of the world latches on to us like Velcro and doesn’t release easily. If you’re intrigued by the possibilities, if you see in this a glimmer of hope for long-sought relief, I highly encourage you to check out some of these resources from John Eldredge. He approaches this practice from a Christian perspective, but people from all faiths or no faith can benefit from applying it in their own context:

FREE PHONE APP:  One Minute Pause (Ransomed Heart) – Accompanied by calming music and beautiful images, John guides you through benevolent detachment, allowing you to choose 1, 3, 5, or 10 minute exercises. There’s also an excerpt on benevolent detachment from his book Get Your Life Back. I’ve found this app very helpful when I’m struggling to apply this practice (available in the wherever you get apps).

PODCAST:  Benevolent Detachment (John Eldredge and Wild at Heart) – John and his wife Stasi discuss this practice in detail with practical examples of how to apply it to your life (available wherever you listen to podcasts).

BOOK:  Get Your Life Back – John lays out a number of clear, manageable spiritual practices to deal with the stress of life, including benevolent detachment (available wherever you buy books).

So how about you? Could you use some relief? Are you struggling beneath emotional weight you were never meant to carry? Would you like some help setting that boulder down? Then explore benevolent detachment. It will help you care for yourself as you care for the world. And you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

WATCH ME INTERVIEW MY AUTHOR WIFE BELOW! TO BROWSE MY OTHER YOUTUBE VIDEOS, CLICK HERE.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Becoming Yourself

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑