Fifth Pathway - Persistently Looking Inward - Part III

Fifth Pathway – Persistently Looking Inward – Part III

Your honesty and humility generate an open mind which equates with a blank canvass upon which God can paint a new story for your life.  A genuinely open mind affords an opportunity to reconsider old and erroneous assumptions.  Perhaps, your time in the intuitive wilderness will resemble a Damascus Road experience.  Like Paul, you may have held unrelenting conviction that you were doing the will of God as you misguidedly persecuted people of good faith.  Alone without any distractions and interruptions, you see clearly that your self-righteous actions conflict with God’s love, grace and mercy.  You discard your previous concept of God.  You exchange your idolatrous paradigm for a relationship with a holy personality.  This new insight upon God produces even greater insight into your unique identity.  If you are willing to let go of old ideas and misconceptions, you will be born again.  You will discover your exact mission and purpose.  God needs the solitude of the intuitive wilderness to deposit this revelation within you.  Resist the arrogance and fear of my driving lessons.  Be teachable and let God assist you in editing the script of your life in accordance with His divinely designed journey for your life.

Alan Alda completes his powerful quote with an equally formidable promise.  “What you'll discover will be wonderful: yourself.”  God gives life to each of us as a unique gift.  We are equally unique as recipients of this incomparable and incalculable gift.  What a waste of life when we spend it trying to be someone whom we are not.  It is also regrettable when we squander time, talent and other resources preoccupying ourselves in activities that conflict with our mission and purpose.  To avoid these pitfalls in life, we must know who we are.  The intuitive wilderness graces us with a clear and unequivocal picture of who we are as children of God.  In adherence to cultural norms within faith communities, we indirectly conspire to deprive ourselves of God’s gift of a unique existence.  Carl Jung’s epoch-making book, The Undiscovered Self, posits a unique character created by God exists within each person.  Discovery of our inimitable and authentic self occurs when we differentiate from parents, siblings, extended relatives, neighbors, friends and coworkers.  We find ourselves when we no longer seek external validation.  In a sense, who we really are remains veiled from us until we embark upon the inward journey.  Until we begin that process, we live as public personae projecting an image and veneer to others.  We linger in aimlessness about mission and purpose in life.  We live on autopilot as we think, feel, act and react to the unconscious messages that people in our formative communities deposited within us.  Our genuine talents, abilities, interests and endowments are held within a vault of conformity and monotony.  When God graciously leads us to the intuitive wilderness, He blesses us with the incredible and inexpressible gift of discerning who we are! 

The recovery community offers practical means of self-discernment.  They prioritize the necessary of completing an inventory of one’s self.  Modelled after standard business operations, a person looks inwardly to determine assets and liabilities.  Any business that fails to examine periodically its credits and debits risks bankruptcy.  Does spending exceed receipt of revenues?  If yes, what accounts for their imbalance?  What corrections are necessary?  Likewise, a person evaluates his or her attributes to see if weaknesses outnumber strengths?  Are there unhealthy patterns?  What are their origins?  Why do they continue?  Can a person eliminate character defects?  Can he or she strengthen assets?  As an individual engages this arduous process of looking intently within himself or herself, he or she finds the contours of his or her authentic and unique character. 

A personal inventory is a treasure hunt.  It is not merely a matter of internal housecleaning.  That imagery connotes the weekly task of vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, washing and polishing.  It ends with discarding trash, dust and dirt.  Looking intently inward exposes past trauma.  Assuredly, you need to resolve the lingering effects of childhood and formative pain; otherwise it unconsciously dictates your thinking, feeling and choices.  I recall a fellow graduate student whose father left her family when she was sixteen years old.  A self-absorbed adolescent at the time, she was unable to separate her father’s love and consideration for her from the dissolution of his relationship with his wife, her mother.  This former classmate personalized her father’s departure.  She concluded he abandoned her.  Regrettably, she failed to analyze the facts and feelings of her experience and pain.  As a physical adult, she remains an emotionally immature and underdeveloped adolescent who believes the world owes her special allowances.  She has been unable to establish an emotionally healthy relationship with either of her parents.  More regrettably, she has been equally incapable of remaining in any relationships beyond two or three years.  When circumstantially forced to examine herself and make changes to improve any relationship, she bolts and begins another one.  Her incapacities have left emotional damage and relational wreckage in five failed marriages.  Had this woman looked further into her pain and sought holistic healing, she would have found internal treasures to assist her in acquiring self-love, self-acceptance and the ability to love someone else.  She would have found riches in the rubble.  Her most painful experience held underneath the surface the inner treasure to heal from her pain and progress toward a life filled with love, health, wealth and perfect self-expression.  This woman lamentably made fear larger than life and recoiled from searching within herself.

Beyond talents and gifts that yield financial and material acquisition, this inventory discloses latent spiritual attributes.  A personal inventory reveals characteristics that enables a person to give and receive eternal and enduring riches of life: love, truth, justice, mercy and peace.  This process of self-evaluation unearths your mission and purpose.  There are tasks God assigns to you that you and you alone must accomplish.  No one else can fulfill your unique assignment.  In contrast with the negative messages you heard in your formative years, you have divinely given gifts within you.  A component of knowing who you are and achieving unconditional self-acceptance is recognizing these gifts.  They reflect your incalculable and inherent worth as a child of God and member of the human family.  If you embrace the painstaking process of looking into the mirror, you find this wonderful person.  Once you accept yourself and steadily begin to extricate yourself from the thoughts and assessments of other people who wrongly assumed the right to tell you who you are; you increasingly enjoy your unique life.  Persistently looking inward is a pathway to healing because it reliably reveals your character instead of focusing upon your childhood trauma.

An inventory seeks balance in accounting.  Readily, we glance at positive attributes and assets.  We, however, must grapple with liabilities.  Self-righteousness cloaks defects of character that impede spiritual progress and personal development.  Recall the elder brother in the story of the prodigal son.  He stays home and seethes silently with righteous indignation and resentment as he detests his father’s indifference to his hard work, duty, obedience and religiosity.  The elder brother expresses contempt for his father and younger brother.  Their father loves both sons equally and unconditionally.  Upon the return of his wayward younger son, the father joyously and spontaneously holds a feast to express his heart’s oceanic gratitude.  He celebrates his son’s resurrection from spiritual death.  In stark contrast, the elder brother derides his father for rewarding a son who squandered the family wealth with “prostitutes and riotous living.”  The specificity of the older brother’s condemnation possibly hints toward hidden sinful desires that he suppresses with religion and self-righteousness.  He remained on the family farm and did not enjoy any of the excesses of which he accuses his younger brother.  The elder brother describes himself as a slave whom the father did not deem worthy of a delicious meal of curry goat yet alone filet mignon or veal.  We suppose the elder brother held bitter contempt in his heart for his father and brother.  The elder brother symbolizes the danger of ignoring liabilities of character.  To respect his father and extend mercy and forgiveness to his younger brother, the elder brother would need to recognize and resolve any prodigality that lingers within his mind, heart and soul.

Fifth Pathway - Persistently Looking Inward - Part IV

Fifth Pathway – Persistently Looking Inward – Part IV

Sin, crime, mistakes and other patterns of behavior that undermine personality development emerge from hard wiring in a person’s character.  Untreated alcoholism and drug addiction inevitably result in additional misdemeanors and felonies including theft, armed robbery, sexual assault, vandalism and other violations of law.  Within marriages and families, infidelity, deceit, poverty, unemployment, eviction and violence substantially damage relationships.  Empty refrigerators and cupboards are the clearest indication that alcoholism and addiction consume the family’s food budget.   Also, utility termination notices, lack of gasoline in the car, tuition arrears and failure to remit payment of other expenses are further evidence of internal deterioration.  An inventory excavates these defects of character.  Once exposed to the disinfectant of sunlight and spirituality, these traits become potential fuel for transformation.  Jung describes this dimension of human character as the “Shadow,” a bleak and hidden space in the mind and heart where dark traits lurk.  Childhood coping mechanisms became toxic and cynical tools.  Possibly, you perfected lying as a means of manipulation to gain the things you desired.  Cultivating a likability persona becomes a way of tricking people into liking you and granting your wishes though you may not feel favorable toward them.  As a person willingly embraces his or her full character, he or she neutralizes weaknesses and eliminate liabilities. In some instances, you will be able to convert previous ineffective and erroneous behavior into a new way of living.  Persistently looking inward is a pathway of healing that encourages and empowers you to clean house continually.  As you remove bad habits, you develop better ones that catapult you into the life you wholeheartedly desire.

Individuation is the formal term in analytical psychology that Carl Jung ascribes to the process of progressing irreversibly into adulthood.  Beyond physical growth and changes, a person distinctly separates his or her personality from parents and anyone else who contributed significantly to character formation during early childhood.  Practically, a person learns to think and live independently.  The need for external validation lessens considerably.  In certain instances, it necessarily disappears.  Fundamental decisions pertaining to love, work, sexuality, bodily autonomy, vocation, relationships and use of resources are made internally.  Intuition, the divine voice which lives and speaks genuinely and reliably within everyone, guides decision-making.  Mature adults do not require parental affirmation or other forms of external approval.  A person learns to trust himself or herself within an interdependent relationship with God.  Achieving individuation is a process of independent thinking.  A person learns to listen to his or heart and aligns motives with God’s divine design.  It empowers a person to utilize divine gifts to worship God in service of humankind.  It is a lifelong process of learning more about a person’s unique “Self” as a child of God and member of the human family.  This inward journey seeks synchronicity of mission, purpose and talent.  Ambition seeks a combination of God’s will and a useful desire to live purposefully with humility.  Whatever practical form dreams and goals assume is satisfactory; external trappings lose their importance.  The need for titles preceding your name, letters following your name, designer clothing, luxury vehicles, residing in a sought-after zip code or being on a popular social registry dissipates.  A person ceases to look outside of himself or herself for something that he or she can only find within his or her character.  As a person willingly embraces the challenges of achieving individuation, he or she pursues alignment with God’s will thereby enabling his or her soul to sing openly and freely to the glory of God. 

Individuation is the ultimate liberation from bondage to self and others.  “Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.”  George Gurdjieff’s provocative quote argues that freedom begins internally.  Any person who does not possess a free open mind wherein he or she thinks independently will be a slave to someone else.  Many people do not learn to think for themselves.  They are whomever their spouses, children, parents, siblings, extended relatives, friends and society tells them they are.  Gurdjieff insists self-knowledge is foundational to personal identity and independence.  Unless a person embarks upon the inward journey of self-discovery, he or she cannot function as an autonomous being.  To be free, a person must possess minute knowledge of his or her character.  Otherwise, self-governance is not possible.  Without that crucial attribute, a person cannot obtain dreams and goals.  Lack of self-knowledge means a person is unable to define any ambitions.  It further means that he or she does not have any discipline, focus or other attributes to achieve or succeed.  Anyone who cannot discipline himself or herself is incapable of leading other people.  Such a person allows other people to lead him or her.  In the process of differentiating from the people who initially fostered his or her identity, a person excavates his or her authentically divine and unique personality.  The need for external validation disappears.  Self-acceptance and self-expression, the aims of spirituality, emerge as individuals embrace the necessity of painstakingly toiling in the rock quarry of self-awareness and development. 

Persistently looking inward becomes a daily spiritual discipline of self-reflection.  Combine the vocations of geologists, archeologists, anthropologists and historians.  The first group of teachers and scholars study the Earth’s formation particularly rocks ridges in terrain which indicate dating and developmental processes.  Applied spiritually, you examine hardened contours of your character to understand origins and growth of your personality.  Your habits and coping mechanisms signify certain defining and influential experiences from your formative years.  Your initial reactions became permanent; they reveal how you have chosen to relate to people and respond to similar situations.  Analyze a solid habit the way that a geologist would.  When did this habit begin?  What is the primary cause?  Consider the Grand Canyon in Arizona or the Waimea Canyon on the island of Kauai in Hawaii.  Those rock formations equate with a candy store for a geologist.  There are similar fossilized traits in our character.  With liabilities, it is necessary to take them into the laboratory of self-analysis to determine how they corrode the positive aspects of character.  I suspect that negative emotions such as guilt, fear, regret, resentment and anger emerge from a definite past experience.  Perhaps, your family ganged-up on you and held a group session in which you were the butt of as many jokes as attendees told at your expense.  Chances are laughter in a public setting makes you fearful of reliving that humiliation.  Conceivably, you forego family gatherings lest you become the butt of jokes yet again.  Even more hurtful, parental betrayal and abandonment solidifies as an estimate of a person’s inherent worth.  The singer, actress and activist, Eartha Kitt, experienced that horror.  For many years, her parental abandonment defined her.  She accepted love and attention from anyone as it helped to fill the huge internal vacuum.  Over the course of her performance career, she cried an ocean of tears in response to an audience’s nightly applause.  In time, as healing unfolded in her life, she realized that her parents’ action did not define her worth.  In persistently looking inward, Kitt separated her intrinsic worth and unique character from her parents.  In so doing, she took a sledgehammer and smashed the rocks of self-contempt and masochistic suffering.  As she healed, she demolished detrimental patterns of behavior in which she allowed people to manipulate her by simply complimenting her.  As Kitt looked deeply within the mirror of her soul, she studies the rock-like formations in her character.  She discovered ways to transform these patterns into growth rather than allow them to remain as monuments of pain and hurt.

Fifth Pathway - Persistently Looking Inward - Part V

Fifth Pathway – Persistently Looking Inward – Part V

Archeologists look for artifacts to deduce how previous civilizations lived.  Depending upon their discoveries, these social scientists can extrapolate our ancestors code of conduct, religions, social values, means of trade, languages, literature and societal structure.  In utilizing this pathway of healing, a person employs an archeologist’s tools.  Look for the relational artifacts embedded within your personality.  What sayings, values, principles, prejudices or other concepts did you uncritically accept from your parents and grandparents?  Chances are these ideas solidified within your thinking, feelings and behavior. In order to differentiate from them and accept yourself as a unique individual, you examine these artifacts from your formative relationships and years.  Ask similar questions of your relationships with siblings, aunts, uncles and close cousins.  Do you continue to hold beliefs, assumptions and principles borne of these significant relationships that are incongruent with your character?  Interestingly, I met people in college who held racial prejudices because their relatives imparted these ideas to them.  Upon reflection, my college contemporaries realized that they did not agree with these concepts.  They acquiesced them because people whom they loved held those false, misguided and uninformed notions.  As you analyze these relational artifacts, consider any lingering toxicity in your mindset.  How will you demolish hurtful and continually detrimental patterns of behavior that undermine your progression toward self-acceptance and self-expression?  As you read, consider pausing and listing in detail any artifacts from previous relationships that provide you with clues about the composition of your personality and belief system.  Do those relationships and the concepts that they conveyed to you retain relevance?

Anthropologists would advise you to delve more deeply into the foregoing relationships.  Examine the context of your formative years.  Who are the persons who contributed most significantly to your self-concept?  What did they believe?  In the larger periphery of your upbringing, what role did neighbors, teachers, friends and acquaintances play in your formation?  Did you go along to get along?  Did you inadvertently become a stereotype?  Did you listen to the music that everyone else enjoyed even if you liked other artists and genres?  Did you wear what everyone else wore because it was in style?  Did you believe what everyone else believed?  Did anyone question the pervading assumptions about politics, economics, religion and social relationships?  Can you find any points of departure between you and the chorus of persons who were on stage during the drama of your formative years?  Did you ever stop and ask, “Who am I?”  Were you aware of what you wanted most to do in life?  Did someone attempt to rebuff your dream and goals by impeding your progress?  Were jealousy, ignorance, limited experiences and provincialism prevalent in the lives of the people who lived in the shadows and on the sidelines of your early life?  How much of this negativity still dwells within your mind and heart?  Within your childhood and adolescence, do you recall distinguishing yourself from the people, context and convictions that fostered your personality?  Simply, an anthropologist would ask if you ever questioned anything you were taught within your home, family, church, school and local society to ascertain how these factors cultivated your beliefs and behavior before becoming an adult?

Historians begin where geologists, archeologists and anthropologists finish.  Evidence such as journals, diaries and letters comprise a corpse upon which you complete an autopsy.  The dead body is the persona you cultivated based upon other people’s impressions of you.  As you look through any documents, photos, mementos and memorabilia of your past, you will garner clues of how this inauthentic expression of yourself developed.  More significantly, however, this evidence yields clues about the seeds of the authentic you.  Looking persistently within is a pathway of healing because it allows you to search through the rubble of the past and find your diamonds hidden in the rough.  Your heartfelt dreams and goals forged in the anvils of childhood trauma symbolize who you are.  The painful experiences you survived may indicate a passion you have carried in your heart to assist others in similar situations.  Are their creative impulses and imaginative inspirations that have lain dormant in your consciousness and intentions?  Is there an imprisoned entrepreneur, composer, author, artist, linguist, business owner, musician, vocalist, athlete, teacher or inventor inside of you?  As you analyze your patterns of growth and development, you will find the most reliable answer to these questions.  Persevere in inward exploration and you discover the tools of self-mastery.  You learn to neutralize your weaknesses and liabilities which impede your forward progress.  You invest time, energy and resources in strengthening your asserts, talents and abilities.  Practically, you become even better at what you do best.  You acquire greater spiritual attributes especially the willingness to forgive anyone who harmed you.  In forgiving those persons who injured you, you liberate yourself from anger, fear, resentment and bitterness.  Freedom from that extreme toxicity creates passageways for your advancement.  With that dross burned from your character, you will create, imagine, inspire, motivate, encourage, empower, endure, produce, achieve, succeed and excel!  A whole new life awaits you when you unload the bags of cement you have been carrying for thousands of days.  New vistas of possibility for a life of joy, happiness and freedom filled with new experiences and mystery burst on the horizons of your mind and heart.  It begins with persistently looking inward.

Personal Pathways to Healing - Introduction

Personal Pathways to Healing - Introduction

Introduction – Seven Personal Pathways to Healing

Comprehensively embracing past pain, completely dissolving anger, genuinely extending forgiveness, painstakingly acquiring faith, persistently looking inwardly, humbly receiving God’s peace and unconditionally accepting your self are seven effective pathways to personal healing and growth.

The “inward journey” includes as many pathways as the billions of persons who embark upon it.   Previously, a pastor for fourteen years and a past resident in a psychoanalytic training program, I strive to be an authentic “wounded healer” who shares sincerely and simply my personal story of progressing toward inner healing and wholeness.  As I offer thoughts on these powerful dimensions of daily living, I hasten to state that I am not recommending any full proof formula.  I detest the increasing commercialization of religion and spirituality in ecclesiastical and secular spheres.  Many pastors utilize “Christian” television to hock “the” biblical formula for living an abundant life which includes wealth, prosperity and good physical health.  For nearly fifty years, this “Gospel of Wealth and Health” hijacked American preaching as income inequality grew exponentially between rich and poor people.  Purveyors of unscientific and irresponsible diets published countless bestselling books as citizens in the United States became hopelessly obese.  Simultaneously, obesity became a primary contributing cause to heart disease, diabetes, organ failure, strokes and myriad types of cancer.  To resolve personal pain and enjoy your unique life, I suggest the foregoing seven pathways as effective, pragmatic and trustworthy methods. 

The inward journey to healing is not a linear progression.  Life’s daily complexities and mysteries contain too many unforeseen plot twists.  Sudden surprises like a spontaneous tornado erupt and destroy formulas.  Natural disasters are good symbols for unfortunate personal experiences and their contemporaneous pain.  Divorce, termination and bereavement parallel living through the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, a Japanese tsunami or Hurricane Katrina.  Responding to any catastrophe whether human, environmental or circumstantial necessitates faith, reason and supportive relationships.  Instead of traveling a direct route on an interstate highway, most people who commence the inward journey steadfastly zigzag between healing pathways.

Parenthetically, the seven strategies which I recommend hardly comprise an exhaustive list.  I encourage you to formulate techniques that work specifically and effectively for you.  Application of spiritual disciplines is as varied as our distinctive personalities.  One size does not fit all persons.  “The right way” to practice these techniques does not exist.  Admittedly, some pathways are more expeditious than others but the dividends of healing, peace and wholeness manifest for persons who commit faithfully to an inward journey.

First Personal Pathway to Healing - Comprehensively Embracing Past Pain

First Pathway to Healing - Comprehensively Embracing Past Pain

Comprehensively embracing past pain is the first pathway.  No one likes being in pain.  Most people try every possible means to avoid feeling any type of pain whether physical, mental, emotional, psychological or relational.  The multinational and multitrillion dollar pharmaceutical industry rushes to the rescue with myriad narcotics to alleviate pain and alter a person’s moods.  The entertainment industry of reality television, blockbuster movies, live concerts and social media provide daily reprieves from life’s difficulties.  Not surprisingly, celebrity comedians are household names as countless citizens use laughter to drown out the noise of their fears.  Collegiate and professional athletics have become different venues of entertainment as sports channels proliferate.  Still, drugs, sports and escapist amusements cannot vanquish deeply unconscious and longstanding pain.  To resolve substantially hurtful experiences, begin with a hard and unvarnished acceptance of them.

Current hip-hop culture utilizes two expressions that help when using this first pathway.  “Keep it one hundred.”  “Facts, facts.”  These contemporary sayings exhort listeners to resist the temptation to ignore or massage any hard details of any hurtful experience.  Decades ago, on the very popular television detective series, Dragnet, Sergeant Joe Friday weekly interrupted witnesses whom he interviewed with the request that they limit their responses to “just the facts.”  Interestingly, examining the origins and causes of painful experiences often reveals healing methods.  We rarely wish to reflect upon acts of betrayal, deceit, infidelity or physical injury by persons whom we trust.  Anger seductively feels empowering.  As bitterness and resentment naturally emerge, these formidable emotions erode any possibility of learning from hurtful and disappointing experiences.  However, accepting unvarnished facts opens doors to new living.

Honestly embracing past pain negates exaggerations and excuses.  Minimizing deep emotional wounds and glossing over bodily scars seem appropriate ways to heal.  Yet, those strategies do not provide any lasting resolution.  Assuming a victim’s complex eventuates in a debilitating depression yielding powerlessness, hopelessness and even helplessness.  Rationalizing pain might result in a crippling addiction or some other escapist behavior.  Embellishing your past with fictional polishes creates either good storytellers or pathological liars.  Enfolding factual pain into your life’s narrative becomes “the touchstone of all spiritual progress” and “the admission price to a new life.” 

Accepting your pain offers many lessons for spiritual development and personal growth.  A determination not to repeat the same mistake is the simplest one.  Additional lessons may include cultivating better personal and professional relationships in response to repeated terminations.  The need of by-pass heart surgery inevitably forces a person to practice better health and wellness.  Divorce reasonably leads to an examination of a person’s ability to commit to a covenant.  Multiple instances of unrequited love demand an intrapersonal evaluation of a regrettable pattern of choosing persons incapable of reciprocating love.  Debriefing defeat in a political election or some other failure discloses hapless mistakes and myopic approaches.  As “anger turns off the light in the mind,” it eliminates any potential lessons.  When a person fully embraces pain, he or she reaps a bountiful harvest from introspection and retrospection.

First Personal Pathway to Healing - Comprehensively Embracing Past Pain - Part II

First Pathway to Healing - Comprehensively Embracing Past Pain – Part II

Because embracing pain feels like a weak response, most people refuse this first pathway of healing.  We despise weakness in people because we so greatly detest it within ourselves.  Healing ironically ensues if a person willingly and open-mindedly retrieves divine power and personal insight embedded within any catastrophe.  Whereas anger initially feels empowering, it is fundamentally toxic.  As resentment significantly increases, your anger turns inwardly.  In addition to poisoning your heart and soul, anger adversely effects your body.  It seems reasonable that bitterness and stress could contribute to cancer and other debilitating diseases.  Nevertheless, embracing pain is preferable to heartache and emotional paralysis.  Mystically and providentially, Almighty God transforms disappointment and betrayal into cathartic means of change.  Reminiscent of a refiner’s fire, these experiences burn dross and other sediments out of our character.  Elimination of latent character defects is critical for inner healing and wholeness.  Otherwise, we repeat choices and behavior that undermine our good and growth.  Welcoming opportunities for growth embedded in daily problems is the more preferable pathway to healing.

Utilizing pain is a strange and mysterious method to acquire spiritual attributes.  St. Thomas Aquinas simply defined humility as the truth.  In accepting undistorted facts of any difficult period, a person obtains greater humility which enables him or her to empathize with fellow sufferers.  Open-mindedness additionally is an invaluable spiritual quality.  Anyone recovering from past pain can glean wisdom and support from fellow sufferers of different ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds.  Willingness perfectly complements humility and open-mindedness as a person intentionally embraces painful experiences and develops empathy for all members in the human family.  Reading books and taking academic courses do not impart this knowledge.  This knowledge from the “anvils of experience” emerges within “the school of hard knocks.” As people internalizes these lessons, they relate more harmoniously with spouses, children, coworkers and friends. 

Humility offers yet another spiritual asset.  It fosters genuine reliance upon Almighty God when crises and circumstances overwhelm inner resources.  Even the toughest person will falter underneath sustained challenges.  Enduring encouragement and empowerment from longstanding friends will proves insufficient at times.  There are obstacles and afflictions which human power cannot resolve.  At such junctures in life, it is imperative to seek divine assistance.  God uses human weakness to demonstrate His power.  When Paul asks the Lord to remove a thorn in his flesh, the Lord responds, “My grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in your weakness.”  What an amazing irony!  Admission of human frailty enables a person to utilize God’s power to triumph over adversities.  Embracing incapacities and inadequacies empowers a person with divine power.  Access to God’s power is available to individuals who realize God’s sovereign willingness and ability to help them. Practically speaking, humility means relying genuinely upon God in contrast to rugged individualism.

Second Personal Pathway to Healing - Completely Dissolving Anger

Second Pathway – Completely Dissolving Anger

Anger easily seduces persons as it is more empowering than being a victim of harrowing circumstances.  The illusion of control always seems preferable to waiting patiently upon Almighty God.  Everyone seeks to determine his or her own destiny.  Anger consequentially follows as an understandable reaction to frustration and failure.  It boils in a person’s consciousness like hot lava, destroying anything in their path.  Fearing failure to obtain something he greatly desires or losing something he significantly values; anger ultimately undermines a person as it leads to regrettable decisions.  Further, anger robs people who feel it of peace, joy, happiness and other positive emotions.  Interestingly, people surrender joy in daily living when they stew in anger in response to disappointments and defeats.  Nursing anger rarely creates healing.

One of anger’s seductive qualities is its corollary perceptions.  “I will not be a victim!  I am not a victim!”  Additionally, “I will prevail over an y adversity.  You watch and see that I will be victorious.” Those fierce and penetrating emotions often mutate into more resentment and cynicism.  Internalizing these emotions eventuates possibly in clinical depression.  Externally, these formidable feelings may cause detrimental acts of rage and passion.  In extreme instances, manslaughter and murder may result.  These complicated mental and emotional phenomena feasibly explain two unresolved murders in Brentwood, California in June 1994.  These tsunami-like expressions of anger always feel preferable to humility; and the erroneous idea that this spiritual quality equates with self-effacement.  Despite countless historical and contemporary examples of anger’s detrimental consequences, most people prefer its narcotic inflation.  Not surprisingly, this emotional drunkenness fuels self-aggrandizing behavior. 

Anger is not a pathway to healing.  It often creates irreversible relational harm.  It mercilessly rages like a forest fire engulfing anything in its unforgiving path.  Like such a blazing inferno, anger never forgives.  It typically impedes a person’s ability to practice restraint of pen and tongue.  However, it does not feel as empowering when anger creates immeasurable guilt and regret following loss of self-control.  Sometimes, fury incapacitates yielding emotional and existential paralysis.  Seeing red blinds a person to the intricate colors of his or her life’s mosaic.  However invigorating anger may feel, harboring it resembles sinking in quicksand.

It is most ironic to think of vulnerability as a position of strength.  In “feeling the feelings (raw, brutal and hard),” a person garners grace and inner resilience.  The lessons, endurance and wisdom rooted within personal pain enhance character.  Further, it is odd to think that a person could win a battle or a war by simply surrendering.  A friend recently shared that he spontaneously ended his divorce conflicts by saying in a legal hearing without advance consultation with his attorney, “That’s it.  We need to end all of this.  Give her what she wants.”  In his words, “I surrendered to win.”  “My former wife’s mouth dropped wide open.  In time, “I got all of my money back.”  “Mostly, I enjoy a better relationship with my children than I would; had I continued to fight their mother.  The funny thing is that I actually have a better relationship with her too.”