Buechner: Anger

Buechner: Anger

“Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. “  Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

 I have eaten at this banquet. I can be energized by the delicious food until I finally realize  that if I stay with the energy of anger, it is destroying, devouring me, literally eating me alive, turning me into a bitter, negative skeleton of a  person. The situation, the person that has brought on this situation is still hurting me.

Anger also blocks us from the God of our understanding as our world centers around us and how we have been harmed. There is not room for God at this table.  We think God let this happen. God did not come and protect us. We lose our connection. The person or situation has now become our higher power as we start to plan revenge or just bask in the harm done to us.  We become the victim rather than the heroine.

We all know the answer to anger.  Anger is like putting our hand on a  red hot burner on the stove. It is a sign we need to stop and pay attention to something in our life.  Anger produces a huge amount of energy in our minds and bodies. The answer is transforming that energy into something that is helpful rather than hurtful to us and  others. We look for God in the situation. What can we learn about why this was so harmful and hurt so deeply? We pray for the person who has harmed us as we also pray for ourselves for healing.

We come to realize that our God also was wounded and knows so well what we are going through.  We pray to become a wounded healer.  We reach out of ourselves with our presence  and our prayers  to and for others who also have been wounded. We pray we can forgive ourselves when we have been the cause of anger and pray to forgive the one who has harmed us.

 Two words are the prescription for this illness, prayer and forgiveness. These wounds are only healed when we make an appointment to visit with the great physician.

Joanna     joannaseibert.com

Jean Shinoda Bolen: Soul Work

Jean Shinoda Bolen: Soul work

 “You have the need and the right to spend part of your life caring for your soul. It is not easy. You have to resist the demands of the work-oriented, often defensive, element in your psyche that measures life only in terms of output - how much you produce - not in terms of the quality of your life experiences. To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution.” Jean Shinoda Bolen

We can learn so much about ourselves and our souls from Jean Shinoda Bolen. Her book, Goddess in Every Woman teaches us about the Artemis, the Athena, the Hestia, the Hera, the Demeter, the Persephone, the Aphrodite in our own psyches and how each positively relates to and cares for our soul and at times negatively can be harmful to our soul.  

Bolen’s writings bring to us with so much wisdom for this journey. She empowers us during difficult situations to stay the heroine, knowing and believing that answers will come and that things will change instead of our regressing into the victim where all our energy sees the situation as caused by others. When we become the victim, our soul cannot breathe.

I love the story of Psyche’s journey to reunite with her husband, Eros, the masculine part of her personality. One of her difficult tasks is to sort a large number of different seeds.  The sorting is done by an out of the box, unusual group of insects or ants that appear. These ants may represent our intuitive function, something beyond cognitive ability that is out of the box inside of us. In confusing situations, this natural intuition will come if we can stay grounded as the heroine.

Other tasks for women to connect to their masculine involve allowing the feminine to gain power but remaining compassionate, learning to see the big picture, developing the ability to say no. These stories of difficult situations where we have the opportunity to learn about ourselves are some of the many ways we take care of our soul and let it take deep breaths and wake up from a deep sleep. This is soul work.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

May, Burton: Willfulness

May, Burton: Willfulness

“Willfulness must give way to willingness and surrender. Mastery must yield to mystery.”  Gerald May

Guest Writer, Larry Burton

These words from psychiatrist and spiritual director Gerald May are perhaps the most important and the most difficult of any I know.  Folks who come for spiritual direction often think it is a way to “master” spiritual practice, or to “do things right.”  But a life in the Spirit cannot be mastered.  It can only be accepted.  I write this not out of my own mastery, because as much as I would still like to get this thing “right,” I haven’t.  What I have learned, and what I seek to share, is the process of trusting surrender.  Many, if not most, of us have equated faith with right belief.  It is not easy for us to make the journey to the roots of the word faith, but when we do we find that being faithful is about surrender and willingness.

Care must be taken, however.  One of my friends who is seeking a deeper spiritual experience told me recently, “I dedicated my life to Christ as a missionary when I was eight years old.  I believed every word the preacher said.  In high school, I started questioning, and by the time I had gotten to college my father had kicked me out of the house because I didn’t believe anymore.” 

My friend had surrendered himself to a set of propositions that must be strictly mastered in order to go to heaven.  When that failed, he was angry and walked away from it all.

Surrender and willingness is a discerning humility.  That is, it does not deny curiosity and inquiry, but at the same time it accepts the mystery and just as importantly, the love of God.  My friend has no interest in regaining his old beliefs.  What he seeks is a sense of connectedness to a Higher Power.  Even though I wish this journey would lead him into Christian community, that isn’t in my power.  Even a spiritual director gets to learn and relearn willingness and surrender.

Larry Burton

Joanna  joannaseibert.com