The Catholic Midlife: Recent Episodes
Karen and Curtis Herbert
Join Curtis and Karen Herbert of The Catholic Midlife as they address the challenges and joys of midlife from a uniquely Catholic perspective. Grow deeper into this season of life with wisdom from theology, scripture, positive psychology and neuroscience, and proven coaching and leadership skills. Let’s spark a midlife renewal and create a firm foundation for the second half of life!
Paul used the word evangelium, translated as gospel, to talk about the good news of Jesus' resurrection. It's a word that the Romans were very familiar with. Paul, in fact, was using the word gospel to directly challenge their ideas about godhood, goodness, and joy. The letter to the Phillipians picks up this theme as Paul weaves a revelation and exhortation to hope, joy, and celebration. It's an exhortation that's connected to Isaiah. Karen leads this fascinating discussion.
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More reflections and encouragement as we continue with Isaiah chapters 40-55. These are where the suffering servant passages are found. These are part of a larger story in Isaiah. Read these chapters and let them wash over you. It's a great time before Advent to read the poetry of Isaiah and reflect on who God is, how he acts, and what He's doing in the world today. We highlight key themes that you can listen for as you let this scripture unfold and speak to you. Join us!
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We continue with Isaiah chapters 40-55. Read these chapters and let them wash over you. It's a great time before Advent to read the poetry of Isaiah and reflect on who God is, how he acts, and what He's doing in the world today. We highlight key themes that you can listen for as you let this scripture unfold and speak to you. Join us!
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Isaiah chapters 40-55 are powerful testaments to God's plans for His people. It's a great time before Advent to read the poetry of Isaiah and reflect on who God is, how he acts, and what He's doing in the world today. This poem opens, at chapter 40, with "Comfort, comfort my people…Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed… Here is a beautiful poem full of promises, remembrances, and expectations for a good future, written in the darkest of times for Israel, in the midst of its exile to Babylon, an oppression that they were never expected to leave. We can read these chapters and reflect on God's promises, who God says He is, and who you are. We encounter the creator operating at a cosmic scale that reaches down into the details of His creation with a message of hope and comfort unlike anything else in history. Join us!
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The Three Good Things exercise improves your optimism and outlook after only one week. An optimistic outlook helps you in all areas of life. The Three Good Things exercise takes a few minutes around the end of your day. Martin Seligmann developed this exercise and tested it with many people. We tell you what to do, how to do it, and common mistakes or misunderstandings that might get in your way. It's easy and useful! It's not a gratitude exercise but it will involve gratitude, which is timely as we start to think about the Thanksgiving holiday.
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Pope Leo's Dilexi Te calls for a renewed orientation to serve and assist the poor and address poverty in all its many faces and circumstances. The early Christians addressed the needs of the poor in dramatic ways as they transformed the Roman empire and the culture of the world. That could inspire us to think in new ways about shifting our own culture.
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Yes, more thought traps, please. Yes, we have lots more. Hooray. Listen and spot your favorite one to work on this week. These traps derail us or leave us spinning our wheels. We discuss and share examples of some of them, like Personalizing, Blaming, Unfair Comparisons, Regret Orientation, What IFs, Emotional Reasoning, Inability to Disconfirm, and Judgment Focus. Email us about YOUR "favorite" thought trap!
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Humans (like you for instance) have some habits of thinking that are traps. We all fall into them, repeatedly. You have to laugh! These traps can shut down our thinking before we realize it, leaving us stuck or making poor choices because the traps often work at an unconscious level. Asking great questions is the key to uncovering thought traps. We discuss and share examples of some of them, like Mind Reading, Fortune-Telling, Catastrophizing, Labeling, Discounting Positives, Negative Filtering, Overgeneralizing, All-or-Nothing Thinking, and the infamous Shoulds. Listen and decide which one is your favorite, so you can work on it this week. Haha, tell us which one your spouse or friend falls into the most. ;) This is a re-presentation of episode 74.
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What comes out of your mouth comes OUT OF your heart. It’s a window into your heart. And what you focus on & the way you interpret it powerfully conditions what goes INTO your heart. We talk about SHIFTING your focus to transform your heart for the better!
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Let’s chat a little bit about awareness. Try listening to yourself. We are necessarily using a lot of assumptions about what’s happening around us. The world is complex and we need to simplify it so we can act. That’s fine. Yet leaving our assumptions unchallenged creates blind spots. Like a map that’s not accurate, we can get lost in some areas of life. Karen and I chat about tips to create awareness and the kinds of questions you can ask.
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How do you show up in your own life? Are you consistently showing up at your best? With positivity, creativity, optimism, and ready to make decisions as needed? You might be showing up as “meh” more than you realize. How would showing up more powerfully impact your life, your impact on others, and your own experiences? This season of the podcast is about models that we like. Today we share an effective model for you to use.
Resources
Your seven levels of energy, see iPEC’s explanation. https://www.ipeccoaching.com/blog/7-levels-of-energy
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We continue to share how the energy you bring to your life makes a huge impact! This season of the podcast is about models that we like. Here, we are sharing about the iPEC Energy Level model. Today we are talking about what this positive energy might look like. We start to give you tips about how to shift to your positive energy so you can be more.
Resources
Your seven levels of energy, see iPEC’s explanation. https://www.ipeccoaching.com/blog/7-levels-of-energy
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The energy you bring to your life makes a huge impact! Your positive energy will drive your success in all areas of life. Negative energy is sometimes useful, yet it’s your positive energy that creates the impacts you want. Sometimes it’s good to hide “in the cave” with your negative energy, yet it’s getting out of the cave to interact with your situation that creates all the difference. We want you to be empowered to create the energy you need to THRIVE in life. We are sharing about the Energy Level model.
Resources:
Your seven levels of energy, see iPEC’s explanation.
Text us: The Empowered Catholic Podcast: 612-208-9150
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You have some signature strengths. These are virtues that you do particularly well. It might be perseverance, or kindness, hospitality, love of beauty, humor, or any of many other possibilities. Putting them to work for you with intentionality is an excellent way to excel, achieve, and to pursue happiness. (Happiness is a word we use to mean flourishing, or thriving). “Signature Strength” is a Martin Seligman term for key virtues that promote happiness. You can use them creatively to enhance your effectiveness, authenticity, happiness, and holiness.
Resources
Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment – January 5, 2004 - by Martin E. P. Seligman
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Happiness is a primary goal of every human. It is inseparable from the human person. God made us to be happy and pursuing it is an important part of His plan for us. It’s part of our human nature. Positive psychology is the study of what makes people authentically happy. What do happy people have in common, and what is it that they DO that helps them get happy and stay that way? In fact, one study even found a correlation between longevity and cheerfulness. One of the models for authentic happiness is Seligman’s PERMA model - listen to learn how you can use this model to understand more about how happiness is showing up in your life.
Resources
Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment – January 5, 2004 - by Martin E. P. Seligman
A Gentleman in Moscow – September 6, 2016 - by Amor Towles
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The working genius model created by Patrick Lencioni is so useful. A project starts with Wonder (seeing an opportunity) and ends with Tenacity (get it finished!). Patrick reports that there are four more steps between Wonder and Tenacity. You, your spouse, your kids, and your co-workers all have a couple of these steps that you are best at, and that you like to use. You also have a couple of these steps that you do not like and feel hard for you. Once you realize how your zone of genius is different from those around you, you can see the best way to interact with them. Your spouse has different genius zones than you do: once you realize what they are, you will nod your head and say, “That explains a lot!”
Resources
The working genius assessment: https://www.workinggenius.com/
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Learn about the FIVE CONFLICT STYLES and learn which one is your go-to style. Learn how different conflict styles—competition, accommodation, avoidance, compromise, and collaboration—play out in various scenarios. How can you navigate conflicts more thoughtfully and flexibly?
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There’s so much wisdom in Scriptures warning to “judge not.” So much! Why should we embrace this wisdom? And how? What’s the OPPOSITE of judgment? How about ACCEPTANCE. What could acceptance do for you that judgment cannot. Learn what judgment is COSTING you and what NON-judgment could do for you. And learn what we mean by “judgment.”
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Judge not lest ye be judged! It’s in the Sermon on the Mount. What would happen if we lived up to this standard? What would happen to us? To those close to us? To the world? Judgment closes doors and hearts. “Judge not” opens them. Here’s Jesus telling us not to judge others. How seriously will you take this? What’s YOUR “take” on JUDGE NOT?
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The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus literally tells us not to worry about what to eat, drink, or wear. He says that worrying is ineffective (Can any of you add a cubit to your height?) Is this idea of not worrying important to you? Should it be? Why does the book of Matthew spend valuable scriptural space on this idea? Is this just a tip? An important rule? Is it possible? And HOW do you “not worry” anyways? We have explanations and HOW-TOs. Enjoy. Don’t worry.
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Adults manage their emotions. It’s what we do, right? Sometimes we forget how important it is to create some positive emotions to help us do what we need to do! There are traps to avoid when regulating emotion, including dismissing it as being of small importance or letting it capture us, for instance by rumination. Our brains’ powerful negative bias will suck us down into negativity if we don’t resist it by cultivating optimism and more powerful ways of viewing our lives. Let’s go!
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Justice. It’s not what you think! Our habits of thinking about justice are not the habits of thinking about justice that are found in Scripture. Our modern minds view justice in narrow and legalistic ways, with a big focus on retribution or paying back. It’s not like that for the Jewish peoples in the times of Jesus that were familiar with Scripture. It’s more about bringing order and goodness, balance and truth, into a situation - like shalom. More broadly, the ancient mind associated justice with giving others what they were owed in light of your relationship with them, with generosity being a big part of that. Listen and recalibrate your ideas about justice and think about what you are aiming for when you seek justice or are asked to be more just.
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Resources
The Eight Doors of the Kingdom: Meditations on the Beatitudes by Jacques Philippe. 2018 Scepter.
The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing: A Theological Commentary June 2017 by Jonathan T. Pennington
The Beatitudes are fascinating. We pick up the first one, “Happy are those who are poor in spirit.” What’s going on here? If I am spiritually impoverished, is that a good thing? Yes. Surprising, right? Spiritual humility is important for RECEIVING from God. And what does trust have to do with it? It surprisingly came up as a related topic in our discussion. It’s a curious thing and a profound truth. Come join us!
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Resources
The Eight Doors of the Kingdom: Meditations on the Beatitudes by Jacques Philippe. 2018 Scepter.
The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing: A Theological Commentary June 2017 by Jonathan T. Pennington
It turns out that “perfection” is a terrible translation of Matthew 5:48. It’s found in the Sermon on the Mount: Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. It’s a typical example of Western English speakers seizing on a word and running with it, while being ignorant of what the speaker is talking about, i.e., mostly you hear ignorant and unhelpful things about this passage. Fortunately, you are here and we can clear this up for you. Yes! It’s the Greek word teleios that is often translated as “perfect.” When you peek into the scholarship around this word and the words in the Hebrew Bible that are translated as teleios, you get a much different picture than the one conveyed by “perfect.” It’s more a matter of wholeness, of whole-heartedness for God, of thriving, of being truly well in all areas of life, as a whole person. Karen and Curtis talk it over! Let’s go.
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Resources
The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing: A Theological Commentary June 2017 by Jonathan T. Pennington
It turns out that “blessed” is a terrible translation for the beatitudes (Matthew 5) That’s quickly evident when you review the original Greek and Hebrew meanings behind the word often translated as 'blessed.' The Beatitudes are often viewed as moral directives or do-this-to-get-that kinds of promises but that’s missing the point. The Beatitudes are actually an invitation to understand and participate in God's kingdom in a way that transcends our usual expectations. They offer insight into the mysteries of how God operates in the universe and in His Kingdom.
Resources
Discussion and details about translations of beatitudes: Here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU-H1cpo6lI
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We like Pope Leo’s reflection on the parable of the workers. It touches on the pursuit of happiness, the quest for meaning, and the need for belonging. It’s a message of hope! Hop in and check it out.
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Resources
Pope Leo’s homily about the laborers in the vineyard: HERE
What’s “the THING” in your life that you are SO DONE WITH but it’s not done with YOU? We share stories of past clients that got rid of that THING in their life that had troubled them for so long that they thought it would never be dealt with. Transformation IS possible!
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“How does coaching help me as a Christian?” was a question recently asked of us. We see people undergo transformations that make a HUGE difference in their life. The kind of changes that change everything. It impacts who they are and how the do things. It impacts whatever roles they have in life, like mother, father, worker, leader, child-raiser… Think about an area of life where you would love to have a transformative change. We love seeing clients dump the baggage they have around some area of life. And seeing how they now have energy to really be much more of that person they are trying to be. We are integrated beings. We have integrated mental, emotional, physical and spiritual lives. These are not separate. It is somewhat helpful to think of these “lives” as separate so we can better understand our human experience, but we only have one life and each of us is only one person. Removing obstacles in one area creates improvement in all areas.
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Part of our job description as humans is to get busy with the work of the Holy Spirit. Removing interior obstacles is a big part of that job. We have seen, many times, how a focus on what’s really important, what we really want, is so helpful to discerning what the Holy Spirit has in mind for us. We often worry that checking in with what we want will lead us astray. Yet once we push aside distractions and temptations the “what we really want” is always something very good. It is a key to learning how we can make our own special contribution to the Kingdom. Often we ask for too little, perhaps because we can’t really imagine “more” for ourselves and those around us. Or we have perfectionistic ideas that become obstacles to the good. Finding your excellence is a wonderful thing and we leave you with questions for that purpose.
Resources
We mentioned past episodes on perfectionism, which we don’t want! See Episodes 79-81.
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-79-barbie-you-are-perfectionanists/
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-80-me-my-and-your-perfectionism/
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-81-scripture-never-tells-you-to-be-perfect/
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Text us: The Empowered Catholic Podcast: 612-208-9150
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Lean into this mindset: Everyone is Doing the Best that They Can with the Resources that They Have. It’s surprising how useful it is to keep this in mind. It takes so much of the drama out of people and circumstances that are obstacles to you. Instead of indulging in the drama and responding to THAT, you can respond as seems best without taking most things personally. It’s a mindset for excellence. It also applies to YOU. Yes, YOU are doing the best you can with the resources that you have. In fact, you are very resourceful when you put your mind to it. We might worry that this mindset will encourage slacking-off. Yet what actually happens is we waste less energy on accepting what “is” and spend more energy on what “is actually possible.” It also feels great, which is not surprising because a positive outlook beats a negative one every time.
Resources
We mentioned past episodes on perfectionism, which we don’t want! See Episodes 79-81.
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-79-barbie-you-are-perfectionanists/
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-80-me-my-and-your-perfectionism/
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-81-scripture-never-tells-you-to-be-perfect/
Contact Info
Text us: The Empowered Catholic Podcast: 612-208-9150
Email us: EmpCatholic@gmail.com
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Sometimes we lack IMAGINATION when we have given up in some area of our life. Imagination is the creative faculty for envisioning various possibilities based on what we know, perceive, or otherwise experience. When we start to think about ACTUALLY pursuing excellence and imagine what SPECIFICALLY may be involved, what is POSSIBLE moves into the realm of what is actual. Vague goals can be comforting because they are not an actual call to action. When we are stuck in some area we may be rehashing the same old options and are not using our IMAGINATION to think beyond our usual list of behaviors. VIRTUES are the pursuit of excellence, which helps us get to what is REALLY important.
Resources
We mentioned past episodes on perfectionism, which we don’t want! See Episodes 79-81.
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-79-barbie-you-are-perfectionanists/
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-80-me-my-and-your-perfectionism/
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-81-scripture-never-tells-you-to-be-perfect/
Contact Info
Text us: The Empowered Catholic Podcast: 612-208-9150
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Focus on excellence. Likely you are focused more on solving problems, avoiding pain, getting by, or putting out fires! That’s human nature. And we naturally resist change. And yet. And yet we crave freedom, opportunity, and beauty. Seeking excellence is so rewarding. Let it be more top of mind for you. What if you pursued excellence in one of these areas of life: Health; Family; Marriage or Primary Relationship; Spirituality; Personal Growth; Friendship/connection; or Career/Mission? What’s going to happen if you do? Why are you NOT? What’s not going to happen if you don’t?
Resources
We mentioned past episodes on perfectionism, which we don’t want! See Episodes 79-81.
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-79-barbie-you-are-perfectionanists/
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-80-me-my-and-your-perfectionism/
https://thmlcoaching.com/episode-81-scripture-never-tells-you-to-be-perfect/
Contact Info
Text us: The Empowered Catholic Podcast: 612-208-9150
Email us: EmpCatholic@gmail.com
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Website: https://empoweredcatholics.com
Under one single cover, you can get the latest up-to-date science showing how and why science supports the truth and reality of Eucharistic miracles, the Shroud of Turin, and Marian visitations. It’s all in Father Spitzer’s book Christ, Science, and Reason, What we can know about Jesus, Mary, and Miracles. You can hear fascinating details in this lively interview! This is a great book that lays out the scientific details in a readable and engaging manner. Fr. Spitzter is a joy to listen to, so please join us for this episode!!
Resources
*Fr. Spitzer’s Magis Center for Science and Educational Resources: www.magiscenter.com
*Get the book Christ, Science, and Reason, What we can know about Jesus, Mary, and Miracles on Amazon or at Ignatius Press: https://ignatius.com/authors/fr-robert-spitzer-s-j/
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The Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus. That seems pretty clear. There was some carbon dating in the 1980’s that said the Shroud wasn’t old enough but, after some freedom of information demands for the original data, we now know that 1980’s dating was flawed. And there are other dating methods that point to much older origins. We still don’t know for sure how the image was made. There’s no pigments, no dyes, no signs of liquid wicking into the fibers… The Shroud provides highly, highly detailed images of the wounds of Christ, complete with anatomical accuracy in every measurable aspect - even including anatomical and historical details that were unknown in medieval times. We’ve been reading Fr. Robert Spitzer’s new book Christ, Science, and Reason that has a chapter on the Shroud that goes into great detail on the most up-to-date info. There’s lots of other interesting stuff. In fact (spoiler alert), we will be chatting with Fr. Spitzer next week for Easter!
Resources
*Fr. Spitzer’s Magis Center for Science and Educational Resources: www.magiscenter.com
*Get the book Christ, Science, and Reason, What we can know about Jesus, Mary, and Miracles on Amazon or at Ignatius Press (Includes a chapter on the Shroud): here. https://ignatius.com/authors/fr-robert-spitzer-s-j/
*Scultpures of Jesus based on the shroud: here https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252551/the-first-hyper-realistic-body-of-christ-based-on-the-holy-shroud-is-on-exhibit-in-spain
*Shroud images and info: https://shroud3d.com/
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Myers-Briggs Type Preferences (MBTI®) test is familiar to most of us. Do you remember if you are a Perceiver or a Judger? The MBTI measures certain metaprograms that you use. A metaprogram is your default style of responding to what is happening around you. If you want to get things done, to have influence, to be impactful, then you need to deal effectively with other people. You need to know how to communicate with them. To motivate them. To inspire them. Flexibility in your communication lets you be the person with the most influence in the conversation. Everyone has preferences for how they like to work, to process information, to get things done, and to organize their lives; in other words, everyone has certain preferred styles for dealing with their lives and the people around them. When you’re not “connecting” with someone, it’s time to change your style of communication to see what does connect with them. Doubling down on your own preferred way of looking at things is not a very good strategy and is likely to merely frustrate everyone.
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Metaprograms are high-level patterns we run in certain situations. Introverts and extrovert are examples of different metaprograms. Sensing vs. Intuiting. Big picture vs details! There are many many metaprograms. We discuss several of them and it’s helpful to realize when you are interacting with someone who’s on the opposite page as you are. There’s an even bigger takeaway, however: we tend to judge people that are running the opposite program. For example, if you’re a big picture person, you are likely frustrated with detail-oriented people and call them names, like “nit-picker.” If you learn to recognize when others are running a different metaprogram than you, then you can tailor how you approach them to get better results. What can be tricky is that metaprograms just seem like “the way it is” to us. Sometimes we are getting annoyed instead of learning how to communicate flexibly.
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How about a little affirmation? It might be easy to forget to tell people in your life what you like about them or what they are doing well. It’s so easy to focus on the negative! Or to be self-absorbed. Or simply to lose sight of pointing out what’s good. Compliments are great and telling somebody how much you love or appreciate them has an important place in the relationship. The kinds of affirmations we are talking about are more specific. Specificity helps the affirmation land with the listener, meaning it’s easy for them to internalize something that’s specific. A specific affirmation speaks for itself and sinks in because it’s pretty obviously true. We give some examples and more tips to make your affirmations on-point, easy, and joy filled to make your relationships stronger and deeper.
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Empowered listening will build your relationships. Any and all relationships are better with better listening. You can take the initiative to make this happen: you are empowered to listen well. There’s a few habits to practice and cultivate to become a great listener. Here’s one hint: build habits that set the stage for a pure and simply curiosity to cultivate your conversations.
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Have you ever been talking to someone and realized that they aren’t listening to what you have to say, or they don’t care what you say because they just want to tell YOU something? Instead of THAT, what if every conversation you had brought a positive and deeper connection to the person you spoke to? This episode provides a critical skill for having a better conversation, a conversation that promotes connection and communication. It’s central to getting other people to listen to you! You want to use this skill with your kids (young or adult), your family members, your friends, and people you meet anywhere.
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Happy Ash Wednesday! Woo-hoo, right? Let’s keep talking about hope because the POINT of Lent is to prepare us for EASTER. St. Paul did some talking to the folks in Corinth in his letter to the Corinithians. In chapter 15, he’s talking about being resurrected. Apparently, Paul is getting questions from those early Christians, something like: How does this resurrection thing work? What does it look like? Are we pumped up about this? As Paul explains how this might work, he fills his listeners with hope! He inspires them. We are inspired. Go to our website and look for our leadership weekend in April 2025 and join us for more encouragement in-person.
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Let’s keep talking about hope! Karen works on your imagination by sharing multiple images of what the kingdom of heaven looks like. These are all images used by Paul in scripture. Marriage. Brides and bridegrooms. Citizens, like Roman citizens. Birth. There’s hope to be had when you enter into the kingdom mindset that is central to the New Testament.
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Romans chapter 8 compares being in this present age to the pangs of labor. Men comparing something to giving birth is risky but we’ll give St. Paul a pass this time. It’s as if the present age is giving birth to the new creation. It’s one of the themes we mentioned in Episode 115 on hope. We’ve been talking about our personal hope, you, my hope for me, myself, and my loved one. Yet we are invited to be a part of God’s plan for his creation, the plan that He’s been putting into action ever since Genesis, in Jesus’ work in history and his work now, which he will complete upon his return. Giving birth is not easy (to say the least). This new creation is being “born” now and we are a part of that process! There’s a role for us here. Being a part of the new creation is “what it’s all about.” We are doing a lot more than waiting for heaven. We have purpose and hope for all.
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The “hope” in St. Padre Pio’s famous proverb “Pray, hope, and don't worry” is an active verb. When I try to skip from “pray” to “don’t worry,” I can’t “do” the “don’t worry.” That’s because I need to EXERCISE my hope. I need to lean on my trust in God. The letter to the Hebews chapter 6 says our Christian hope is like an anchor. And not just any anchor. It’s an anchor that’s firmly fixed in the presence of God Himself. It’s the ultimate, immovable anchor. We need to hold on to it! Because there aren’t any promises that we are going to live without getting into a few storms. Grab hold of that there anchor chain, mateys!
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St. Padre Pio was known for saying this simple phrase to anyone who came to him with a troubled heart: “Pray, hope, and don't worry.” He then went on to say, “Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer. Have courage and do not fear the assaults of the devil.” How well do you live this proverb? How true do you think it is? Is it OK to set worry aside? How POSSIBLE is it to stop worrying. It IS possible to worry less - a lot less - and to be and to do better as a result. Let’s see how we can live this proverb of St Padre Pio.
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The Four Easy things to do to be Empowerment are… Wait, we don’t know four easy things that will “make” you be empowered. We DO offer four pillars that will take you very far, and indeed very far, on your own peculiar path to empowerment. As you place yourself “at cause,” think about implementing these practices. A first pillar is being fearless. Of course we mean something more specific than not “having fear.” When Christians talk about interior freedom, it has a lot to do with being fearless. Why are we living with so much fear? Listen to the podcast to hear about being fearless and the other pillars that will turbocharge your empowered life!
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What are we supposed to be doing, anyway? What are we called to now? What we are called to now is an exciting collaboration with God. It’s like the opposite of God ordering us around. Don’t let God become the One Who Orders Me To Do Stuff and I Gotta Do It. Of course, there’s stuff I Gotta Do, yet the point is to be in an active collaborative relationship with God. And guess what? When you are collaborating with God, it is empowering. In fact, collaborating with God is your human vocation. It’s not a nice thing to do, it is the thing you were created for. When you live your vocation of collaboration, it’s empowering. And we want you and everyone to be empowered to live their vocation. It’s what we need. And it makes life worth living. We touch on some of the traps in this area and what NOT to do.
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Live like this; be at cause. We can easily act as if “things happen to me” and I am more or less at the mercy of what’s happening to me. I am impacted by events, by my past, by accidents, by circumstance, and there’s not much to be done about that. This idea of being at the mercy of my circumstances is what we call being “at effect” because the (poor) idea is that there are causes Out There that impact me. It’s like life is the cue ball and I am the eight ball. The cue ball whacks me and there I go, rolling away. We are CONTRASTING being “at effect” with being “at cause.” Be at cause. We explain more what we mean in the podcast and give you tips for being at cause, which is a key attitude and skill of empowerment. Listen to this episode.
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Your brain is sitting inside a closet (your skull) and has zero idea what’s going on around it, except that it has your bodily senses feeding it signals. Those signals, like photons and vibrations in the air, mean almost nothing to the brain EXCEPT that your brain has past experience about what those mean. Everything you experience, everything you know, all that you think - these are all reconstructions of reality. These are guesses that your amazing brain is making about “what is” based on your senses and, especially, on your past experiences. There’s SO MUCH information hitting your brain every second that it has to ignore most of it and guess about the rest. That’s great but it means that we make a lot of assumptions about “what is.” With some skill, you can start to sort through your thoughts and emotions anc pick up on interpretations that are not necessarily accurate and are not helpful. Creating that skill is a big part of the empowered life.
Resource
Lisa Feldman Barrett podcast interview by Dr. Andrew Huberman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeRgqJVALMQ
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Do you find yourself often thinking in terms of getting cooperation from your unconscious mind? Or learning how to give it great instructions so it can support you easily? We have all had the experience of “deciding” to do something (like a New Year’s resolution, hmmm?) and then, a few weeks, or days, later - it has fizzled out. You had decided to do the Thing. But you didn’t. You consciously wanted the Thing. But unconsciously, you weren’t convinced. Ultimately, the Thing didn’t happen because you lacked cooperation from your unconscious. If, however, you know how to get your conscious and unconscious mind ALIGNED, then you will get the Thing done. And many things done.
Resource
Jonathan Haidt: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom - Haidt coined the analogy of the Rider and the Elephant to explain how the conscious and unconscious mind cooperate (or not) with each other. He gives many examples and reviews various brain functions to point out some of the sources of conflict.
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Christmas! Perplexingly, we were inspired to talk about those genealogies that are part of the Christmas story, like in Matthew where there’s a list of Jesus’ ancestry. t It turns out that reflecting on what it means to be part of a lineage means a lot. We are part of the nativity story because God has brought us into the lineage of Jesus and Abraham, and the entire story of God and His Creation. It is a profound thing. Listen and enter in. Merry Christmas!
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Empowered Christian. Empowered Catholic. Empowered Person. Yes. Yes. Yes. Empowered is a state of being that addresses the whole person. Because God acts on the whole person. The Spirit leads us and prompts us, as Christians. Yet we have a huge role to play in seeing, hearing, feeling, and responding to these prompts. Grace builds on nature. If you are being prompted to improve your health, you will be called to action. That’s your part. Yet you might resist the action you “know” you need. We all have had THAT experience, right? Your human nature is showing up! How to work with it effectively? Our nature is a multilayered mystery. We invite you to consider the dimensions of this human nature in its many layers. We paint a picture of empowerment and invite you to consider what could happen if you stepped into it.
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We are now The Empowered Catholic Podcast. Why? And Why “empowered”? These are big questions! We have increasingly been aware that we are being called on to breathe some bigger themes into the Church and the world. We started seeing patterns and key themes in our work and podcast. We are on a journey of empowerment as persons and as Christians and invite you to join us. Empowerment is just one word; listen to this episode to understand why we chose this word. And learn why we are inviting you to put on the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical attributes that create empowerment so you can serve God and the people around you more faithfully and powerfully.
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Revelations 21 beautifully and dramatically describes a new heaven and a new earth, with the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, and God coming to dwell with His people. “Behold, I am making all things new.” Our ideas of the end-game, the point of it all, the final-final Where All This Is Going matters because it has a big impact on how we live now. You are destined to live in eternity in a (new) earth seamlessly integrated with a (new) heaven where God will come down to dwell with all His people. Once you get your imagination around that, it will change your perspective. Yes, it will change your perspective on everything. What a contrast this vision is with the mistaken idea that life is something we have to simply suffer through, to get over with, to endure, to just sweat it out because all this world is going to be annihilated anyways. Life requires forward momentum. Your imagination about where you are going - your vision for the future - starts to create your future because starting NOW, picking up the thoughts, habits, and way of being that you WILL have after your vision becomes true is a powerful driver for change. We have a destiny as the people of God. Let’s step into that now.
Resources:
Revelation for Everyone: 20th Anniversary Edition with Study Guide. N.T. Wright
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St. Paul and the writers of the gospels make some cultural assumptions when talking about FAITH and when talking about GRACE. We miss a lot of what they are writing about because modern people are oblivious to these cultural assumptions that were common in the ancient world but are absent from the modern mindset. The patron-client relationship is one of these cultural assumptions. This relationship was omnipresent in the ancient world. This relationship involved a basket, even a whole shopping cart, of implied but unstated behaviors. The client would receive kind favors from a patron without meriting them. Then the client would, of course, respond with gratitude, praise, loyalty, trust, (unequal) friendship, and availability to help the patron to the (small) extent possible for them. We spent the last episode explaining about the web of expectations that surround the patron-client relationship. In this episode, we look at some scripture stories through the lens of the patron-client relationship and have very surprising insights to share.
Resources
Richards and James, Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World. InterVarsity Press.
Wheatley, Patronage in Early Christianity: Its Use and Transformation from Jesus to Paul of Samosata; Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 160. Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
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The Bible makes assumptions about what you know because in the ancient world, there were some things that everyone knew and took for granted. They were so basic, it was hard to explain. That’s why Westerners and modern people often misread the Bible. It’s because we are importing our own cultural assumptions into our reading. Think about stories you’ve heard where a traveler dealing with another culture makes hilarious and embarrassing mistakes because there was something they didn’t know about the culture. A missionary in Indonesia said he was no longer surprised when he woke up and found people he didn’t know cooking a meal for him, his family, and themselves in his kitchen. His kitchen wasn’t a private place. St Paul and the writers of the gospels use certain analogies when talking about FAITH and when talking about GRACE. If you don’t understand what these assumptions were, you don’t understand what Scripture means when you read those words. Listen to find out what you’ve never heard about faith and grace.
Resources:
Richards and James, Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World. InterVarsity Press.
Wheatley, Patronage in Early Christianity: Its Use and Transformation from Jesus to Paul of Samosata; Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 160. Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
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What are some positive signs that Boundaries are working for you? Did you know that resentment is sometimes a good sign? What about viewing boundaries as a very positive way to help you build relationships with family, friends, and the groups that you belong to? Karen and Curtis wrap up the podcast season on boundaries with some signs or steps that help you see how you are making progress with healthy boundaries.
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“What? You can’t do that! Change back, right now!” is an almost inevitable response that you get when you change your boundaries in a relationship. The push-back might be small or large however it’s almost always there. We all resist change. It’s natural. When someone’s changing things up, our default reaction is to resist that change. When you are consciously setting a boundary, you could anticipate the pushback. If you’re like me, it’s helpful to not over-react. Often it’s a best to keep calm and kind while you give them a little time to work it out.
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Yikes! It’s time to set a boundary! How do you know what boundary to set? What do you need to avoid when communicating the boundary? What if people don’t seem to respect the boundary? Let’s get together in this episode and talk through key boundary issues. . . because boundaries are good. They serve you, and they serve the Lord.
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When you get right down to it, it can be hard to define a boundary. What is it, anyway? What would a good boundary sound like? How do I know if I’m setting a good boundary? Join us for this week’s episode as we dig deeper and give some great examples to get you thinking. Remember, you have to do the work to set the boundary. . .but we can help you!
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There’s quite a few wrong ideas about boundaries, especially when it comes to our desire to be generous as part of our identity as Christians. How can creating healthy boundaries help us serve more and better? Join the discussion.
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You want to be really good at having healthy boundaries. Sometimes they are your bottom-line boundaries that are non-negotiable. Other boundaries you negotiate with other people. Often, however, your boundaries are semi-conscious and don’t become an issue until they are crossed. What are the signs that you should reconsider some boundaries? What’s a healthy boundary?
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Did you know that you love having and enforcing boundaries? Did you? Well, you do. Think about the last time someone's repeatedly annoying behavior made you blow up. Heh. That was not fun, was a bad look for you, and probably shifted the focus from their poor behavior onto you with the double-lose result that you look bad and their poor behavior continues. If you were expert at making and enforcing boundaries that blow-up would never have happened. That’s just one of many, many reasons you love boundaries and want to be really good at having healthy boundaries.
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What could you do with your list of values? Do what? That’s a valuable list that will motivate you and others, make decisions easier, help you navigate relationships and keep yourself pointed to the things that you actually want. Karen and Curtis talk about what to do with your values list and give some examples.
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Curtis was working on a breakthrough session and was asked to define his values in the area of work/career. This process made for an interesting discussion. What are your values in the area of work/career? Getting a handle on your values and bringing them up into the conscious level is helpful in many ways, not the least of which is being better able to honor them or to solve situations where you can’t honor all of your values.
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Part II: We often let our left hemispheric brain doubt the transcendent. It simply lacks the tools. We continue our discussion of philosopher-neuroscientist -doctor-psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist and his research on the connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. It turns out, how these hemispheres interact influences culture, religion, human society, work, and pretty much everything about how we experience the world. Join us as Karen gets her first set of questions answered–which, you know, always leads to more.
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Resources:
Go to Amazon to get Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, published by Perspectiva Press.
Here’s a fun interview of Iain by Monty Python’s Sir John Cleese
Look also for Channel McGhilcrist: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/
HI! It’s Curtis and Karen and we are super intrigued by philosopher-neuroscientist -doctor-psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist and his research on the connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Sounds abstract, right? Well. . not entirely. It turns out, how these hemispheres interact influences culture, religion, human society, work, and pretty much everything about how we experience the world. Join us as Karen gets her first set of questions answered–which, you know, always leads to more.
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Obstacles come in lots of different shapes and sizes. And flavors and colors and… you get the idea. Sometimes they are even stowaways in our minds. Limiting beliefs are like that. These are usually semi-conscious assumptions. Listen to yourself talk! There’s some language you use that might point the way to spotting your favorite limiting beliefs. It’s one thing to make reasonable and achievable, or even S T R E T C H goals, but it’s something else to have these limiting beliefs operate to define what it is you can or will do.
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We’ve been talking about goals this podcast season. Now what comes with every goal? Hmmm. Yes! Obstacles! Hooray for obstacles. These are the change-makers and change-markers for your goals. We are always so surprised when our plans run into an obstacle. Yet that’s what happens every time. Let’s talk about EMBRACING obstacles. Yep. Embrace the goal, embrace the obstacles.
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What would you discover by modeling the behavior of people who are very successful in the same way that you want to be successful? You would find many philosophies, approaches, habits, opinions, and ways of being. Yet you would find some things that they all had in common. One key thing is that they all had great mindsets in the areas of life where they were successful. Today’s episode offers you a few key mindsets to cultivate for success.
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This week Karen and Curtis discuss how the Four Requirements for Change might apply in real life. We mostly talk about how it applies to physical health because it’s full of concrete details that make it easy to see how they work. Please send us your comments, we are always interested to hear your thoughts!
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Transcript:
Hello and welcome back to the Catholic Midlife Podcast with Curtis and Karen
Hey everybody.
We are here for episode number 129.
This is going to be a great episode. And Karen, I wanted to tell you, I met this guy this morning. I was buying watches from him on Facebook marketplace, 40 watches for 40$ because we have a family member that likes to fix watches and I met him at a gas station.
And so we were surreptitiously trading cash for this little box of goodies, and I've been watching Breaking Bad with one of our kids And I was kind of expecting
Oh no!
some character to pop out of the weeds and tell us something terrible.
And arrest you.
But it turned out we had a great conversation because he is a high school athletics coach a running coach I believe.
Okay.
And he's really fit and as part of my fitness journey when I see somebody who's really fit I like to ask him for tips just because it's encouraging and it's inspires me and boy, did he like to talk about tips?
He had tips. I bet he did.
had a lot to say and I think I mentioned he looked good. I could tell he was on the job and something he shared with me is that he never eats processed food for breakfast or lunch and then he goes home and he says I'm married so I eat whatever my wife prepares and he probably doesn't eat too much. He doesn't eat sugar except on special occasions and same for alcohol he says sugar and alcohol aren't intended for your body, there for special occasions. And as I was asking for tip, one thing really struck me. He said, we can all practice good nutrition. It's possible for all of us. And that was inspiring because Karen so often we think of some area of life, we think, ah, it's too hard. It's, it's out of reach. I can't do that, it's beyond me, but here's a man sharing a great tip in the physical arena that we really all can get behind.
Sure. So he gave you some practical tips, but it sounds like he also inspired you to the possibilities around fitness and nutrition.
Absolutely.
That is a great introductory story, Curtis, for what we're going to do today because last week we talked about the four things that need to happen to create change.
And after we did that episode, we thought, you know, I bet it would help people if we just took an area of life and broke down some examples around the four keys to change to help people really to have a sense of more practically what we're talking about.
That's great, Karen. Let's stick mostly with the physical fitness, physical health arena because it's easy to understand. The applications are easy to understand. And frankly, because, well, Karen, for our audience, I think we all immediately appreciate that you can't pray your way to weight loss.
It's true. Or there's no novena for weight loss. You have to, you have to figure it out, and you have to create all the habits. And this is an area where the over spiritualization It's really not a trap that we fall into.
Right. We can all appreciate in this area the work that needs to happen.
Exactly. And of course, like everything, it begins with the spiritual that guides us, yet there are many things that are needed. And that's why we're talking about the four predicates, the four things you gotta do for change.
Okay, so let's look at the first one and see if we can apply it to physical health. The first key to change, if you remember, is you have to release your baggage. You have to release your negative emotions, your limiting beliefs, your inner conflicts, the things that are obstacles for you to moving forward with your goal.
So what kinds of baggage might someone have around physical health?
Well, this man I spoke to, he didn't say this, but I could imagine him saying at some point, Well, I don't control the food that's fixed in the house, and I don't feel comfortable Making other people eat what I eat because he said he specifically eats whatever is prepared. So he could have turned that into some kind of big baggage thing for him yet he found other areas of life where he did control exactly what he ate and he's able to make it work.
Sure, so that could have been a belief that made him say, Oh, well, there isn't anything I can do in this area.
Right.
Okay. Yeah, I can imagine someone having baggage from previous say illnesses or diseases and like, let's say you had childhood illness and maybe you were in the hospital and you had a lot of doctor's appointments.
I could imagine that could create a lot of negative emotions around health for a person like anger or fear, anxiety, disappointment, frustration. You could feel really powerless, especially if it happens as a kid, about managing your own health. I could see how that could show up as baggage around physical health later in life.
We could have a lot of baggage that sometimes we do have problems like our knees really aren't that great and it presents a challenge to getting around and moving yet there are ways to get exercise even if your knees are not
the best. So that physical drawback could become baggage if, if you let it, or we can have a limiting beliefs around not having enough money to belong to a good gym. And while we respect people's budgetary limits, and that could be true, often what's true is we're not comfortable spending money on ourselves
because our fitness is not the priority that we could be or we think that well, I should be able to work out at home on the cheap and not have to go to a gym and spend money.
Right. And that's going to maybe get in the way of achieving a goal around physical fitness. I remember I had a limiting belief. I didn't realize until I spoke it out loud because I've had some physical illness myself. And at one point I said, well, I'm just gonna have to deal with this for the rest of my life.
And someone very wise pointed out to me that, that was a limiting belief and if I really believed that and kept saying that it was going to be an obstacle for me to address this and get to a better level of health. I had to change the way I was thinking about that issue.
Karen, we keep talking about baggage, but do I always know when I have it?
Well, there's different levels of awareness, obviously. It can take some practice to get in touch with the signs, but it's very clear when you are thinking about an area and you have a lot of negative emotion around it, that's probably baggage. And it comes out in your language, either what you're telling yourself interiorly, or as in my example, something I said out loud, to someone else that was recognizable as baggage when the person reflected it back to me.
There's also some signs around action, like if you're super stuck in an area and you just can't take the action, you likely have some baggage to release there because you can't move forward.
Right. You can't take effective action if the emotion doesn't support you, or you can't take much action.
Yeah. So I would even say to our listeners, Hey, just take a few minutes, think about the area of physical health and notice what emotions come up for you and if you've got the negative emotions, or notice if you have some, some negative thoughts or beliefs about that area that wouldn't support you in your physical health goals.
After you release your baggage and by the way this is of the big contributions we make is Helping you release your baggage and release it a lot faster than you can do physically
with your own time and effort. But as you release this baggage and you start to look into your goals, you may be surprised at some of the new things that come up with. It's sort of like crawling out of a hole and up onto a ladder and all of a sudden you look around and you, you see more possibilities than you did.
I think Curtis, if you had somebody set some goals prior to releasing baggage and then set some after there could very easily be a shift because the baggage really gets in the way of seeing what's possible for us and what kinds of goals we could set.
Karen, we've talked about goals in this podcast before it was episode, I looked it up. Aren't you proud of me?
I am. I wouldn't remember offhand.
Is episodes 46 to 49 that's somewhat granular and then more tips and big picture stuff at episodes 101 to 103. So we've talked about goals and let's try to dig into this example
of goals in the context that we're, you know, at this physical fitness, what, what are some goals going to look like here?
Yeah, actually, this is a great area of life to talk about because you're going to set a very good goal for you, a specific goal for you. And very often, we, we can get information from our communities or people around us about, you what ought to be a goal for us. And there's a process we go through with people to really specify what is a good goal for you.
And a lot of it has to do with, well, when you come out of this process, what do you want to be different? Is it something you want to be able to do? Is it something you want to have? Is there some kind of way of life that you don't have now that you'd like to have? And it's going to be different for every person.
Some people are like, well, you know, I have to care physically for a family member and I want to be fit enough to do it. Or, I am on this medication and I can get off this medication if I do certain things in my physical health well.
And we're going to have goals at different levels.
Some of them are going to be very end point kind of goals. And supporting those longer term bigger goals are going to be a lot of very granular ones. And we want our big goals to be motivating, goals that inspire us and empowering. In other words, goals that let us be at cause and step into doing what we need to do to reach them.
And we want them to be towards kind of goals as opposed to avoidance goals as much as is possible for us. We want to move towards something, more than moving away from something.
And I think I mentioned this last week, Curtis, I'm not totally sure, but when you're thinking about your goal, you do have to look slightly ahead to the next step, which is taking action because you do have to ask yourself, is this a goal that I'm willing to do the actions it will take to achieve the goal?
And that's a really important way of helping to discover what's the right goal for you.
Absolutely. We have to have a sense of what it is we're going to do. We're going to be willing to do. And we've talked about goals elsewhere for instance, the smart kind of way of, of looking at things specific, measurable, achievable realistic time based in time. Some of those bigger goals might be so I can play volleyball, so I can golf having the strength and the flexibility.
Those are some bigger ones and a more granular goal could be around nutrition. Like I'm going to eat nutritious dense food, and, and not food that has a bunch of wasted calories.
I'm going to drink more water.
Right. Or I'm going to learn how to wait until I'm hungry to actually eat.
Yeah, and, and, If
to eat a carrot, you're probably not happy, hungry.
Yeah, and part of the process here is, you know, there's no, there's no one nutrition plan that works for everyone.
So there's a process when you get into the action step of really being flexible to figure out what works for you. A lot of times I think we think about the granular goals and we haven't really connected and focused on our motivation for the bigger goal. And if you don't have that, it's very easy to get discouraged and frustrated with the smaller goals, especially if you're struggling with them.
Karen, let's push forward. We've talked about goals kind of a lot elsewhere. Let's talk about
oh, action.
Taking action.
It's the weak point, but your goals are going to support you and taking action because you have a lot of, you have the big goals, but you have some little ones and then you have some tiny goals just to do the next thing because, and this is what you like to say, there's a momentum to action.
There is a momentum to action.
I think you all can appreciate this that oftentimes it's just the getting started that takes the effort and then you create a momentum and really change at any level is a change in your unconscious habits. That's ultimately what you're going for if you want consistent long term change, it's going to be around creating the behaviors at the unconscious level.
And installing them consistently in a way that supports you.
And remember, your unconscious it's mysterious, but yet it's not. It's something that is always present. You know how to open doors and you don't think about it. It's because your unconscious mind just kind of does it for you. Or you get on the freeway and pretty soon you're two thirds the way to work.
While your young adult is like, uh, dad, we're actually going to blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, why didn't you say so? Shouldn't, shouldn't, shouldn't have let me turn there. It's because my unconscious mind is just taking me away.
Yes.
And, and it's not a mysterious thing, even if it's not something I, I mean, I don't know how my body regulates my calcium levels, but it does a great job of it and it's mysterious, but it's also familiar and Karen, you were just talking about training, learning in our unconscious and yes, that's what we're talkingabout.
There's plenty of techniques and tools and resources to address how to get that to happen. And how to support you in getting those behaviors really working consistently for you.
And often habit formation is going to be the key in many of these actions, especially I think in the physical arena.
And, repetition, understanding triggers understanding anchors for new behaviors. Thinking about what inspires you to change your behavior in the moment when it's difficult. All these things are part of getting cooperation from our unconscious, from that awesome elephant. The conscious mind is the goal setter and the unconscious mind is the goal getter.
Goal getter.
I really like that you brought that up, Curtis, because part of what it takes to really get the change we want is to get to know our unconscious mind and how it works, because if it's on your side, you're going to get there.
And if it's working against you, then you'll be blocked and that will be an obstacle and, and there are ways to really connect and be clear with your unconscious mind because it wants you to tell it what to do.
And connecting with your intuition, connecting with your unconscious, those things that you see around you, that for some reason, you're talking to this guy in the parking lot as he slips you 40 watches. And he's telling you these things about nutrition. That's telling me, Hey, I've got more things I can do in this area. My unconscious mind is, is flagging it for me. And there are so many ways that we do this kind of thing.
Your unconscious mind can be your best friend.
Yeah, there you go.
Absolutely.
Well, Curtis, as you know, and I know, one thing that can happen when we're taking action is we can get a little distracted.
Oh, a little distracted. Do you
think so? Just a little, just a little, at least in my experience.
What's for dinner, by the way?
Very funny. And what do you do? I mean, and what's the antidote to distraction?
Focus.
Focus is the antidote. That's the word that we like.
So sometimes what happens when we're taking action is we'll start to get the feedback from the action. So there's this feedback loop as you start taking action that gives you more information about what's working, what's not working, if there's an action step that needs to happen first before you take that other action step.
And so there really is this kind of flexibility we have towards the action steps we're taking that are going to get us to a goal. And it's not always a straight line. Sometimes it's a little bit more of a wiggly line in fact, usually it's more of a wiggly line. And when you appreciate that and expect that then there's things you can do to maintain your focus on the goal and change what action is needed based on the feedback that you're getting.
In the context of the physical health, we can try different ways of getting our nutrition. Your approach to it may change over the years and you may find that some things work better than others. I'm kind of down on keto these days. I just couldn't stick with it. I mean, doing the whipped cream shots was, it just, there's something wrong with that.
And I guess you don't have to do that on keto, but I was ready to move on and I think, we experienced the making different plans to adapt to the changing situation. And the key to focus is we're planning on getting there. The plane is going to land at the place where we want it to land.
We're going to figure out how. One of the things, Curtis, that happens to women in midlife is the things that we've done to keep ourselves healthy for a while now aren't going to always work the same when we hit menopause or pre menopause.
When we're in a different physical phase of life, there has to be some flexibility to research more, choose new actions, get more feedback and stay focused on where we want to be.
Wow, Karen, that sounds like a really fun time of experimentation.
Yeah, well I'll let you know how it goes. I'm sure it's gonna go great.
All right, you ladies don't charge down and just come chop my head off. Okay. I know it's not a fun time of experimentation. And we talked about focus last week. You know, here's a little I don't know, hack for focus and that is keep getting inspired. Listen to the audio books that inspire you, read the things that inspire you. When you find somebody that's doing the thing that you're trying to do, talk to them, look at them and think how great they are and ask them questions.
People are always happy to talk about their successes and it's a great way to maintain your focus by giving your unconscious mind some examples and inspiration.
Sure. That's a great point, Curtis is giving yourself something to focus on. That's what you want and not what you don't want.
Karen, we've given some, I don't know, more or less specific examples of the four things you gotta do to have change. And we've talked about the physical arena because it's easy to understand and it's hard to over spiritualize. But I was talking to a lady that was in a multi level marketing program. She, was selling the things and she had a small team about four people that she was inspiring and what had happened to her was she was having a certain amount of success in her sales and then she got a coach that did a breakthrough session for her, a coach that's familiar with the practices that you and I use, Karen.
She went there, she went to Denver from California, had the breakthrough session and released a ton of baggage around her business and she tripled her sales in the next year. And she attributed it directly to that coaching so much so that she was at the training you and I were at wanting to learn, well, how do I do this?
How can I teach my team these techniques so they can make more money and she can make more money?
Sure. So that's a career example of really addressing from step one, what's needed to get the change.
Exactly. And multi level marketing, that's things like doTERRA, Melaleuca, even like Livia, those kinds of things where you sell and then you recruit other sellers and you get a portion of what they sell and then you can get a portion of what the people they recruit sell. That's what multi level marketing is. Here's another area, Karen, how about marriage.
Oh yeah, Tell me.
Tell me.
oh, wait a minute. Maybe you shouldn't. What are you going to say? So
so often when we think about marriage, we think about, oh, couples therapy or, oh, I'm going to get with my spouse and we're going to do blah, blah, blah together. However, If you clear out your own baggage in your marriage, you're going to show up differently.
And it's probably the best thing you could do for your spouse is show up in a better, more positive way because we always have more to offer. And then as you get your own, you know, stuff under control it's easier to deal with your spouse's stuff and, and either ignore it or create boundaries or whatever it is.
I love Laura Doyle's book, The Empowered Woman. She likes to talk about how women, by following her empowering tips, which means they're at cause for their own behavior, they can start to drive a different dynamic in their marriage, because relationship, it's like dancing. She takes a step, and he has to take a step to, to keep the show rolling.
And I'm not suggesting by any means that marriage is all on one person, yet it's true that, hey guys, we're a cause, okay? If we want a better marriage, we can start working on that right now. We can start working on it and ourselves and for my friends that aren't married often it's working on ourselves that begins to almost, you know call forth those other potential, dating relationships because we're taking care of our stuff.
And all of a sudden our, our vision starts to clear up.
I did hear a great story recently, Curtis, and the, the person was saying, they were a coach and they were working with someone who wanted to find a life partner. And so they had the person, you know, talk about the things that they wanted in their partner, and then they looked at the list together and the coach says, so are you the person that that person has on their list.
Yeah.
And there was kind of this ouch question and you really have to say, dang, I need to do what I need to do to be that person. And I think that's true even after you get married is to have that vision of who do I need to be in this relationship.
Oh, wow. Wow. I bring up the marriage thing at my own risk.
Ah, you do.
There's a lot of, lot of accountability to be in charge of yourself. But as we, as we grow, we can, it's easier for us to grow together and that, that can be very beautiful.
Thanks for being here on the Catholic Midlife Podcast
We love to hear your feedback. Anything you have for us, suggestions, comments, questions, just send to us at thecatholicmidlife@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Do you want to change how you show up in a major area of life like spirituality, family, personal growth, or physical health? Or would it be better to simply keep running life like an obstacle course, jumping, ducking, and more or less weaving around the problems until you get to the end? There are FOUR requirements for any kind or REAL change in your life. The kind of change that takes more than a bit of mental effort. The kind of change that makes an actual big huge difference in your life. Listen to the podcast for the details. Let’s go! See you there.
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Text us: The Catholic Midlife podcast: 612-208-9150.
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Your unconscious mind is always listening to what you have to say and will work to make things turn out the way you say. Do you like achievement? Accomplishing things? Improving? Then using positivity in your language is a big help for you! LISTEN to yourself this week. You might be surprised by what you hear. We discuss the possibilities and some limitations of being positive. Get your rational optimist glasses on and prime your brain with sweet, clean, positive speech and emotion for the win! The people around you will say THANK YOU!
Resources:
Robert B.Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Curtis's one-line summary: Lots of fun research. Mostly about the psychology of sales and persuasion.
Sean Achor, The Happiness Advantage
Curtis's line summary: Positivity is a winner for achievement—the advantages of rational optimism, positive speech, and positive emotion. They are mostly directed to business.
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What have we been talking about? The last several episodes have been about the Disciplines of a master. We discuss why these are important, give examples from our own lives, and do some wrapping-up of the whole discipline topic. You could pick one and spend a week working with it, how cool could that be??
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We can be tempted to think of religion as a personal project of seeking holiness. That’s our age of individualism breaking everything down to me: my role, my task, my burden, my initiative. In this age of individualism and atomization, we can easily forget the importance of seeking connection with other people, nature, and our own inner lights. Yet being CONNECTED is crucial to being human, to thriving, and to getting anything done in the real world. What are the signs of a loss of connection with others? With creation? With yourself?
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Confidence energy. When you remove fears that are useless and put some trust into the process (remember that episode?), confidence energy can start to show up. Decide to choose it. It’s about the power you have to create the change - you believe that YOU have the power to create the change. It’s the CRUCIAL difference. It does not look at the problem, it sees opportunities and solutions. It focuses on how YOU are showing up at the moment. Your PERSPECTIVE pans out to see the bigger picture when you have confidence energy. When fears are not your primary counselors, then you will SEE possibilities, and you start to have confidence. Why wouldn’t there be a win there? And I can win there. An inner certainty that YOU can go forward with life, hand-in-hand, and work things out. Big things. Small things. Sure it takes trust in God’s providence and His future for you. It takes HOPE. It’s your job to HOPE and to trust, to seek. Ask for these spiritual gifts and you will receive them. Yes, you can.
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Fear is natural. It's a natural emotion. [00:14:10] Why, then, do we have this emphasis on fearlessness? There are things that naturally come up in life that are always going to give rise to fear. And In those situations, probably what's needed is courage. The courage to act in the face of feeling fear and doing the right thing. Fearlessness is different and addresses all the rest of the fears we have. Fears that are actually meant to be released and not to be overcome. So courage is feeling your fear and overcoming it. Fearlessness is releasing the fears that you don't really need to have and that are not serving you in any way whatsoever and are just the result of your unconscious processes that you've adopted over the years. In that case, the goal isn't courage; it’s getting to a place of fearlessness. Remember what St. Paul tells us. He says that when your love is complete, there is no fear; it's driven out. Did we mention that releasing that kind of baggage, including but not limited to useless fears, is one of our specialties? Email us if you are curious or book a consult on our website. And this is our goal. This is what God wants for us, is to be people who do not dwell in fear, but dwell in love.
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God made you. So live your life. It’s YOUR job. If you are living a version of your life only because it’s the version that someone else thinks is what you should do, you will feel it in your bones. It will sap your power, meaning that sense of agency that creates energy to live your life. Authenticity looks like Acting from your core; doing/saying/showing up from your beliefs, values, choices, perspectives, and talents; being true to yourself, and living with integrity. Being authentic means being emotionally honest, clear about your experience of the world, and free of pretense. Being real. It’s a virtue needed for humility, which is indispensable for coping with life. A lack of authenticity leads to disconnection from yourself, from God, and from those around you. Brene Brown says “Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” Be more of what God created you to be; that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.
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So often, we're looking ahead. We're looking to the future. We're waiting until something happens or until we get to the next place, or to the next milestone. Or we're worried and anxious about what might happen in the future. That’s living in the future and not living in the present where we're meant to be. Our power is in the present and it is where God meets us. Learning how to trust the process of your own life, and in the events of your life, requires confidence in God’s providence, a release of the desire to control, and a willingness to focus more on what you can learn instead of what you can get.
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We often think we are making choices, but really it’s our past, our worries and fears, our habits, our trigger behaviors, or our doubts that are making the choices for us. We are hijacked by our past without us even realizing it. Because when we make choices, we are always filtering them through our past experiences. What we learn from those experiences tends to create what the “facts” are for us. Sometimes in coaching, we call this the YOU-Bag. It’s like a backpacking bag on your back: you can’t see what’s in it but you feel it. Often others can see some things in there that you can’t. We have a pack full of unconscious beliefs that drive our behavior. It’s helpful to bring them up to our full awareness so we can see if these drivers need to be updated or replaced. Learn more about conscious choice and the illusion of choice by listening to this week’s podcast!
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Awareness is a discipline, meaning a kind of excellence that you could cultivate, that shows up in a few different contexts. Awareness is the ability to know “what is”. It’s the ability to discern what’s actually happening from your mind’s interpretation of what’s happening. In a sense, it means being present versus seeing a situation from the past. We have a catalog of past experiences and those can dominate our minds to the point where we don’t “see” what’s in front of us. Awareness includes the ability to sense what’s driving your behavior in a given situation, realizing that our unconscious and semi-conscious thoughts are often taking the lead role in our behavior. The Examen is a great Catholic tradition that can help us bring awareness to our lives if we are asking good questions.
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Serene acceptance is radical acceptance. It sets the stage for our most powerful action and divine cooperation. There’s nothing passive, woe-is-me, or giving up when we practice serene acceptance. It shifts us immediately to see what might be possible. What you are resisting about life? When you are busy rejecting, resenting, resisting, or glumly resigning yourself to a situation, ask yourself: What am I resisting here? What does acceptance look like in this situation?
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Our modern ideas about discipline are deeply impoverished relative to the days of the fathers of the church. When we think of discipline, we think about a general disciplining the troops, the principal dishing out punishment, or the need to persevere to complete a hard task. Yet these are only one part of discipline. Jesus invites us to be his disciples. Disciples are invited to be much more than soldiers following commands or workers pushing through long hours. The bigger meaning of “discipline” still survives in some parts of our language. For instance, we talk about the scientific disciplines or disciplines of the arts. Mastering a discipline is work, yet it also creates freedom in ourselves because we become free to practice that discipline even as we master it. As the disciple matures, she is able to practice like the master, with increasing joy, confidence, and creativity. Being a disciple is a path to increasing freedom, joy, and confidence. Getting focused solely on the sacrificial aspects of discipleship is to miss out on all the best parts! Listen and join the conversation.
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Boy! It’s hard to hope! The challenges of the present age overwhelm us, and we worry, we fear, we become discouraged and defeated. As Christians, we grasp onto the cosmic hope of Christ and struggle to make it our own. Hope itself is a contradiction, a stance in the midst of uncertainty, and a refusal to avoid the tension of being human.
We strive to do what Abraham did, trusting “against all hope, but still in hope.” (Romans 4:18)
Friends, hope is always with us, always around the corner. Let’s encourage one another in hope.
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Our hope is too small. Scripture reveals a hope that embraces all of creation cosmically reordered and recreated as an interlocking of a new heaven and new earth. We are so individualistic, so atomized in our culture, that we can hardly even understand what we read in the New Testament when it comes to hope. Remember Romans 8 where all of creation groans as it waits for the revelation of the sons and daughters of God? That’s a hope that’s COSMIC in scope. It’s beyond “me and mine.” Karen discusses some of the images that Scripture uses to convey this hope on a great big grand scale as big as creation itself. Listen to get a grip on hope at the cosmic scale.
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“I’m gonna answer the call. I am willing to use my gifts. I am going to choose my greater potential.” Magnanimity is the greatness of the heart. It is fundamentally conceived in terms of vocation and stewardship: it is a response to God’s call, and willingness to use his gifts. As Aquinas says: “Magnanimity makes us deem ourselves worthy of great things in consideration of the gifts we hold from God.” I sometimes fear we have become too passive and looking inwards inside the four walls of our parish churches. Magnanimity enlarges the heart. It’s what the other human virtues are perfecting, and it’s the human virtue par excellence that sets us up to receive the supernatural virtues of hope, faith, and love. We don’t hear a lot about this virtue these days. Join us as we dare to hope and aspire.
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Gratitude kicks off a cycle of positivity in your relationships because it engenders the same response from other people. We all need to remind ourselves of the good things we have because our lovely brains have a big negativity bias that will take over unless we actively resist negativity. Easter is a season to embrace new hope, and to look at the world with new eyes of faith. Appreciation and gratitude are wonderful Easter virtues. Gratitude can elude us as we suffer through this present age of creation yet we have received much from God, including our life and eternal joyful life. Gratitude refers to an emotion and an action.We all know that experience of feeling a depth of gratitude for someone or something in our life. It's also a habit that we cultivate to get our minds focused in the right direction. When your emotions and actions aren't lining up, you've got some fixing-up to do. Gratitude acknowledges and appreciates the good and the positive.
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You weeded the garden in Lent. Now it’s time to plant some seedlings. Try out something new. Reconnect with your experience of awe to open your heart up to something new. God always has something new for you. Something just for you. You were busy cleaning your house in Lent. Now the Holy Spirit is here and waiting to engage you in new ways. Awe is a universal human experience that catapults us out of the every day into the realm of the extraordinary. It lifts us beyond our me-centric view into a God-centric, and us-centered state of mind. We experience awe when we see others act with extraordinary moral courage, kindness, or service. Or we connect with awe in nature or perhaps great art. Awe brings us to Wonder, which leaves us open with curiosity in God’s universe, alert to opportunities in our life. Easter is the time for new initiatives! To plant new seeds. Let’s get our hearts opened up, directed outwards, sensitive to the eternal and the new.
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When we read the Lord’s Prayer with the understanding that it’s a prayer for the Kingdom of God now and forever, we can grasp how “forgive us our debts” is a reflection on how the Kingdom of God operates. It’s a kingdom where forgiveness is offered and received. We are all reconciled with God and each other. That’s why we are the people of peace: we are living our vocation of forgiveness. Join us as we discuss this profound part of the Lord’s Prayer.
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Teach us, Lord, how to pray. And we got this remarkable prayer that’s so very short. How can it be called a summary of the Gospels? The key is to understand how to pray it with the end in mind. Remember that life tip that says “Begin with the End in Mind”? When we keep the end in mind, then the petitions make more sense. “Hallowed be Thy name” can sound like “don’t use the Lord’s name in vain.” But what it’s really getting at is that we want God to come more fully into his creation now. We are asking Him to do the things that make his name Holy, in anticipation of when he arrives fully present in His creation. Learn why the Lord’s Prayer is an eschatological prayer, and how to set yourself up to pray it as a follower of Christ.
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The Lord’s Prayer is the most perfect Christian prayer, and in this episode, we discuss creating the right mindset for this beautiful prayer. Watch out! We’ll be tackling big scary things like ‘eschatology’, ‘eschatological dualism’, and ‘2-stage eschatology’–but only to find out they’re not so scary after all. We don’t know exactly what God’s future will look like, but we do know some things, and we know enough to pray for it to come in the power of the Holy Spirit. Learn why the Lord’s Prayer is an eschatological prayer, and how to set yourself up to pray it as a follower of Christ.
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From the earliest days of Christianity, people recognized there was something very important and special about being given the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Peter Chrysologus was teaching it to some newly baptized Christians and he said: “The angels stand in awe at what you are going to hear today.” I think to the modern Christian, the kind of praise and reverence that early Christians showed to this prayer is not in our experience and if we think about it is surprising. I won’t say ‘we treat it like an old sock’, that’s not true. . . but there is a sense of familiarity that has come about that is not at all like how the early Christians approached it. Join us in a relaxed conversation as we start to open ourselves up to the depths of this profound prayer.
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SHARPen up your marriage! We have some high-level tips for you. S is Shared Vision or Story. H is healing in your marriage. A is attend to the marriage bond. R is the R-word, you know what it is: Relationship! Brush up on your R skills! Be a better friend. P is for personal growth. Gotta grow. When you grow, you will bring new energy to the relationship.
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Husbands really, really want to please their wives. C’mon, I mean, St. Paul even warns us about it! Laura Doyle wants wives to believe it and lean into it by telling their husbands what would please them. The trick is to do so without being demanding or unpleasant. Listen in for this how-to marriage tip!
Referenced Materials
Laura Doyle, The Empowered Wife, Updated and Expanded Edition: Six Surprising Secrets for Attracting Your Husband's Time, Attention, and Affection 2023, BenBella Books.
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Much of what is taught about having a great marriage is not very helpful, according to marriage guru John Gottman. He says one of the biggest keys is to learn how to cultivate a deep friendship. He writes, “I rarely see small moments of connection in the tapes of couples who later divorce or report their marriage has permanently soured”. Cultivate a connection with the habit of “turning toward” your spouse. There are big moments, like being asked to do something that takes a lot of time; you are not likely to miss those! Be in the habit of also paying attention to the many small moments where you can turn toward your spouse. When they talk to you, give them your full attention. When they point something out, check it out. Look for these “bids” for attention, affection, humor, or support.
Referenced Materials
John Gottman and Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert Harmony/Rodale. Rev. 2015
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Our “maps” of who we “know” our husband or wife can get outdated. We have assumptions about them that are not true anymore. We could ask better questions: curious, open-ended questions that are gentle and inquisitive. We give you some good ideas about how to ask those questions. We also discuss the five levels of sharing. It’s surprising how seldom we reach the deepest levels, even after many years of marriage. It’s a lot easier to stay at the medium levels, like making your preferences known, because going deeper can be more risky. We can’t expect our husband or wife to keep up to date on “who I am now” if we don’t share at the deepest levels. Revealing ourselves is part of discovering the depths of each other.
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If you are struggling with your goals, we offer you five common reasons that goals are not accomplished. One of them is that our goal does not require taking measurable actions, so we don’t know if we are executing our plan. For example, if you have a goal to improve a certain relationship, that could be a wonderful intention but it does not require any measurable actions, so it’s not a goal. But if you thought about that relationship and decided that you wanted to have better conversations, then you are getting closer. What action could you take for better conversations? If you read a relationship book, you might realize that there are skills to being a good listener. You could list those skills and track how consistently you practice them, and how many times you missed opportunities to do so. You might use a checklist, a journal, or capture notes to your daily planner. Now you’re cooking. Join us as we discuss other common reasons you might not be achieving your goals!
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We often lack what’s needed to actually make changes. In other words, we often have a goal and do not realize we are not ready to chase that goal. So we are not successful in creating the change. I think all of us have experienced that!! It’s not as easy as “just deciding” to do “it.” Karen shares the four requirements for change. The first one is to GET RID of the baggage that’s associated with the change. Join us as she explains what that means and shares the other three requirements for change.
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Today’s episode is an EXERCISE to create great goals for yourself. Jump in and try it! As we practice the virtue of living in the moment (episode 101) we might wonder: Am I doing what I’m meant to do at this time? Having great GOALS helps with this question. What if you had great, inspiring goals? A strong direction? Often our goals are a glorified to-do list that provides little true direction. “Gotta do more better” is not inspiring and it’s not a great strategy for actually doing better. Join for a few minutes to get some new ideas for goals in your life! Because life is growth and growth is change and you have goals; the question is are they conscious and in focus or just sorta meh goals?
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Living in the present moment is a habit to help us reach for interior peace and integrate our lives. God is never early, He’s never late, He’s always right on time. God’s grace is found in the present moment. If you are in the present, as Jaques Philippe says, you “entrust the past to the mercy of God and trust the future to His providence, doing just what is required of you today,“ and that helps you receive grace, because “sterile regrets, rumination on the past, and worries about the future cut us off from divine grace.“ Peace and grace that’s what we need. Listen in as we discuss why this skill is invaluable and give some pointers on how to better practice this habit.
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Listen to catch some new thoughts about the way you think about time! The modern mind thinks of time as a commodity. As a tool or a resource. There’s a limited amount of it. We have a lot of sayings that reflect this viewpoint, such as “time is money.” Or “living on borrowed time,” or “it’s about time.” But time is more than another object we use. Time was created by God as a way for us to participate in eternity. We often think of time as the enemy, as something we compete with, or as an unstoppable force. We could, however, learn new perspectives that lead us to trust in time, to value it as our participation in eternity, and to connect the past and the future together in the present moment by way of narrative.
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Christ is born to be King! He IS King, now. Merry Christmas! That makes us agents of the New Creation because Christ has already started the New Creation. Paul talks about this a lot. God wants to dwell with man and will bring heaven down to earth and they will exist together in the new creation; think of the New Jerusalem descending in Revelations. Christ, he says, is the “first fruits” of the new creation. He’s the first to be resurrected, to show us the way. He’s sent the spirit to us, and we, too have the “first fruits” of the new creation.
Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for… creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. -Romans 8:19-24
“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. But be glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. -Isaiah 65:17-18
All of creation is groaning, awaiting its deliverance! We suffer with Christ and with the world, which is God’s kingdom, just as Christ suffers with us and with all creation. We are Christ’s children and heirs; we enter into his suffering and are glorified with him.
You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. -Romans 8:15-17
We have a vocation of being the people of God. It has personal and communal consequences. As Paul says, Jesus is king of the whole world. In heaven and earth he reigns. And when we're in Christ, we're fellow heirs to the kingdom. We're celebrating the new creation. We're celebrating that we are part of the new creation. We are agents of the new creation, and we anticipate the new creation right now in the present age as we wait and hope for the new heavens and the new earth.
Always God hears the “groaning.” God is victorious. God acts, and we are anchored in the hope and glory that is there for us, and nothing can separate us from the love of God. No principalities, powers, rulers of the world - whatever it is, nothing can separate us.
Merry Christmas season!
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You are a citizen of Heaven - did you know that? Paul wrote that in Philippians 3. What does that mean about my situation? Paul’s listeners in Philippi would have instantly connected that idea to being a citizen of Rome because having Roman citizenship was so important. Philippi was a colony. Roman citizens there were agents and emissaries of Roman culture, law, language, customs, and power. Roman citizens living in Philippi weren't interested in leaving Philippi and going to Rome if things got dicey. They could call on the emperor to send in back-up.
John’s gospel, which is our focus this season, explains that Jesus has already started his kingdom on Earth. You are a citizen of that kingdom. That makes you an agent and emissary of the Kingdom of Heaven’s culture, law, language, customs, power, and all of it. Citizens living on planet Earth aren’t interested in leaving Earth just so they can go to Heaven. God will bring Heaven down to Earth in the end times. That’s a process that’s already started. Jesus inaugurated it. He rose again as the first member of that blended new creation of Heaven and Earth. We will follow him.
Our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. - Philippians 3:20
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Happy Advent, my friends. We are getting ready to re-celebrate that first Christmas. Sometimes I get the impression that people think Jesus came to earth so that we could go to heaven. But if you think about salvation history, it runs in the other direction. It's always God wanting to come and dwell in his creation with his people. God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve. God was present in the desert in the signs during Exodus, dwelt at the tent of meeting, was present in the Tabernacle, and was present in the temple of Jerusalem. That's the Shekhinah. That's the glory of God that the book of Ezekiel describes so dramatically coming in with an overwhelming presence and then tragically leaving. For the first-century Jewish people waiting for the Messiah to return, restoring the glory of God to the temple in Jerusalem was critical. They expected that the Messiah couldn't be the Jewish Messiah if there was no restoration of the glory of God, the Shekinah, to the Temple of Jerusalem.
The Gospel of John carefully explains that the glory of God returned to the Temple with the Messiah Jesus. You just have to know that the theme is there so you can see it. Listen to this episode so you can see this theme and why it matters so much.
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There’s a theme that you may not be aware of that runs through the entirety of scripture from the distantly ancient text of Genesis to the merely ancient text of Revelation. You’ve heard of this idea but may not be aware of how it is an organizing principle for understanding Scripture. It’s a theme explicitly present in the ancient books of Genesis and Exodus and throughout the New Testament - it’s one that the writers were very intentional about but one that our modern minds simply bloop over because we don’t have the right lens, or I could say cultural framework.
We were amazed when this theme popped up in Genesis, it’s the theme of TEMPLE in God’s creation and that’s what we discussed last week in episode 94. A temple is a place where God dwells with man: it’s a place where the heaven and earth that He created overlap. Throughout all of salvation history, as shown in Scripture, God keeps coming to Earth to dwell with man in Creation. In the Garden, in the desert at the tent of meeting, and in the Tabernacle.
As we approach Christmas we think about what it means for the temple to be in the person of Jesus. What does that mean to see him as the new temple?
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The creation account in Genesis is not understood by modern people. It’s very unlikely that you have ever heard a correct account of what it means. As modern people, we have pretty much missed every important point in it. We have read all of our modern preconceptions into it and created pointless controversies about it. Listen to the podcast if you want to know what the creation story in Genesis is actually all about.
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day, he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. -Genesis 2:2-3
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Reframing is the art of looking at a situation, thought, or belief and finding a different perspective that is also TRUE and MORE HELPFUL. We often lock in on the first interpretation of a situation that comes to us. But we can usually step back and see there are OTHER things that are also true about a situation and these other things can give us a different approach. A new approach that will focus on our agency or shifting our thoughts and emotions to a condition where we can more easily respond. For example, we might fail at a test or on a project and think “I’m terrible” or “I am no good at this subject or task”. With reframing you might end up saying to yourself “I can learn to study more effectively,” or “I had a difficult lesson and look forward to learning from it and avoiding similar fiascoes in the future.” Contrast a reframe with empty positive talk, avoidance, or just shrugging it off, or just sucking it up.
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We have an excellent and very doable language challenge for you this week! We discuss E-Prime, which is a way of using English without any forms of the verb “to be”. That means without any words like these: is, be, been, were, is, am, was, will be, am, are. We think there is one situation where avoiding the “is” and “am” serves you particularly well. We ask you to listen to that situation and reframe your is and am. E-Prime is an intriguing idea and certainly has its advocates. Check it out!
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Your unconscious mind is always listening to what you have to say and will work to make things turn out the way you say. Do you like achievement? Accomplishing things? Improving? Then using positivity in your language is a big help for you! LISTEN to yourself this week. You might be surprised by what you hear. We discuss the possibilities and some limitations of being positive. Get your rational optimist glasses on and prime your brain with sweet, clean, positive speech and emotion for the win! The people around you will say THANK YOU!
Resources:
Robert B.Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Curtis one-line summary: Lots of fun research. Mostly about the psychology of sales and persuasion.
Sean Achor, The Happiness Advantage
Curtis one line summary: Positivity is a winner for achievement. The advantages of rational optimism, positive speech, and positive emotion. Mostly directed to business.
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“Hey, Mom, I’m moving back home!” What do we need to think about if and when that conversation starts? Our first thoughts may be to ask ourselves: How can I help? A better question might be: Is this course of action helping my young adult child move to independence? Create an agreement with your young adult before they move in. Agree WHEN they are leaving and what they need to happen for them to leave. Everybody will have some boundaries: start to figure those out. Think in terms of collaborating and getting buy-in, or at least a mutual understanding.
Resources:
Doing Life with Your Young Adult Children, Jim Burns
How To Really Love Your Adult Child, Jim Chapman and Ross Campbell, MD
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How can you be HEARD? How can you HELP when they don’t want to hear you? If you want her to hear you, then you must hear her first. Do you want him to see your perspective? You must see his perspective first. Being SEEN and HEARD is important to any relationship that has depth and vitality. When you are speaking with your young adults, and pretty much anyone, DO THIS: be on the lookout for how you validate them. When they know YOU understand their perspective, and it’s a perspective that makes sense, then they will be more open to seeing your perspective. When she’s telling you what she’s thinking, feeling, and experiencing… then it’s your turn to explain to HER why it’s understandable that she’s thinking, feeling, and experiencing that. Validation is about showing that, “Hey, considering your experiences, your perspective on life, what you've been through, and your values, it makes sense that you are thinking/feeling that way.”
Listen to the podcast to understand what the skill of “validation” is all about. Look for an opportunity to practice this skill in every conversation. The results will surprise you!
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We want to avoid giving unsolicited advice and comments whenever possible. How is that possible when we have conflicts? Or we are the landlord or banker and we have to spell out some requirements? COLLABORATING with your young adults during their transition to independence helps shift the relationship to a life-long, loving, adult, relationship. Shifting to COLLABORATION is a BIG shift for most parents. We are deep into “control” or “advising”. A tip for being a great collaborator is: to learn how to pursue an INTEREST instead of taking a POSITION. Positions are the particular solutions we propose; these serve a larger Interest. An Interest is the larger thing that you are trying to accomplish with your “position.” Listen to the podcast episode to hear more about the what, why, and how of collaboration.
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We discuss some of the biggest DO’s and DON’Ts for managing our relationships with our young adults. What’s the best way to give advice? Our young adults generally don’t want to hear it. They’ve had plenty of it from us in the past. We also discuss how our young adults really hate receiving or perceiving, judgment from their parents. We can carry a lot of judgment of them without realizing it. Or we make the judgment and think, “It’s “no big deal.” Here’s some news: It is a HUGE deal. The perception by your adult child is the target of critical judgment is probably the number one reason parents get cut off or cut out of their children’s lives. Learn how to handle this area of your relationship with a great deal of care and intentionality.
What’s a story you have about successes or challenges in relating to your young adult children? We would love to hear from you!
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There’s a huge goal to never lose sight of when relating to your young adult! Our expectations of them can conflict with that goal. It’s human nature to focus on what’s NOT happening and to be impatient for what we think SHOULD be happening. We have expectations rooted in our own personal history. Let’s bear in mind that the culture is not what it used to be. Life’s path is less settled and predictable in terms of transitioning into independent adult roles. There’s also lots of brain maturation still happening into the late twenties. As parents, we are transitioning from a role of control (as if we ever really had that!) to a relationship of mutual respect and influence. It’s up to us to model what mutual respect looks like. Our control of our children’s outcomes, meaning the “results” they get, was always limited. Most parents need to consciously move away from taking responsibility for the outcomes their children have. And to release control to them for their experiences of being happy in their circumstances.
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Join us as we take a quick break to remember the helpfulness of self-compassion practice, why it’s important that you use this skill now, what it is, and how much we want it as part of our spiritual life. Self-compassion is a skill and a habit. What does that remind you of?? A virtue! Yes, a habitual and firm disposition to do the good. In this instance, to do good to YOU so you can bring God’s good to those around you with serenity, courage, and grace. Need patience? Then you need self-compassion. Need to persevere with hope? Start with self-compassion so you can tap your spiritual gifts as fully as possible.
In this Episode
Check out Karen’s self-compassion live webinar: HERE
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Bill Yoh shares how a love of neighbor lit up his life with the fire of the Holy Spirit and inspired him to live a simple, strong, unvarnished faith in a straightforward and consistent way. We were delighted to speak with him as he shared his experiences, from the dumpsters of Nicaragua to the boardroom of one of the largest privately held US companies. He shares lessons taught to him by the poor, by the generous people who serve them and picks out a handful of virtues that will help each of us follow the inspirations of the holy spirit.
In this Episode
Go to Bill Yoh’s website to buy the book, get the newsletter, and learn more: https://unvarnishedfaith.com/
Book: Unvarnished Faith: Learning to Love with a Servant's Heart, by Bill Yoh.
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How do you know if you have a Giant Killer Duty Robot looking over your shoulder? Dominican Fr. Servais Pinckaers continues to help us see the robot AND tells us what moral theory used to look like before that robot swept down like a terminator from Skynet and displaced the teachings of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the church fathers. It turns out that, if you want to get your ideas about what you are supposed to do (aka morals) you have to START WITH THE RIGHT QUESTION! Yep. It’s true in your life. And it’s true in our life as a community of the faithful. We discuss how it is (moral obligation theory), how it was (the question of happiness), and how to spot that robot in your mirror!
In this Episode
The Sources of Christian Ethics, Servais Pinckaers https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823208282/
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Move over, Goliath, we got a Giant Killer Duty Robot to slay here. Good thing we are getting lots of help from Dominican Fr. Servais Pinckaers, who wrote a lot of the encyclical Veritatis Splendor and the Catechism of the Catholic Church with John Paul II. Servais calls the robot “Moral Obligation Theory.” He traces its roots back to the 15th and 16th centuries. It’s a theory that has become a “lens” that most of us modern Christians use most of the time when we think about morals - it’s so powerful we don’t even know we are looking through it! As with most thought distortions, it takes something that’s good and takes it out of context, elevating it to have a priority that’s misplaced in most circumstances. Moral obligation theory is a giant killer robot because it’s a joy killer. Servais is very clear: this theory stinks and does not help us. If dealing with God makes you feel miserable, or you feel like your entire life is grinding out one duty after another, you might be laboring under this theory of moral obligation.
In this Episode
The Sources of Christian Ethics, Servais Pinckaers https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823208282/
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End your bad habit of “perfect” with us! End it today. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect is what it says in Matthew 5:48,” right? After all, PERFECT is an English word that we know very well. If it’s perfect then it’s flawless, without defects, and does not make mistakes. That’s modern English. But the word used in Scripture does not mean the same thing as the modern English word “perfect.” The word used in Matthew 5:48 is a form of the Greek word Teleios. It means something more like “grown” or “mature” like an acorn matured into an oak. Please stop trying to be perfect. Scripture does not require it. In fact, it is worse than useless. Join us as we discuss the details.
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Amanda is a young lady described in a recently published book reviewed in the August 23, 20023 Wall Street Journal. She’s had perfectionism drilled into her, Barbie-style, and she’s internalized it. “Self-directed” perfectionism is the perfectionism that’s directed at yourself; it’s what we normally think of as perfectionism. Amanda has hit all her milestones through her middle-class upbringing: the grades, the extracurriculars, and the great school. And now she has a great job. She’s empty. Why? Answering that question is, in many ways, the point of this podcast. We all know, intellectually, that chasing success can be a trap. Success, however, comes in many forms, including not only professional work but also marriage, family, children, roles in our local church, health, body image, and more. For instance, have you been complaining about your lack of progression in your “spiritual” life for pretty much all of your life? As midlifers, we are likely to need to give up on some of our hoped-for “successes'' if we want to flourish, if for no other reason than the fact that our ambitious and unrealistic 20-year-old selves very likely set a bar so high that we can’t reach it in every area of our life. Perfectionism is one of the big thought traps we can so easily fall into. Most perfectionists refuse to see it for the performance-killer and joy-stealer that it is. As we say in Minnesota: “Go figure.”
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Barbie, the movie, has something to say about perfectionism. Remember that monologue by Gloria? Gloria was super frustrated with the contradicting and insatiable messages directed to her as a woman that required her to be perfect and to be judged inadequate whenever she fell short. It resonated with many, many women. Perfectionism messages are constantly being directly beamed into you from your environment. Beamed, like Scotty beaming things, OK? That's just one arena of life. Men and women are getting these messages constantly from all over the place in our culture, which is very competitive, often treats us as commodities, keeps us insecure in our roles, and holds us to what are often unreasonable standards. Join us to discuss "so what," "what to do," and "why does it matter, really, really matter"? (hint: yes it really matters) Contact Info
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We take things personally because it cuts to our survival instinct. What’s at stake, in our brains, isn’t “do I get the topping on the ice cream?”; it’s “ Do I get to eat today?” Our brains are always looking for threats. We quickly interpret what people say or do as being directed at “me.” If you are trying to bring that virtuous, charitable, wise “you” to the party, it’s so helpful to create some distance and boundaries around the stories you tell yourself. Listen to the podcast for some helpful thoughts!
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Ruminating undermines you. We can quickly move from necessary self-reflection into repetitive negative thought patterns that get in the way of growth and problem-solving. Midlifers love to chew on their mistakes and keep turning things over and over. And over and over. Rumination isn’t solving your problems. It's not bringing health and new growth. Instead, it's making things worse. And some good news is: we don't have to do it. We discuss how to know when you are ruminating, why it’s so engaging for our brains, and what some of your options for pushing back could be. We want you to spot your ruminating and know when it’s not helpful, so you can disengage.
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Are you ‘shoulding’ on yourself? (Don’t lie! We all do it) And it’s easy for those tricky ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts” to start defining your emotions and behaviors. I should get up earlier. I should work out. I should get more sleep. I shouldn’t complain so much. I shouldn’t be upset. And what about what others should or shouldn’t do or be? Find out why this is distorted thinking and how it undermines who you are called to be and what you are called to do. Let us know how the ‘shoulds’ are showing up for you!
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What? More thought traps? Yes, lots more. Hooray. Listen and spot your favorite one to work on this week. These traps derail us or leave us spinning our wheels. The ratio is great but awareness and curiosity are better for spotting and responding to them. We discuss and share examples of some of them, like Personalizing, Blaming, Unfair Comparisons, Regret Orientation, What IFs, Emotional Reasoning, Inability to Disconfirm, and Judgment Focus. Email us about YOUR “favorite” thought trap!
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Humans (like you for instance) have some habits of thinking that are traps. We all fall into them, repeatedly. You have to laugh! These traps can shut down our thinking before we realize it, leaving us stuck or making poor choices because the traps often work at an unconscious level. Asking great questions is the key to uncovering thought traps. We discuss and share examples of some of them, like Mind Reading, Fortune-Telling, Catastrophizing, Labeling, Discounting Positives, Negative Filtering, Overgeneralizing, All-or-Nothing Thinking, and the infamous Shoulds. Listen and decide which one is your favorite, so you can work on it this week. Haha, tell us which one your spouse or friend falls into the most. 😉
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All human sufferings are capable of being infused with the same power of God manifested in Christ's Cross, writes JP2 in Salvifici Doloris. We have solidarity with Christ in suffering. This solidarity and participation in the cross that unites us with the Holy Spirit is a reality to be experienced and confounds explanations and theories. Moreover, the church is not passive in the face of the world’s suffering; on the contrary, we are asked to go precisely to where people are suffering– and the Spirit comes with us. The disorders of our culture show us where we have not met others in their suffering and have not brought God’s healing restoration to them.
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John Paul II speaks of the Gospel of Suffering. He says “The Redeemer himself wrote this Gospel, above all by his own suffering accepted in love” in Salvifici Doloris. We, meaning everyone, are burdened with suffering. It’s natural for us to wish that, and basically expect that God will take it away from us. Suffering cuts directly to what it means to be human. It demands respect and a response. We suffer when we experience any kind of evil, be it “large” or “small.” We want to view suffering through the lens of redemption. Christ answered the question about suffering with his own suffering–and as he did so, John Paul II says that evil was laid bare “before the eyes of Christ’s soul”. And it could not stand. The cross broke evil, somehow, in a way we don’t understand (e.g., read Romans 8). So now, as we approach suffering through the lens of redemption, it is possible to meet there the living waters of life that flow from Christ. WE can actually find redemption in the midst of suffering. We meet Christ there. It’s really important that in this lens, we hold together the Cross and Resurrection and DO NOT allow them to be separated. Listen to the discussion on the podcast!
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What kind of energy are you bringing to situations where you suffer? Is it the kind of energy that leads to faith and hope, and finding purpose? The energy around your suffering tells you a lot about what you might be able to do differently. There’s no “right” way to suffer, nor can anyone tell you what you should do. Indeed, suffering is not going to go away in this present age; it is inextricably wound around us in a tight web. The questions we have for ourselves revolve around how we are going to let suffering shape us and what impact it will have on us and those around us.
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When life in the Spirit encounters the world, it doesn’t fit. There’s suffering at the points of collision. Life in the spirit, living in the new creation, being an agent of King Jesus, living the gospel - however you want to talk about living the new reality created by the resurrection - creates pain points because it doesn’t conform to this world. We are not conformed to this world. Instead, with the power of the Spirit, we conform this world to the reality of the new creation in the kingdom of God. That’s a via crucis, a road marked by suffering. Sometimes we get pulled into strange ideas about suffering being the coin of our salvation that we use to earn our way to God’s favor. That’s an idea that misses the point. Instead, keep your eye on the end game, which is participating, through the power of the Spirit, in eternal life in the new creation where the kingdom of God is fully present in the unity of heaven and earth.
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Sometimes we get bogged down in WHY am I suffering? Scripture does not really give us a direct explanation of why evil and its consequent suffering exist. Instead of a tidy explanation, we see the story of what He has done in history, in the Jewish people, and in Christ. We create theories and explanations but these fall short. "I sought whence evil comes and there was no solution", said St. Augustine. Asking WHY we are suffering in a particular way can easily get us stuck in frustration. Because we cannot “solve” our own suffering. God will draw a purpose for you out of your suffering. That’s because God can draw good out of evil. Even though He allows evil to take place, it is not because He wants you to suffer. He does not create evil or suffering. What you learn from suffering is not “why” you suffered. Suffering is transformative and draws us more closely into seeing and experiencing God’s glory - the glory of the magnificent, tremendous power of the presence of God ruling over heaven and earth in His amazing, redeemed, new creation kingdom.
Mentioned in the show
Lisa Mladnich’s book True Radiance, which is out of print but used copies are available, try Amazon. Listen to her interview in Episode 67.
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Pentecost, the Ascension, and Daniel 7 - these are all tightly linked. It engenders hope to think about these connections. We love hope! We need it. The Spirit goes forth to renew all the Earth. Let’s invite it to start with each of us. Daniel 7 promised that great things that would happen when the Messiah returned. All power and kingship would be given to one like the son of man. That was fulfilled in the ascension when Christ went to Heaven to take up his kingship and start reigning. One of his first ACTS (like Acts 2) was to send the Holy Spirit from Heaven to Earth. The great interlocking of God’s creations of Heaven and Earth is well underway. That’s what we are part of; the reign of the King in his kingdom. The Holy Spirit is “power from on high” for us to participate in that and be comforted. Let’s transform our hearts and minds to be agents of the Kingdom.
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Lisa Mladinich helps people grow exponentially in their God-given talents. She’s a Catholic coach, mom, bestselling author, and an inspiration to listen to. Finding and (loving to be) using your strengths is primarily, and this is really important to keep in mind, for getting closer to God. It also helps you understand your weaknesses. It’s so rewarding to be more of who God meant us to be: life is better, we are better, we are closer to God, we do better in our relationships, and we step up and pitch in to do our part in the Kingdom of God.
Lisa’s Stuff
Lisa’s website: Wonderfullymade139.com
Lisa’s podcast: Talent Talk Tuesdays
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Making your contribution is… awesome! There’s something about you that’s so unique that only YOU can make that contribution to building up the kingdom of God. As you transform God’s creation, you are transformed. Because you are cooperating with the Holy Spirit that’s working on you even as you work with it to do your special thing. It’s a little intimidating to think there’s a role that is just for each of us, but it’s going to be a role for which we are well-suited to play. Because God knows each of us very well and has some things “planned out for us in advance”.
As mentioned in the podcast:
Paul: A Biography by N. T. Wright, pub. HarperOne, 2018
Christifideles Laici, An apostolic exhortation by John Paul II, 1988
We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. - Ephesians 2:10
The Church is like a living body with many very different vocations. Every member offers a totally unique contribution on behalf of the whole body…. The faithful engage in an ever-clearer discovery of one's vocation and the ever-greater willingness to live it so as to fulfill one's mission. God calls me and sends me forth as a laborer in his vineyard. He calls me and sends me forth to work for the coming of his Kingdom in history. This personal vocation and mission define the dignity and the responsibility of each member of the lay faithful. -Christifideles Laici, at 20 & 58, paraphrased
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Self-acceptance is one of the keys to life and is indispensable to Christian life. If you want to really change, you need self-acceptance in order to do so: it always precedes real change. Self-criticism is a common but weak alternative practice that many people embrace. Repeat: self-criticism is a bad habit that’s puny and wears you down. Self-acceptance, on the other hand, lets you see the same things in yourself, but without flinching. St. Francis de Sales practiced self-acceptance when he counseled us “not to fret over our own imperfections and to say to ourselves: Well, my dear friend, here we are again! Let us get up again and call on God’s mercy and hope to help us. Be of good heart, be on guard moving forward, and with God’s help we will do better!” Listen now and join us!!
Mentioned in the podcast:
Ethical Excellence; Philosophers, Psychologists, and Real-Life Exemplars Show Us How to Achieve It
by Heidi Giebel
Rebuilt: Awakening the Faithful, Reaching the Lost, and Making Church Matter
by Fr. Michael White and Tom Corcoran
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With acceptance, even though it doesn't change objective reality, the attitude of your heart is very different. You can enter into that reality with faith, hope, and love and find God operating there. You can find your peace which is always vital. You own your freedom and agency. Getting to a place of acceptance is often a key in coaching. It’s also a spiritual discipline. Paradoxically, more acceptance means more freedom. Freedom, properly understood, creates agency. Now positive change is enabled.
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I am reliably informed that with great beer comes great responsibility. OK. Certainly with Freedom comes Responsibility. You have AGENCY as a person. Freedom is for agency. I am sometimes quick to throw in the towel and say: I have no power here, no options, no choices, no mas. But I am always an AGENT; I am an actor as in “active”; I am a cause. Not THE cause, but A cause. John Paul II compares the attitude of “I am a cause” to “something is happening to me or in me over which I have no influence.” You are God’s representative on Earth. You have agency. What does that mean?
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Freedom is FOR what? We hear a lot about what we’ve been freed FROM, like sin and death (yay for that!), and not so much about what we are free FOR. Freedom is the foundational bedrock for the human spirit and central to your Christian walk. There are a lot of misconceptions and failures of imagination when it comes to thinking about freedom. We use this podcast season to clear some of those up so you can have, hold, and step into your wonderful Christian freedom.
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Apologies are just a step in a relationship, perhaps a way to get a conversation moving again. Sometimes they don’t seem to “fit” the situation. Or we sense that the other person will use them to make us feel more guilty or to manipulate us. We talk about complex situations and how an apology might fit in. There are also reasons that we and “they” resist making apologies. Knowing how to decide if, when, and where to make your apology is an art. Get some ideas and grounding by listening to this episode.
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Happy Easter, everyone! What a great season to be in. Let the party begin! This is your bonus Easter episode. We spend a lot of time and energy thinking about what's gonna happen when we die. We don't, really, as Christians, spend nearly enough time thinking about what's going to happen when we're resurrected. The gospel message directs us to this new kind of life that Jesus has opened up for us in his cross and resurrection. The question of “what's gonna happen when I die” is, scripturally, turning the gospel on its head because what the gospel directs us to is “what’s going to happen when I am resurrected” (knowing Jesus was the first to do that). Join us!
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A good apology can clear the air. A bad apology will make everything worse. Learning how to make a good apology is a relationship-saver. But nobody tells us how to do these things. I guess that’s why most of us are not very good at apologies! What a shame! We dig into to-do’s and to-dont’s on this episode. If you’re like us, you will discover that you have some apology habits that need an upgrade.
Email us with an example of an apology that DID or DIDN’T work for you.
Resource: Harriet Lerner’s book, Why won’t you apologize?
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There’s a big gap between reconciliation and modern ideas of forgiveness. This gap appears at all levels - between individuals, in local groups, and in nations. Modern forgiveness focuses on releasing anger and hurt so we can move on and be at peace. That’s so important! Reconciliation goes even further and seeks a renewal of the relationship after facing the difficulties of acknowledging the harm to the injured persons. Reconciliation is often not possible and that creates a gap. Once you see this gap, you can appreciate what’s missing from forgiveness. Understanding this gap helps you come to terms with what’s missing, accept it so you can have that release in forgiveness, and perhaps consider reaching further for reconciliation. We are called to reconciliation, that’s what’s held out to us in scripture as our model to imitate. It hurts when we can have it. As Kingdom people, we want to have a bias to reconciliation. Reconciliation is more possible than we think because it’s God’s way and desire.
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Forgiveness doesn’t have a simple definition or formula. It’s an act of will that also engages with the heart, which can be enlarged, illuminated, and encouraged but not commanded. Forgiveness has huge personal benefits, like releasing toxic emotions. It also extends into the world with social and political impacts. Forgiveness does not overlook wrongs - instead, it puts a spotlight on them so that what needs forgiveness is known to all and can be grieved. It does not cater to wrongdoers but creates new boundaries to be enforced. Forgiveness is not reconciliation although it’s a step towards it. Forgiveness is part of writing a new story for you in connection with the person or situation that’s being forgiven. Most of all, forgiveness is part of being an active member of the Kingdom of God, which is a kingdom of forgiveness and reconciliation for all.
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Forgiveness is one of those things you know you should do but nobody tells you how. It’s not easy. And it’s indispensable to the Christian life. In this episode we start off a podcast season on forgiveness with a theological perspective: Forgiveness is a way of life. Think more in terms of identity to step into than another obligation for you to deal with. Forgiveness is like a door that allows forgiveness to be received and to be given. The question is: how will we allow the door to open a little more?
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There’s an enormous evangelization opportunity for us. It’s a wonderful opportunity to meet people with their deepest needs. What is it? It’s marriage. People of all ages, even today in 2023, long for great marriages. We, Catholic parishes everywhere, can help. J.P. De Gance helps parishes help others build marriages and, by the way, grow their own parishes. In fact, his organization Communio has a track record of doing exactly that. Learn about the state of marriage, why it has everything to do with the future of the Church, and how we can help others be blessed.
Want to evangelize? Get your parish involved with Communio.
J.P. De Gance co-authored a book with all the details about WHAT and HOW there is a marriage vocations crisis and WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. It’s called Endgame, The Church's strategic move to save faith and family in America.
We would love to hear from you! Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
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In the interview with J.P. De Gance
A short video about transforming your parish to be a center of marriage evangelization; share with your parish leadership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8f4PEXT7Hs
Communio website: https://communio.org/
Website to Get the Book ENDGAME (Or go to Amazon): https://communio.org/endgame/
We commit listening violations frequently. It’s natural to jump in with our me-centric perspective. Listening, however, is other-centric when it’s performed at more than a surface level. We talk about some of the common listening violations and suggest alternatives. We want you to come away from this episode with ideas about how to spot what’s missing when your spouse is listening to you and what you might be overlooking as a listener. Listening is directly proportional to giving and receiving intimacy. Most of us are never taught even the most basic listening skills.
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When we are not satisfied with something in our marriage, it’s up to us to do something about it. Because that’s when things change, when someone is ready to make the effort to figure out what and how to change the patterns in the relationship. Often we have an idea that it’s just one “thing” that we are after. “Things” however almost always exist on a continuum. For instance, there’s no vision if we don’t have enough of both light and darkness because no contrast means there’s nothing to see. If we are not growing, we are going backwards, that’s the law of nature.
Today’s podcast talks about three tensions. Three “things” that are in opposition. But they aren’t really in opposition; it’s more like they are different ends of the same thing, or part of the same continuum. One of the “things” is Independence versus Intimacy. These are in tension in marriage. There’s always at least one area where we want more of one or the other.
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Join the conversation with Phil and Michelle at Connected Marriage, which has been transferring skills to married couples for more than a decade. Midlife is a time when our past investments and patterns start to yield fruit. You have mixed results. What’s going to change? Where is turning toward your spouse (not) happening? Also, why do women tend to give up on an area of relationship at about the time that the men are starting to notice it? Join us!
Get in touch with guests Phil or Michelle at www.connectedmarriage.org
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Grow grow grow. Worried about how great your marriage is going to be when it’s back to “just the two of us”? You should be! Maybe not worried, exactly, but proactive. What to do? Date nights? Common interests? Karen and Curtis invite you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What’s really going to serve this marriage? Think in terms of growth. Think SHARP! S is for Shared Vision. What are things you want to be able to say about your marriage in 10 years? What stories will you tell about your together experience? That’s “S”. Listen in for the rest!
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Everything pertains to love! That’s the title of a new Papal letter out on St. Francis de Sales, Totum Amoris Est, published on the 400-yr anniversary of the death of de Sales. It inspired us. St. Francis’ description of the love of God uses emotional language instead of dry philosophical arguments. It’s striking how de Sales worked hard to make loving God be attractive to his contemporaries. It was also striking how de Sales described the devout life (being holy) in terms of having an interior energy and alertness that's alive to God and the world instead of being a set of rules.
He lived in a time of religious wars, yet stressed that God always used attraction and persuasion to draw people to him. Despite being in the midst of violent religious strife, he did not retreat from the world but chose to engage in it.
Pope Francis, in this reflection on DeSales, leads us to discern our situations: What does love look like here? Where can love be found? de Sales poses these questions not as a theory or a sweet ideal, but as a man that was in full contact with the extreme conflicts of his day and as a spiritual advisor to thousands of men and women.
What great questions! Discerning what we need to do is our job and our challenge.
Join us when you listen to the podcast and be inspired!
Read Totum Amoris Est here.
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Life goals are so important! Without goals, momentum starts to take over your life. You live in reaction mode. Your past controls your future. Your day-to-day life blocks your bigger questions about what your life goals are.
What are you going to put on the table? Because God is waiting to help you bring your gifts and talents into play. We often want God to simply tell us what to do. At The Catholic Midlife podcast, we believe He is often waiting for YOU to tell HIM something you want to do. What will you offer?
Here are some signs that you might be letting momentum take over your life: You are not setting goals. Your goals are not stretching and changing you. You are not acting like an apprentice in any areas of life; you are comfortable; you lack resilience dealing with obstacles; or you live by checking off your to-do list versus focusing on your goals.
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The question for goals is: What is the harvest that you want? Goals are all about the Law of the Farm: you plan, you prepare the field by removing rocks and tilling, you plant, you water, you do the right things in the right season, and finally you harvest. Goals engage the law of the farm by creating the plan & engaging the process. There is SCIENCE to this; there is also ART. You make a lot of decisions along the way that changes the process or influence the outcome.
Goals are so helpful in keeping us moving! It’s easy for inertia to grab us with the result that we go in circles or dig into our rut deeper.
Join us as we share tips and traps for setting goals.
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“Why Goals?” Because the rest of your life matters. Grab that mindset. Often we are merely coping. Striving to do what is necessary and carve out a little “life” in between. When we believe that the rest of our life matters in terms of what we live, do, say, and be - we have a different outlook. The people around us need us to show up at our best. The culture around us needs the Christian perspective and service; the life-giving, loving, and supportive presence that justifies being called the salt of the earth or the yeast in the dough.
How do you think and feel when you truly think that the rest of your life matters? If you’re 50 years old, you could easily end up living another 30 years. Think about what you’ve accomplished, and what you’ve left undone, for the past 30 years. What does another 30 years mean? To you? To God? To those around you? To the culture around you?
It’s midlife, baby! Time to dig in and dig out. We think an important angle to the rest of your life is to think about what it means to be a member of the kingdom of God. Working it all out with your Creator is quite the process, right? Here’s a suggestion: think in terms of opportunities.
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“Why can't I achieve this goal?” There are a lot of reasons. For example, we don't always set the right goals. And when we set them, we don't always have a clear sense of what it will actually be like to achieve them. Also, we have a bunch of unspoken goals that we're already working on consciously and unconsciously, and those can take priority without us even realizing it. So we may not even appreciate that we're already working on many goals.
Think about what's your approach to achieving a goal. If you're like most of us, you've got a goal in mind, you sketch out the steps, and then you're thinking, “OK, here's the next thing to do. Here's the first step, and I'm gonna just get started.” You might throw in a couple, “I got this.”
That’s the instinctive go-to plan: to use some willpower, maybe with some affirmation thrown in there. Often it hasn't worked out for us… New Year’s resolutions, anyone??
I think we don't appreciate that we when think of “goals” we think about the external process to goal achievement, namely, I decide on the goal, and then I think about what I need to do to get there. And then I “motivate” myself to take action. Make a list of the steps, get pumped up, and get going.
The internal has to come first. That’s why we talk about unconscious goals in this episode. See ya there!
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Christ is born to be King! He IS King, now. Merry Christmas! That makes us agents of the New Creation because Christ has already started the New Creation. Paul talks about this a lot. God wants to dwell with man and will bring heaven down to earth and they will exist together in the new creation; think of the New Jerusalem descending in Revelations. Christ, he says, is the “first fruits” of the new creation. He’s the first to be resurrected, to show us the way. He’s sent the spirit to us, and we, too have the “first fruits” of the new creation.
Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for… creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. -Romans 8:19-24
“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. -Isaiah 65:17-18
All of creation is groaning, awaiting its deliverance! We suffer with Christ and with the world, which is God’s kingdom, just as Christ suffers with us and with all creation. We are Christ’s children and heirs; we enter into his suffering and are glorified with him.
You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. - Romans 8:15-17
We have a vocation of being the people of God. It has personal and communal consequences. As Paul says, Jesus is the king of the whole world. In heaven and earth, He reigns. And when we're in Christ, we're fellow heirs to the kingdom. We're celebrating the new creation. We're celebrating that we are part of the new creation. We are agents of the new creation, and we anticipate the new creation right now in the present age as we wait and hope for the new heavens and the new earth.
Always God hears the “groaning.” God is victorious. God acts, and we are anchored in the hope and glory that is there for us, and nothing can separate us from the love of God.No principalities, powers, rulers of the world - whatever it is, nothing can separate us.
Merry Christmas season!
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You are a citizen of Heaven - did you know that? Paul wrote that in Philippians 3. His listeners would immediately know that’s like being a citizen of Rome.
Philippi was a colony. Roman citizens there were agents and emissaries of Roman culture, law, language, customs, and power. Roman citizens living in Philippi weren't interested in leaving Philippi and going to Rome if things got dicey. They would call on the emperor to send in backup.
John’s gospel, which is our focus this season, explains that Jesus has already started his kingdom on Earth. You are a citizen of that kingdom.
That makes you an agent and emissary of the Kingdom of Heaven’s culture, law, language, customs, power, and all of it. Citizens living on planet Earth aren’t interested in leaving Earth just so they can go to Heaven. God will bring Heaven down to Earth in the end times. That’s a process that’s already started. Jesus inaugurated it. He rose again as the first member of that blended new creation of Heaven and Earth. We will follow him.
Our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. - Philippians 3:20
We can think we’re just putting in our time, being “good” so we can get to heaven. That’s a beautiful idea that we get from Greek pagans. Not a Christian idea. Nope.
We are the agents of King Jesus and work so that his Father’s will is done here, as it is in heaven. Then God will come to be with His people. Now we see that imperfectly. Later, it will come about in fullness.
We can forget we are agents of Heaven and try to do “good” without reference to the kingdom. For instance, we might perform acts of charity without bringing the gospel. Works of mercy are valuable however activism without the rest of the gospel is merely a stop-gap solution.
Also, for instance, we can passively be “good” in the hopes that, somehow, we will perform the other roles of our heavenly citizenship, like bringing the Kingdom of Heaven’s culture, law, language (of love), customs, (restorative) power, and all of its many facets.
A temple is a particular place where heaven and earth are joined. We see the temple in creation, the tent of meeting, the tabernacle, the temple of Jerusalem, in Jesus, in his people, and in our bodies where the Spirit rests.
More in the podcast, I only got some of this in here (Curtis). Thanks for dropping in! Send us an email with your thoughts, questions, or impressions!
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John is determined to show how the Shekinah has returned in an unexpected way: in the person of Jesus. Then who, when, where, and how of its return is shocking. There could be no messiah without addressing the Temple question. The Messiah would restore the temple. Period. No restored temple, no messiah. The Temple was central to Jewish thought, history, practice, mindset - to everything. If the messiah did not restore the Shekinah, which is the glorious presence of God, there was no messiah. Scripture was very clear on this point. Ezekiel 43 has a beautiful passage describing the return of the Shekinah.
It behooves us to pay attention.
God created a cosmos like a temple and there He had a place to dwell, with humanity. God then saw creation descend into chaos and misery and, as Adam and Eve were banished, He also withdrew the glory of His presence, perhaps because He no longer had a suitable place to come to rest / to dwell / to pitch His tent.
He created the Jewish tribe as a place to dwell. With the tent of meeting, tabernacle, and then Temple, he dwelt among them. The people were fickle and He could no longer dwell among them, and He withdrew. Finally, he sent His only son.
God put a lot of work and planning into creating the Temple as His place to dwell. What does that mean? What does it mean about our relation to God? To Jesus? To the Holy Spirit? What does it mean as individuals and as a people?
The Seven Signs of the Return of the Shekinah
Read the miracle at the wedding feast of Cana. John explicitly says that’s the first sign. As John’s story progresses, he increasingly reveals more and more of the glory of God that Jesus manifests. When Jesus does healing for the nobleman whose son was sick at Capernaum, John’s gospel explicitly names it as the second sign. After that, John leaves the signs to be observed by the readers.
The further signs three through six are: There's the paralytic at the pool; the loaves and fishes; healing the man blind from birth; and Lazarus. Each progressively reveals more glory.
The Seventh Sign
What is the seventh sign of the increased revelation of glory? The sign greater than Lazarus’ resurrection? What would you pick?
I would pick the resurrection. Max glory, I would say. Can’t top that!
That’s not what John’s gospel picked. John picked the crucifixion as the summit of the return of the Shekinah.
We know this because Jesus’ last words were: It is finished. These words invoke God’s words when he rested on the seventh day of creation, and signal that Jesus is kicking off the new creation right then and there. The resurrection is testimony to the crucifixion and inauguration of the new reality in the new creation.
Max glory: Crucifixion. The Shekinah has appeared and been revealed. Ecce homo.
What does this mean?
Ecce Homo
We think it is crucial to view the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the context of the story they tell about themselves through their words, deeds, and revelations.
Theological formulae about atonement and the Trinity are indispensable but ultimately reveal very little. I’ve heard a bunch of atonement theories. Heard a bunch of questions asked and answered. That’s fine and even necessary. But it gives little light. These kinds of formulae and explanations perhaps obscure as much as they reveal.
How is it that the crucifixion is the final sign of the full revelation of God’s glory returning to His people?
What’s in the story, the narrative, that John provides us that gives us answers?
Many books could be written in response!
It seems to me (Curtis) that, if the crucifixion is the final sign of the return of the Shekinah then one thing that God is telling us is that his glory is revealed when He shares and meets us in our suffering.
His story always involves Him coming to find a place to dwell among us, all throughout the history of humanity.
There is so much suffering here. Only God could sort all of this out. He meets us in the midst of it all. He is bringing His presence, His gaze, and His hope.
The New Creation
Looking ahead to the upper room, considering that the crucifixion marks the start of a new creation - and thinking about the Genesis story of breathing life into humanity…what does it mean in John 20 when Jesus breathes on them?
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Most of our listeners know that using the covenant “lens” is a powerful organizing principle for reading Scripture. It helps explain what’s happening and creates insights for us today. The Temple “lens” is a similar powerful organizing principle. There are some surprises there, at least for me (Curtis). I knew Jesus referred to himself as a temple but somehow that slid past me because, well, that old Jerusalem temple isn’t around anymore and its role was replaced. Or maybe I heard growing up that “your body is a temple” that shalt not (fill in the blank) and it seemed like routine moralizing. zzzz
The “new creation” theme also runs strongly through the Old and New Testaments, with the gospel of John opening with a blatant evocation of creation “in the beginning.” New creation and temple are related themes since, as you know from the previous episode 41, the original new creation of the cosmos was described in Genesis as a cosmic temple for God.
In Exodus, themes of the temple and new creation are running strong. The tabernacle and meeting tent evoke the temple. And God is making a new creation in the form of the Jewish tribe that has become His special place to dwell.
This brings us to the Shekinah, the majestic presence of God. The Shekinah left the temple in a heart-breaking scene in Ezekiel 10. What is the people of God without the presence of God? The Exile follows with untold hardship.
By the time of the first century AD, the temple had been rebuilt and then built out by Herod. Nobody believed, however, that the Shekinah had returned. Nobody.
There was hope, however. Ezekiel 43 predicted Shekinah’s return. The Jewish people did a great job of sustaining hope through many long, dark years.
It did so in a shocking way.
One of the goals of the gospel of John is to shift Jewish temple theology and place it squarely in the person of Jesus. He is the temple, the image in the temple, the offering, and the priest.
John’s narrative carefully includes this theme of the glory of God being unveiled in Jesus and the Spirit resting in Jesus. (You remember from Episode 41 what it means when God is “resting,” right?)
We continue this series next week to try to understand what it all means.
In the meantime, as you read the New Testament, look for places where the Spirit comes to rest on someone (that’s temple language) or the glory of God is revealed (that’s the Shekinah). We are working mostly out of John’s gospel, so mostly read that one!
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The creation account in Genesis is not understood by modern people. We’ve pretty much missed every important point in it. We have read all of our modern preconceptions into it, wondered why it makes little sense, and then created pointless controversies about why it is so. Listen to the podcast to grasp what Genesis is actually all about.
God Resting Doesn’t Mean Watching the Superbowl, with snacks
We can look at how the words of Genesis are used in other places in Scripture. We can also look at other creation stories to see what THEY are talking about so we can get a grip on the mindset and assumptions the listeners of these ancient stories had.
Here’s one ancient mindset: gods come to earth to dwell in temples. What they do there is “rest.” When a god was resting in his or her temple, she was busy ruling the region. In modern terms, we might say “the spirit rested upon him and he prophesied” meaning the spirit took up residence and started making things happen.
When God “rested” on the seventh day, it means He was taking up residence. He was assuming control of the operations. He was on the job, doing the things that He does.
It’s as if you moved from one home to the next. After you pack, ship, unpack, arrange, turn on utilities, hook up the water and internet… THEN you “rest.” Because you’re operations; You are good to go.
God rests in a Temple
Here’s another thing the ancients understood: gods rest in temples. It’s what they do!
When the ancients read an account of all the things that happened in the first six days, they would think “Sounds about right, but so what?” Then they would hear “God rested” there in creation. Suddenly the ancient prelightbulbs would go off, “aha!” You are describing six days to make a temple for God to rest in. And that cosmic temple is… Earth.
Wow.
There’s more but you have to listen because we have to post the episode now and I can’t be writing more stuff. Find out what God put in his temple and the no-way so what about that!
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
-Genesis 2:2-3
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Gratitude has its ins and outs! Karen discusses how gratitude shows up in our lives, points to a couple of pitfalls, and shares some tips. We are grateful for you, our listeners, and invite you to join the discussion at The Catholic Midlife podcast.
What a great question! How should you relate to your emotions, indeed? We paint a picture for you in this episode, which wraps up our Surprising Mind season. We also share 10 common, erroneous myths about emotions and talk about how we have synergy or overlap with certain healing ministries.
Painting A Picture for relating to your emotions
Think of a Catholic man or woman in midlife, which you probably are. And, in this person’s life, her dad passed away several years ago. She’s had some time to grieve and heal.
And today there’s something coming up like a birthday or an anniversary. She’s sad because her dad's not there to celebrate with her. She is sad.
That's a present moment, an emotional experience, and of course, she might be sad and might weep or be downcast for a time. She might think about her dad and process through the experience of the emotion.
That’s an example of a healthy way for your emotions to show up.
Now, let’s go further and say that she has baggage that she hasn’t released, like an emotional block or some kind of limiting belief. As she thinks about missing her dad, a bunch of other thoughts and emotions also arise: “my dad wasn't there for me, he wasn't a very good dad. I have a lot of hurts. I feel abandoned.” And all that stuff comes up when she is experiencing the sadness.
That's the past coming to invade your present emotional experience. That's baggage.
If and when she releases and lets go of all that baggage, then she can enter into the present moment, an emotional experience that’s natural, healthy, and without added stress and darkness.
That’s the kind of experience that also creates false beliefs like, “nobody's gonna be there to help me. I've gotta do it all on my own, all the time.”
In terms of the relationship, she might just think,” Yeah, I've got baggage, and I always will. That's just how it is.”
You can do the work to get rid of your baggage. So you can feel better about life. So you don’t walk around unloading it on others, or letting it come out sideways. So your spiritual life can take deeper root in the other areas of your life. So you can have interior peace and freedom.
Ten Untrue Myths About Emotions
- Working with the emotions means suppressing them.
- Having strong feelings means I'm out of control.
- It’s wrong or inauthentic to shift my emotions.
- My emotions speak the absolute truth.
- Some emotions are stupid.
- Emotions happen for no reason.
- It’s better to be rational than emotional.
- I am my emotions.
- I should put on a mask and not show others how I feel.
- If I feel like doing something, then that must be the right decision for me.
- I should feel like everyone else is feeling.
We had a lot of fun talking about these myths. Karen found a buzzer. Kind of a weak goose buzzer, but she had fun giving them the buzzer.
There are 10 myths plus a bonus myth. Ha!
Which of these myths do you find yourself buying into from time to time?
"Pray, hope, and don’t worry. Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer."
-Padre Pio
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We are not OK with it
I'm coming to realize that there are people that believe that they don't deserve compassion. As you sit there, you might think that's ridiculous because you know that God made each of us, so of course, we deserve compassion.
But then you start digging down into some specific situations and particular circumstances and you find, if you dig enough, that you believe you don’t deserve compassion in some area of life. Like the time you made a mistake or you acted poorly or went even farther astray than that. All of a sudden you are thinking, since I am like X, I don’t deserve compassion.
That’s baggage. There’s a belief and some emotion hanging out with it. That baggage is interfering with the action of grace. Makes it harder for grace to penetrate you.
A large part of why we do what we do at The Catholic Midlife is that we have come to recognize the layers of the human person, the way they all work together, and the way that the mental and emotional life, and you could call it the unconscious life, is very connected with what's going on in our spiritual life.
There's a lot of research that says it's connected to what's going on in our physical life and in our bodies too.
These false beliefs, these mental patterns that cut us off from healing, that interfere with God's action in our lives… It's, it's very sad.
We're not okay with it.
We're gonna do something about it. We are doing something about it. It’s a reason that we are here, now, in The Catholic Midlife podcast.
Mental Emotional Release (MER)
We offer a process called Mental Emotional Release (MER).
Because we all have baggage. It ranges from uncomfortable, annoying, to burdensome, to crushing and paralyzing.
MER is a process that uses the language of the unconscious mind to release baggage. It speaks to your conscious and unconscious mind at the same time. Your conscious mind understands what’s happening, and because communication is simultaneously easy for the unconscious to understand, you can work with both at the same time. That’s why it’s fast, powerful, and effective.
MER is another way to find the release of baggage so healing and moving on can happen faster and more completely. Prayer and seeking to understand how your own baggage manifests are complementary ways of getting to the same thing. We pray we think, we consult with others, and we act.
MER is for you if :
- You don’t want to re-experience negative emotions as you seek healing
- You feel unresolved guilt, anger, sadness, fear, or hurt from past events that you are unable to release
- You ruminate on current or past situations and wish you could just let go of them
- You desire to act on certain things in your life and avoid or get blocked in creating the change you want
- You find yourself getting ‘triggered’ or responding in an unwarranted way to present situations
- You feel burdened by heavy emotions like fear, anxiety, or discouragement
- You can’t move on in your life and you don’t know how to change that
- You struggle to establish new habits or behaviors and keep falling back into old patterns
- You’ve resigned yourself to the fact that “this is just the way I am, I don’t like it but I can’t change it”
- You have a chronic illness, phobias, or allergies; these are often made worse by your thoughts and emotions
- You are holding onto deep unconscious beliefs that drive your behavior, such as I don’t have what it takes, I’m not worthy, I’m stupid
What clients have to say
“Before my Breakthrough Session of MER, I described my stress level as a 9 out of 10 due to the severity of my medical situation. After meeting with Karen, my stress level was a 2. I am feeling grounded and have released my anxiety. Thank you, Karen, I am so grateful!”
"I've tried so many different avenues, and this is the single most helpful thing I've ever done."
“The body keeps the score.”
–Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk
Book a consult if you think maybe you are feeling interested
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Your unconscious mind is in charge of creating and executing your habits! Habits include your thoughts and emotions. Brushing your teeth is a habit. So is the way you manage conflict. Your style of talking to yourself is also a habit - what’s your self-talk like? Is it mostly positive? Negative? Some things just “set you off”, right? Those “things” are triggers that cause a habit to kick in.
Habits of the mind are very powerful. These are typically a huge factor in how much we enjoy life, how effective we are, and whether or not our spiritual values can permeate the “rest of us,” such as our mental and emotional realms.
The good news is that habits of the mind are behaviors. And they are habits like other habits. Like all habits, habits of the mind have several steps in most situations. Knowing what all the steps are is a good place to start. Knowing the steps, you can start to change one or more of the steps.
Listen to pick up some tips!
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Your unconscious mind does some powerful and amazing things for you. . .but how do you get it on board with who you’re trying to be and where you’re trying to go? Get some tips on working with your elephant and talking to it the way it likes to be talked to–because after all, your unconscious mind is YOU and it can also be your very best friend.
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We are going to share a metaphor with you about how your mind works and suggest a couple of ways for you to manage yourself with more grace.
The ancients knew that teaching wisdom involved touching the heart and the mind. Here are a couple of examples: “It is better to obey the Lord and to have only a little than to be very rich and terribly anxious.” And “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Modern minds are so deeply enmeshed in scientific materialism that we're not even aware of it. It colors everything we do. Scientists reduce complex phenomena to know the fewest possible true things - that’s scientific parsimony.
We are always boiling complexity down to a few logical, abstract concepts. It’s a reduction of reality down to abstract ideas. It's a very powerful approach.
It’s hard for you not to constantly do this.
It's also a disaster when it's used to try to understand love, God, virtue, beauty, or basically anything that's really important.
The heart helps us understand these really important things - the sorts of things that can’t be reduced to a few abstract concepts.
Our Western mindset, however, separates the “mind” and the “heart.” We want to logic our way through everything. We want the church to tell us exactly what rules to follow. (Thanks, Paul, for the law of life-in-the-spirit-of-the-messiah (Romans 8) but now let’s get down to business, so tell us exactly what law to follow)). We fall into the trap of thinking “once I have decided I will do it, I will do it because I have decided to do so.”
The Western mind likes to think of a human as being governed by an “intellect” that uses its “will” to seek the good. If we fail to achieve good, we are stupid, lazy, sinful, lack persistence, or otherwise, fail to measure up.
Man up, and go get it!!
That’s an incomplete picture.
I’m not telling you it’s a “wrong” picture. But I can tell you it’s a very crude map of who you are and how you actually work.
Here’s a better way to map this.
Think of a rider on a very large elephant.
The rider is your conscious mind, what you probably identify with as being “you.” It’s the language user, the tool user, the goal-setter, the planner, and the logical one.
The elephant is more or less everything else: it’s your unconscious mind. It’s a huge elephant – a really big one – which is the emotional brain: it’s powerful, impulsive, the source of motivation and it’s what moves us. The unconscious mind is the goal-getter.
The rider and elephant metaphor was coined by the positive psychologist Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. And it’s discussed at length by Dan and Chip Heath in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.
When the rider and the elephant are in conflict, the elephant will usually win. It’s massive and will eventually wear out the rider when it’s not really on board with what the rider has in mind.
Just because the rider wants something doesn’t mean she’s going to get it. Check-in with your elephant - get it to a good place if you want to get something done.
And don’t get mad at yourself if you don’t follow through on your plans. Instead, start asking the elephant - what’s going on? Why aren’t you on board with this?
The rider - the conscious language user - makes the PLANS. But it’s the elephant and rider TOGETHER that take action. And if the elephant’s not cooperating, the rider LOSES.
Learn how to cooperate with your elephant!
Here’s another tip: Your elephant likes specific, clear directions. I want to weigh 185 pounds by Easter, not “I want to lose weight.” The elephant wants to know exactly what to do: eat only whole foods as opposed to “eat healthily.”
Another tip: the elephant has a big, fat negativity bias. It’s always scanning for threats. When it finds one, it stops scanning, picks it up, and looks it over. Ponders it. Plays with it. What ifs with it. Swats it with its amazing trunk.
If you aren’t good at redirecting your elephant, it’s going to spend a lot of time finding negative things to toy with. Like your negative future. Or why that person is a real jerk? Or how unfair the past has been. Or the failures of your circumstances to bring you good things.
For some of these negatives, it will slip them in without you noticing, like attributing the lowest of motives to someone you are dealing with.
There are many many tips for working with the unconscious mind. We are experts in rooting out outdated perspectives and releasing pointless emotional baggage.
If you hang on to the metaphor of the elephant and rider and keep asking yourself “what’s really going on here - why am I acting this way?” then you will be ahead of the game!
Listen to the podcast for more, plus some anecdotes that illustrate.
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Quote from Karen in the podcast: “ The map is not the territory, and I do, I just am going to add a second thing I want people to take away, which is: it is possible to change your map at any time. It's possible. There's hope and, and we've seen this, I've seen this in my clients. It's what we do. There are techniques to shift your mental map and in the power of the Holy Spirit with the right techniques, this totally is possible. I just want people to feel hopeful about who they can be and how they can process the world, and what kinds of experiences God has for us and, and what's possible.”
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Karen tells the story of the man who thought he was Jesus Christ, somewhere in California in the sixties. It took a while for this version of Jesus to figure that one out. He needed a little help from Richard Bandler, who went on to become a famous psychologist. All I can say to California Jesus, is: Dude, like, that’s so bogus, right?
Everything that you know about the world around you came to you via your senses. All of it. The impressions passed into you and your unconscious mind put them into the place in the inner firmament of your mind. When you contemplate the world, you are contemplating your inner reflection of it.
Eastern thought has sometimes concluded that all of the universe is therefore an illusion, or, at least, that we can create our own reality using our minds. Or, failing that, we can at least overcome the universe by recognizing it as an illusion and transitory experience.
Western thought does not accept that. The universe is real.
But Western minds can benefit from realizing that their experience of life is deeply conditioned by the unconscious mind, by your thoughts, beliefs, and values that you have in play when receiving impressions of the outer universe.
Our minds carry maps of the universe; these maps are NOT reality. It is so very helpful to remember this. We can adjust our maps to better fit reality and to fit into reality in a way that serves us better. To be happier and to live out our highest values and beliefs with greater integrity and verve.
The man that thought he was Jesus Christ had a map of the universe that was grossly in error, to the point where he couldn’t navigate external realities and had to be institutionalized.
Maybe we don’t need to be institutionalized but we all have areas on our map that are not in accord with reality. We are finite beings and have to make a lot of assumptions and take shortcuts just to get through the day.
The map is not the reality; so what?
Once you start to become aware of how your thoughts, beliefs, values and all that you take for granted in your unconscious mind are steering you… you could start to be more in charge of your own life, living more intentionally with your values, and having, frankly, a much more enjoyable and positive experience.
By the time you hit midlife, your map is seriously outdated in some areas because a lot of that map was built at a very young age when you didn’t have a lot of smarts, or they are based on first impressions that you didn’t get a chance to reexamine.
Midlife is such a great opportunity to set the stage for your next 20-plus years. Have a happy and productive life, filled with faith and generosity, and new life.
Join our Self-Compassion Group starting November 2022
Quote from Karen in the podcast: “ The map is not the territory, and I do, I just am going to add a second thing I want people to take away, which is: it is possible to change your map at any time. It's possible. There's hope, and we've seen this, I've seen this in my clients. It's what we do. There are techniques to shift your mental map and in the power of the Holy Spirit with the right techniques, this totally is possible. I just want people to feel hopeful about who they can be and how they can process the world, and what kinds of experiences God has for us and, and what's possible.”
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Time for a new season! It’s your surprising mind. Getting a handle on some of its quirks can really give you a head start on navigating life’s obstacles and continuing to grow.
Perspectives on the prodigal son
The parable of the prodigal son. Think about what you’ve thought and heard about it. Here’s the younger son, shockingly asking for his share of the estate before his father is dead. Then going away to the heathen that were not the people of God that the Jews sought to be. And then wasting all that money. Wasting it on immoral activities. Then coming back, dejected, just looking for something to eat. Then the father running out to greet him, welcoming him back. Throwing a party, even!
People from Western cultures, upon hearing that story and being asked to repeat it and reflect upon it will mostly focus on the son… the sin, the repentance, the return, and his generous reception. Or maybe they would focus on the father welcoming back the lost sheep.
People from certain other cultures, when asked to re-tell the story, will emphasize… the famine.
Did I mention the famine? Guess I forgot it. It’s just a plot device, I thought.
These other cultures know what famine is. It’s a terror. When famine struck the son in that foreign land, it made a big impression on them. The issue was: the son had hit rock bottom, he was lost.
First-century Jews, according to NT Wright, would hear the parable of the prodigal son and hear that the long-awaiting kingdom of God that so many Jewish people had hoped for and longed for would include… the gentiles.
The lens for the prodigal son parable
My unconscious mind interprets the prodigal son story according to the values and symbols that are familiar to me. Work hard, respect the family business, don’t waste your money on frivolity, don’t spend money on vices, take care of your finances and certainly don’t waste it all, have gratitude when your family treats you better than you deserve, and don’t be jealous of someone who’s getting some nice treatment. All that stuff.
I have a powerful lens that guides how I see scripture. And how I see those around me, events, myself, my experiences, and everything else.
That lens comes from biology, experiences, my understanding of how the world works, values, patterns of thought, habits, what I learned growing up, and what I’ve absorbed from my culture and my beliefs. All that is whirled up into a map of what the world is like and how it works. Visualize whirled peas.
What you believe
Each of us works to understand how the world and people around us operate. We have a map. Most of what we know and understand is likely to be more or less correct. Alas, it is also true for each of us that there are things that we believe about how the world works and about ourselves that are not true and are no longer serving us. It’s a universal truth because many of these beliefs are formed after only a little bit of experience at a very young age.
Since these beliefs pass into our map of how the world “is” we don’t question them. They condition everything that happens.
For example, if you were to believe that nobody has goodwill and they only help you because you are giving them something, then every interaction you have would be judged according to that belief. And when you had interactions that didn’t fit that belief, you would basically ignore them, because what you pay attention to, even literally what you SEE is conditioned by your beliefs. You would be pretty cynical.
Or, just to throw an extreme hypothetical out there, if you believed that all relationships are about POWER then you would judge them all in that light. And not see all the other values that are so very important to your relationships. You might become embittered and estranged from the world as a result. That’s an extreme example, right?
Our lens strongly conditions how we experience reality. It’s surprising. Our lens is not morally good or bad: it serves us. Even as it helps us navigate a complex universe so we can figure out what’s going on around us, it’s also limiting what we see and can do. It cuts in all directions.
The point is to realize when it’s controlling what’s happening to you. And to learn how to work with it, in cooperation. And to know it well enough to help it be renewed by the Spirit instead of holding onto an outdated view of who you are and how the universe works.
Stay tuned for more about the surprising mind!
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A great inner life includes a realistic and kind inner dialogue with ourselves. We can learn to replace the accusatory voice of our inner critic with a voice of truth and love that is consistent with God’s compassion for us, compassion that meets us, lifts us up, and makes us want to go forward!
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"Self love is the basic form of love on which all others are founded and makes all others possible.... We are always engaged in somewhat repressing this truth, which strikes us as somehow unseemly"
Josef Pieper
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We often unconsciously resist receiving God’s love and the graces that flow with it.
We get discouraged, we ruminate, and we isolate ourselves. We criticize ourselves. We criticize other people. We get stuck in these judgment loops and all of that keeps us both from hearing God's voice and from seeing ourselves the way that God sees us.
What if we saw ourselves through the eyes of God’s compassion for us? Could we start allowing God to really help us to have that kind of a vision - instead of looking through some other lens?
Jesus had great compassion. He felt the stirrings of compassion deeply and stepped forward into action to heal, to forgive, and to restore. He sees the great value of each person. Their dignity. Their freedom.
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
Matthew 9:36
God sees us with great compassion and wants good things for us.
Taking on the inner critic with self-compassion
We each have an inner critic that tells us a version of “you are a loser”, “you are not worthy of love” “you have to be _____ before God or anyone will love you.” It’s the voice that jumps on us as soon as we make a mistake, do something that embarrasses us, or fall short of success. Sometimes it’s the paralysis that shows up when we are trying something new or extending ourselves and we just can’t risk trying. Psychologists tell us the inner critic is essentially universal.
It’s a voice that can control how we experience our lives. That dictates our emotions in difficult moments. That conditions what we will choose.
We could have a different experience of life. A life with a voice that speaks compassionately to us, like Jesus would speak to us. Even if we are need to be told difficult things or be confronted with our shortcomings, we can hear a compassionate voice. The voice of encouragement and inspiration that drives out fear.
A self-compassionate voice.
Join our Self-Compassion Group starting October 2022
Women: https://midlife.thmlcoaching.com/self-compassion-seeing-yourself-through-the-eyes-of-god
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"Self love is the basic form of love on which all others are founded and makes all others possible.... We are always engaged in somewhat repressing this truth, which strikes us as somehow unseemly"
Josef Pieper
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Text: The Catholic Midlife podcast: 612-208-9150.
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What do I need now?
Oh, that’s EASY: I need some chocolate, coffee, or both!
LOL, no, That’s not what I need - that’s more like a passing thought before I realize: no, I need a lot more than that at this time.
Asking “What do I need now” is the third step in the self-compassion break.
Our habit is to skip straight to this question. Or to skip even this question and ask, instead, what does THIS PROBLEM need right now?
Can you see the distinction between solving the problem and taking the step that you need right now, with the steps you need right now coming BEFORE you solve the problem?
Were you following us when we talked about the previous two steps, which are more or less the two prior episodes?
Remember the first step is an awareness that’s nonjudgmental and ready to see suffering in yourself or others. It’s an awareness that doesn’t hurry by. It’s already setting you up to be fully present for yourself, without overreacting or dismissing your difficulty, suffering, setback, frustration, or whatever it is.
The second step is telling yourself how this difficulty is connected to the broader human experience, how others suffer, and that suffering or setbacks are part of the human experience. You connect yourself so that you don’t go into isolation, which is our mostly typical response.
Now you are ready to ask: What do I need now?
Consider that sometimes what we need is inwardly-directed. A moment of emotional reassurance, some physical calming, or simply validation that, yes, this situation is tough. Sometimes we will need to step into discomfort, to acknowledge, yes, taking this next step is also challenging but it’s time to take the action that is needed here, perhaps to give something a try, to step into conflict, to create a boundary, or perhaps to step back and respect someone else’s boundary.
Ask for the tip sheet!!
If you would like a PDF that you can use to guide yourself through a self-compassion break, email us & we would be happy to send it to you. It’s free!
We would love to see you experiment with this practice!
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Do those around you deserve to be treated with compassion?
With compassionate speech, which is kind and sensitive to speak in a manner that is helpful?
With an act of compassion, such as a hug, a hand on the shoulder, or a smile at the right time?
Do they deserve to be encouraged when life is offering them difficulty?
What does it say about you, when you are able to act compassionately?
What about you?
Do you deserve to be treated with compassion?
Do you really deserve to be treated with compassion?
By others?
What about you - do you deserve to be treated with compassion by yourself?
You try to be compassionate with others: it’s time that you included yourself in this circle of compassion.
When a friend has gotten knocked down, would you go over and kick them when they are down?
But speaking harshly to ourselves is the norm:
“You are such an idiot”
“I can’t believe you did something so stupid”
“What’s wrong with me to act so ___________”
Here’s the truth: you deserve to be treated with compassion.
Practicing self-compassion will make you stronger, braver, and more successful in almost every area of life. There’s nothing puny about self-compassion.
Today’s podcast episode presented the basics of an exercise that Kristin Neff (the modern founder of the self-compassion movement) calls a “self-compassion break.”
First, be aware when compassion is needed, and acknowledge the moment by saying “This is a difficult moment” or other words that help you hear the compassion. Perhaps if you have an argument in a relationship, you could say “It is very painful to be arguing in this relationship.”
Second, connect what’s happening to the bigger picture of human life and realize that you are not alone when you suffer. Reflect on how others have, been, and are, suffering. Say true words to yourself, perhaps “Others are suffering with this problem now. Suffering is a normal part of human life.”
Third, ask yourself: “What do I need now?”
This question is powerful. Karen and I will discuss it in the next episode.
If you would like a PDF that you can use to guide yourself through a self-compassion break, email us & we would be happy to send it to you. It’s free!
We would love to see you experiment with this practice!
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When am I supposed to practice the skill of self-compassion?
There are lots of chances every day! If you hate being late and you're being late to someplace - maybe your automatic reaction is I should have done “this” or “that” and why didn’t I and why am I so dumb? That's an opportunity to stop and use some self-compassion.
Maybe you need to make a difficult phone call and fear of looking dumb or creating conflict is holding you back. Self-compassion can help you embrace these fears and accept them so you can make the call.
Maybe you make a mistake at work. Like entering a wrong number in the chart of accounts. We tend to have an idea that we're never going to make a mistake. Or that, if we do, we are “bad.” We make plenty of mistakes… it’s a perfect opportunity to practice self-compassion.
And it’s for the big things. The really big things.
Things like areas of shame, areas of anger, areas of disillusionment… when you experience those huge paralyzing emotions often, that's where self-compassion is the skill that we reach for... To dig out and, and to being again.
Without interior peace, you can do little. With peace, you can be much more effective and it’s easier to hear the voices of wisdom and grace.
The fact is those emotions and stressors go somewhere. If you're not engaging with them in a positive and productive way, they're going to find some other outlet, and sooner or later you'll be experiencing its effects.
Self-compassion: think of this discipline when you are having negative emotions or strong emotions, or when you have a trial or a difficult situation that's causing you stress - or when you encounter your own weakness, something you're not good at. Think of self-compassion when you're suffering any instance of pain or suffering: physical, emotional, relational - those are opportunities for self-compassion.
AWARENESS is the first step in your self-compassion discipline
Awareness. You could also refer to awareness as mindfulness.
If someone is suffering, and you walk by, oblivious, there’s no opportunity to exercise compassion.
You have to see the suffering before you can exercise compassion. The suffering of the others around you. Your own suffering.
That’s really not the norm. You would think it is.
We often skip over the awareness of the suffering, pain, or discomfort. Moving straight to PROBLEM-SOLVING is one way to do that.
And we just keep moving…and don’t come back to that suffering. And we miss the opportunity to have compassion. And the consequent opportunity to put our best foot forward.
There are basically three parts to a discipline of self-compassion,
It's really hard to overstate the importance of this first part, the skill of creating awareness. More specifically, an awareness of what “is” without adding or subtracting from the reality of what God is allowing to happen now.
Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Matthew 7:1
As we suspend judgment, we resist the temptation to make assumptions, generalizations, and distortions that make it harder to respond to what’s happening. As we make judgments, we are passing the situation into our brain’s network of past associations, opinions, us vs them thinking, and our own past hurts.
It also relieves us of the pressure of playing God. That’s a role that is hard for us, right? Talk about being underqualified!
Experiencing events without judging them is so helpful for interior peace! And it’s the first step in self-compassion.
Say This
When you DO notice a moment of suffering, difficulty, or overbearing emotion… try saying this to yourself:
“This is a moment of suffering for me.”
Acknowledge that you are having difficulty. Talk to yourself, kindly. The way a good friend that knows you and loves you would speak to you.
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“I realized I had been engaging in a lot of self-criticisms because I saw it as part of being virtuous. I thought being a big self-critic helped me serve others better and not be selfish. After practicing self-compassion, I began to realize that my self-criticism was actually keeping my focus on myself. It was a self-oriented and self-absorbed habit. Self-compassion helps me move my focus away from me, to be more available and more engaged with others.”
That’s some feedback from a lady who leaned into the discipline of self-compassion.
We have the mistaken idea that speaking harshly to ourselves is helpful.
If that’s the only tool in your tool kit for self-motivation, you are going to be pretty darn tired by the time you hit midlife.
Good leaders know how to inspire those they lead. They raise the eyes and hearts of others to something bigger. Create a shared vision while working through the muddy details.
Let’s be good self-leaders that use inspiration. Let’s avoid talking to ourselves using fear, shame, and self-criticism to motivate us. So often, we treat ourselves in a way that we would never even consider treating somebody else.
Jacques Phillippe says that interior peace lets us reflect God like a placid lake reflecting a mirror image of the sun and trees.
We can’t have interior peace when we oppose ourselves.
Most of us have learned to beat ourselves up in order to force ourselves to get things done. Or to rely on fear to motivate ourselves. We oppose ourselves by being both the taskmaster and slave. Or by being the accuser and the accused.
At the same time, we can’t make progress if we are complacent or make excuses.
“If we accept ourselves as we are, we also accept God’s love for us. But if we reject ourselves, if we despise ourselves, we shut ourselves off from the love God has for us, we deny that love.”
Way Trust and Love p 48-49
Self-compassion lets us see ourselves as we are, with our faults, without fear, loathing, discouragement, or excuses.
The truth is: God looks on us with a lot of compassion. We can’t receive that if we’re stuck with defensiveness or beating ourselves up. We need interior peace and quiet.
Drop us a line
Listen to the discussion on the podcast and join the conversation by emailing or texting us:
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HOPE is a theme of our podcast. HOPE. We keep coming back to it. Because we need a LOT of it. We need a lot of it because life is either challenging us, or even kicking us when we are down, and because we are leaning into new challenges that S-T-R-E-T-C-H us. Life is short and needs lots of hope if we want to accept it and embrace it.
Supernatural hope does not disappoint. It certainly does CHALLENGE. The world seems a tad crazy, bad, and sad. Cultivating and receiving hope is not so easy.
I lift up my eyes to the hills-- where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. Indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. -Psalm 121
Receiving
Receiving. Now there’s an interesting concept. Catholics like to talk about receiving grace. We tend to think of receiving grace as a very passive sort of thing. I’m sitting there, prayerful, and the grace simply shows up. That surely must happen, sometimes. Receiving, however, it not merely passive.
There’s a continuum from being purely passive to being very active: from NO pursuit to ALL OUT pursuit. Watching the ball game and waiting for your buddy to bring back the popcorn form the concession stand: that’s pure passivity. Exploding off the line of scrimmage, hitting and shoving the player right in front of you, breaking off and sprinting on a slant down field, looking stretching, leaping, fighting the defender to RECEIVE the ball… that’s ALL OUT pursuit.
Spiritual life is tricky sometimes and distinguishing making an effort to receive from making efforts to save ourselves by ourselves (that’s Pelagianism or please correct me if I got the wrong heresy name) is not always so easy. We can, at least, discard the idea of receiving as being purely passive.
Discouragement
Hope is a virtue particularly appropriate to midlife because, in this season, it's actually very easy to get discouraged and to lack hope for a lot of different reasons. For example, we might be looking back over our life and thinking, “Oh boy, I, I wish I had made some different decisions.” Or we are dealing with parental guilt (there’s a lot of that, most of which is pointless). Or we feel that the best of life is behind us because of our health, our outlook, our assessment of our future…And we can be just plain tired.
Fr. Jacques Phillippe in The Way of Trust and Love, a book drawing on the spirituality of Thérèse of Lisieux, describes DISCOURAGEMENT as THE MAIN DANGER in spiritual life.
I don’t think that would have been my first guess as the MAIN danger.
Of course we take this quote in context, knowing that there are many other things that are critical and necessary, like goodwill.
Acceptance
Philippe’s book about Thérèse is entitled The Way of Trust and Love. One of the themes of Thérèse’s spirituality that Philippe picks up on is ACCEPTING our interior poverty. ACCEPTANCE is not complacency or making-friends with our inner weaknesses. ACCEPTANCE lets us have PEACE as we realize how “little” we are - and you devotees of Thérèse’s little way immediately know that it’s a theme for her.
We have to accept what God has for us and what God allows to happen. We EVEN have to accept that the world is a good place despite all the “bad” in it. Life IS good. We would never choose much of what happens to us however God allows it to happen. Accepting what IS happening to us and around us is a big step in the battle of RECEIVING the gift of PEACE that God repeatedly promises to us.
RECEIVING this gift of peace, which is a grace (freely given by God, not earned), requires us to make some EFFORT to receive it. An aspect of this effort is ACCEPTANCE.
Some of the hardest things to accept are our own weaknesses, our own spiritual poverty. Spiritual poverty is the norm. We are weak. We just are. When we accept that situation, and remain “little”, as Thérèse might say, we are a loooooong way towards receiving the peace God has promised to persons of good will.
Self Compassion
Karen and I consistently see the need for people to practice self-compassion. It’s a discipline that will help you have ACCEPTANCE of yourself, those around you, the things that happen to you, and what’s happening in the world. Remember, acceptance is not resignation. It’s allowing what God permits to happen, to happen and to be.
Let’s talk more about self compassion next week.
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How do you KNOW you are living with meaning and purpose? We are wrapping-up this season on meaning and purpose: shoot us an email if you want our list of eight items to ponder if you are living with meaning and purpose.
How do you know? If you are ABSOLUTELY MISSING it, you likely know it. And if you are ABSOLUTING SMASHING IT, you likely know that. The interesting bit is the in-between.
I'm really struck by how purpose is such a powerful organizing principle for our lives. It really shows us where our treasure is. It’s a compass. Before we had really dug into this season, I (Curtis) had understood, of course, that it's central to wellbeing. Everybody who's anybody in psychology or positive psychology tells us that meaning and purpose are critical for human wellbeing.
But what's really standing out to me is how powerfully orienting it is in our spiritual life and our lives and our mental, spiritual, and emotional domains.
A lot of Catholics teaching spirituality place a great emphasis on holiness. Being holy. Sure, that’s something for us to be. However it doesn’t really tell us what to do while we are being “holy.”
Purpose answers this question of: what shall we do now? What’s next? What are my priorities? Where will I spend my time, money, and talent? What will I pay attention to. “Pay” attention. I only have so much of it, right?
If you are feeling the PAIN of no-purpose, you are going to start looking for answers. You might stay stuck. But you will look. You might lapse into despair and stop looking, but you will still be hoping it shows up for you.
It’s the lukewarm middle that’s intriguing.
I think we are too quick to “settle for” much less than is possible for us. That we settle for much less than God will provide for us. While that means more comfort and less challenge, it also, ultimately means less joy and more regrets. Eww.
If we are “OK” but not “Full” of meaning and purpose, likely you are not going to change. It’s human nature. Hey, if I don't feel the pain, I'm not gonna change. Why should I?
Karen says: “ I don't know if it's been for this way for you listeners, but this question, how do you know that you're living with purpose? The question of how do you know you're living purposefully has continued to come back for me.”
What are the signs or symptoms or ways to assess that you're living a purposeful life?
Here are some signs. We took these from Richard Leider’s book, Repacking Your Bags
-You have a purpose larger than your own needs, wants, and desires–a sense of how your life and work fit into the larger scheme of things You know you are part of something bigger.
-You have an internal compass which keeps you “true” to your purpose in life
-You have clear boundaries around the two most precious currencies: time and money.
-You have a sense of your potential talents, the limits of which have not been fully tested
-You have marked adaptability when faced with obstacles; you simply handle them as a natural feature of living flexibility.
-Your abundant energy is infectious: it gives you and the people around you even more energy
-You have a strong spiritual core; a sense of some higher power in your life
-You have a feeling of lightness: a sense of being unburdened by the burdens you are carrying.
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In life, we often don’t make progress until we ask the RIGHT question.
That’s why we are so impressed with Dr. John Olesnavage’s approach: finding Your Most Powerful Question. He has written the book Your Most Powerful Question; Finding purpose and meaning in God’s plan.
It’s the fruit of years of professional work as a Doctor of Psychology, many years’ experience with his own most powerful question, and working with many, many people to help them find their most powerful question.
If you read the lives of saints, you will see that their lives are driven by powerful questions. Thomas Aquinas asked “What is God?” St. Vincent dePaul asked: “What must be done?”
John consistently sees that, once a person finds their powerful question, it’s liberating and motivating. It draws them closer to God and to His purposes in their lives.
He says “If you do what God wants you to do, you're going to make a difference. That's a Catholic understanding, period.”
His book is full of examples of people that found their question. One was “What is legacy?” This question lead the asker to take on a new charity that provides hope and encouragement to at-risk youth: they get extensive training on mountain bikes, participate in a long, tough race, and keep their bikes. There are many more examples.
God made us free: it is a fact that is inseparable from our human nature. He desires us to be free. To choose freely. To act freely. As John has said, “We may talk about transformation and freedom to be who we really are, but many of us are trapped in our own life story. Real freedom starts with a genuine question we care deeply about and following it to the truth it reveals.”
The spiritual nature of finding this question is really quite striking.
We can often think that pleasing God is accomplished in the same way that we please humans in authority. We forget the personal and intimate invitation God has for us: to participate with Him in His creation so that his will is done on earth. He is delighted for us to use the talents He gave us.
Guest links:
Dr. John Olesnavage
Powerful Question Institute
Askyourpowerfulquestion.com
johnolesnavage@gmail.com
The Catholic Midlife podcast links:
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If you were heading out to canoe for two weeks in the Boundary Waters, a series of pristine lakes up around Ely, Minnesota, you would be unpacking your gear and selecting what you need to go into the canoe with you. You would not want what you don’t need. You would want what you need and no more.
It would be REALLY hard to decide what to take OUT of your bag and what to put INTO your bag if you did not have a strong sense of WHERE you were going.
Beach? Flip-flops. Mountains? Parka. Sabaton Concert? High-fidelity ear plugs. Canoe? Waterproof bags.
We’ve spent a number of episodes on meaning and purpose because it’s essential to your vocation as a Christina. Your vocation: that thing God is calling you to do. It didn’t stop when you decided to be a priest, nun, brother, friar, married, single, or whatever.
God’s always there, inviting you out into the vineyard, which is the world, to be swept up into His plans, to be a part of it all. To love, to serve, to Be. THAT vocation.
That’s a reference to the vineyard where the master hired laborers at different times of the day. He kept going to the market and seeing people standing around. No! Come join us in our labors, he said. That’s the parable that John Paul II leveraged in Christifideles Laici, which we’ve been quoting in these last few episodes because it connects vocation, your relationship with God, your work for the Kingdom, and your sense of purpose and meaning together.
What a blessing to have an opportunity to make your own unique contribution to the kingdom. Based on who you are. Your gifts, talents, strengths, values, preferences, inclinations, experience, history… the whole ball of wax, meaning you.
Meaning and purpose are central to your wellbeing. To being able to do more than just cope. To flourishing.
There’s a lady we know that’s retiring. She has to decide where to live and what to do with that house that’s in the family. Sell it? Rent it? Move there? Put one of the relatives in there? There’s a lot to sort out. She’s not in the mood to play around, she wants to move to the next big thing in life; she’s very strong and mission-oriented. Wow, so cool.
The thing is, she can’t make any big decisions until she decides: what’s my purpose now? What’s Next for me? That might take a little experimentation. We are so excited! What’s going to be her new direction? She will make it an excellent one, we know that much.
That’s what articulating purpose does for you. Helps you strip away what’s not needed and holds you back. And pack-in the things you need now. Goals. Commitments. Relationships. Work. Play. Place. Roles.
Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
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Meaning and purpose are big themes in transition.
Transitions like RETIREMENT, EMPTY NEST, or other WAKE-UP call you might have.
Where’s the excitement, meaning, purpose, discomfort, and discernment kicking in?
Where’s the expediency, fear, super cautious, or momentum kicking in?
We had a season on TRANSITIONS, starting at episode 2.
John Paul II, in Christifideles Laici, at 58, wrote “The fundamental objective of the formation of the lay faithful is an ever-clearer discovery of one's vocation and the ever-greater willingness to live it so as to fulfill one's mission… God calls me and sends me forth as a laborer in his vineyard. He calls me and sends me forth to work for the coming of his Kingdom in history.”
Transitions are a time for discernment. Who am I now? What am I called to, now? How can I use my inclinations, desires, circumstances, strengths, talents, desires, and inclinations to work out my new purpose and meaning in God’s kingdom?
Did you catch that inclinations and desires are in that list twice?
That’s because we often think those don’t matter when it comes to “spiritual” things like “discernment.” We can forget that we are embodied persons and the “spiritual” stuff is for the whole person and not just out “there” somewhere.
Momentum, complacency, or strongly ingrained enculturation can be driving the bus for us. Instead of us, living out our vocation, being in charge. Sometimes our desire for security and predictability hold us back from what God has in mind for us, or at least what he COULD have in mind for us if we have an ever-greater willingness to live so as to fulfill one’s mission.
Meaning and purpose naturally show up as QUESTIONS during times of transition. Our roles change, and how we spend our time changes. So naturally we look for new meaning and purpose. Having a good transition, in fact, will bring these issues up to the surface.
A key question in a big life transition is: Am I discerning my possibilities and vocation in God’s kingdom? Or am I letting momentum, fear, other peoples’ plans etc. etc. etc. drive the bus of my life?
One of the questions I ask myself (Curtis) is: How does my Catholic faith show up in my choices, compared to how I would be living out my middle-class values anyways?
Find the National Catholic Register article at: https://www.ncregister.com/features/what-s-next-st-ignatius-advice-for-midlife-discernment
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Indeed as a person with a truly unique lifestory, each is called by name, to make a special contribution to the coming of the Kingdom of God. No talent, no matter how small, is to be hidden or left unused (cf. Mt 25:24-27) . . . . In this regard the apostle Peter gives us a stern warning: "As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace" (1 Pt 4:10).
John Paul II in Christifideles Laici, at 56
Making our unique contribution. It’s a powerful catalyst to effective action when understood in a Christian framework. Making our contribution, using our talents, and being stewards of God’s grace.
It’s perhaps surprising how central the role of “values” is when we are talking about making our unique contribution.
Values are deep within us. Often they are not fully conscious. Here we are referring not to morals or ethics. We are talking about the things that make you different, that makes you prefer one thing over another.
For instance, some people have “fun” as a value. Karen, in the podcast, shares how a lady harnessed her value of FUN to empower and uplift others in her daily life and work.
Values are deep within your unconscious. They are motivating you. They are driving you. They are why you make the choices and decisions you make, even if you don't realize it. And it's part of who you are, and it's part of your special contribution to bringing your values to the world. And when we are living into our values, honoring our values, that's part of what contributes to having a deep sense of purpose in life.
Naming and claiming your values will serve you well. You can leverage that knowledge to bring your values more fully into all areas of your life. You can see where they are driving you in areas you were not aware of. You can choose to honor them to sustain you through difficulty. You can choose one of them to honor when they are in conflict.
We offer more tips and offer more insights around values in the podcast.
Making our unique contribution. It’s a powerful catalyst for effective action.
Do you have a strong sense of making your unique contribution? Why? Or why not?
Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
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Our definition of purpose includes having a profound sense of who you are.
That’s intriguing. As we tried to get to the core of what that really means, we touched on about half a dozen key ideas.
One of them is a very helpful “how-to” find meaning and purpose.
Another key concept is that we have spiritual, mental, and emotional realms that need to cooperate. Integrating these realms so we can be a complete, whole, person is crucial. When we're feeling a lack of meaning and purpose, it’s often a sign that those realms are not cooperating! We work hard on our spiritual lives; being integrated with our mental (mindset) and emotional (feelings) is needed for us to become whole and effective.
Autonomy, authenticity, and conscious choice are other key concepts we discuss. Autonomy is being able to make your own choices. You may or may not have all the choices you could wish for, but it’s still YOU that needs to make YOUR choices. In the end, it’s your responsibility to choose - and trying to give away that power isn’t going to work out very well for you.
If you’re operating on autopilot, however, you are not really using your autonomy. It’s making choices from your authentic core self is what you want. Autonomy and authenticity are about the need to be living your own life and not the life somebody else chose for you. It’s about acting through yourself, as John Paull II liked to say.
Conscious choice is also about understanding what’s really driving your action. Is your behavior based on your highest values and spiritual aspirations - realizing you are an imperfect human and not a machine? Sometimes we act in a certain way without realizing we have alternatives.
Definition for purpose
Having a profound sense of who you are is an asset when seeking purpose and meaning.
Here’s the definition of purpose that we are working with, from Richard Leider:
Purpose is that deepest belief within us, where we have a profound sense of who we are, where we came from, what we're here to do, and where we are going. It's a source of deep vitality and vision.
Richard Leider
(We added the words “where we are going”).
As a Christian, you are well on your way: you have ideas about who you are, where you came from, what you’re here to do, and where you are going. Nice!
Guidance from our faith is general, so it’s up to us, with help from grace, to bring the purpose and meaning into our daily lives.
Spiritual and Mental and Emotional realms
You have a spiritual life. You have great values, you cultivate important virtues, you have thoughtful priorities about what’s important, you have lots of midlife wisdom, and you have a relationship with God. You have spiritual practices. You receive spiritual inspiration and guidance from many directions, for example from the Bible, Bible studies, books, your church, your fellow-Christians, books, seminars, retreats, books, online courses, and your inner life of prayer. We read a lot of books around here.
Getting that great spiritual life to percolate throughout your entire being is a different question. We often experience a disconnect from our highest spiritual “self” and what we are doing day-to-day.
That’s part of the human experience and, indeed, is one of the impacts of sin on us.
It’s helpful to think of ourselves as having, besides the Spiritual realm, and Mental and Emotional realm. We also have a physical body, are socially connected to others, and live in an environment.
When our mental life, or realm, is not cooperating with our spiritual realm, we can struggle to make choices or to act effectively. For instance, I might see what I “need to do” spiritually but be paralyzed with doubts in the mental realm and anxiety in the emotional realm., Or I see what I need to do and have a good idea of “how” but somehow I “just don’t care” and I am not able to muster the energy to consistently step forward.
Coaching often involves creating alignment in the spiritual, mental, and emotional realms.
A sense of lost purpose or meaning is often a signal that there is a lack of alignment between the spiritual, mental, and emotional realms.
We want to live our life as an integrated whole person that is striving for unity in all those aspects. All of these elements, spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, social, and how we internalize our environment are integrated in us as a unity, as a whole person.
A lot of the stuckness, the frustration, or the lack of growth and transformation we experience happens when those elements aren't aligning and integrating well into a whole.
Something Much Bigger Than You - Purpose and Meaning
Martin Seligman’s advice to find meaning/purpose is: “Use your signature strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than you are.” We sometimes state this in terms of “bringing your full authentic self.”
Use your signature strengths and virtues in the service and your full, authentic self to something much larger than you are.
That’s great advice.
Your “signature strength” is a character strength that you have that you love to use, that makes you feel good, and that gets consistently good results. It’s consistent with your values. It’s a virtue that you possess.
Understanding your values and go-to virtues is part of knowing your “full authentic self.”
Autonomy and bringing the Full Authentic Self to something much larger than you
“Full authentic self” can conjure up a lot of images of being self-indulgent or whatever, but that's not what we're talking about.
One thing that “full authentic self” signals is acting with autonomy.
Autonomy. We want to live our own lives. God made us free. We have choices to make and we want to make our choices.
You know what it’s like to do something that’s not your choice. You’ve been pressured, bullied, or guilt-ed into it. You are not willing and resentful. You do the whatever-it-is.
That’s life, sometimes. Suck it up, don’t make a big deal out of it.
If it’s life a LOT of the time, then you are on a big collision course with reality. Something’s going to break. What you are planting is not going to yield the big harvest that you would have otherwise hoped for.
Or you will drag your sad self through life, not being who you could be or achieving what’s possible for you.
Of course we are all responsible for our own choices and the fact that you let yourself be pressured, bullied, guilt-ed or whatever else simply adds to the misery of the whole thing.
The good news is that we are essentially always “at choice” and there are always better choices available to you if you are in a place where you can see that, for whatever reason, your choices are not the best.
Life packs a lot of momentum and if you are in a “stuck” place, there’s a reason. Humans are not perfect, we don’t have that option. So don’t kick yourself. Please ask for help when you are stuck.
Let me repeat this: we are not perfect. We are all stuck in some area of life. Sometimes it’s a big one. Don’t beat yourself up. You are not supposed to be perfect. Decide that it’s time to move forward instead of sideways.
Conscious Choice and Autonomy
You are responsible for your choices.
Your choices are sometimes made “for you” without you consciously realizing it. Part of what it means to be living your full, authentic self is to be making free and conscious choices.
A classic example is someone that’s pressured into a career they don’t like. Like Dave, who was pressured to be a lawyer/doctor instead of a (commercial) artist. It took him a fair bit of misery to shake his family off and to forge ahead.
Or, in the podcast, Karen mentions a lady that had internalized so many messages about who she should be, how she should act, and what it looks like to be happy or successful. And she found herself just kind of at the mercy of all these things she was trying to be. After bringing up all of these internal messages she said, “ I'm trying to live up to all these things and I don't even know who I am.”
“ I do not really live as a person when I endure that which happens in me; I am not revealed as the person I am by that which I passively undergo. Rather, it is only by acting through myself that I really live and thrive as person. This important truth is compactly expressed in the title of Pope John Paul II's major philosophical work, The Acting Person. “
John F. Crosby, see here
Your choices help form who you are… and then who you are helps to form your choices. Let’s keep this spiral moving upwards. In life, we are going forwards or backwards. Let’s keep it moving in the right direction.
As we pass through life, we are accumulating all experiences, perspectives, interpretations and our brain creates a framework of meaning around them. And then it becomes part of how we experience and interpret our life as we move through it. And sometimes those things we accumulate are really helpful. Sometimes they're not.
We can start to accumulate all of these things, like a boat accumulating barnacles and the biofouling that slows it down.
Part of, I think living your full, authentic self is being able to look at that and identify the things that aren't really supporting your authentic self and release the ones that are not.
Which points us back to the “full authentic self.” What is the me-that-God-made? And what are the “that’s-in-me-but-not-really-me” bits.
We will be circling back to discuss everything!
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This is a big topic!
We need purpose and meaning. Think about times when you’ve felt that your actions had no meaning or purpose. Yikes. Well-being requires a sense of purpose and meaning.
Fortunately, as Christians, we have strong spiritual resources that help us find that. The SPIRITUAL realm of our being does not always percolate down into our day-to-day moments, however. We also have MENTAL and EMOTIONAL realms of life and are PHYSICAL beings connected to others SOCIALLY in an ENVIRONMENT.
All of those realities impact us in a big way.
The Meaning and Purpose question often pops up around midlife. It’s pretty common. There are a few reasons for this. One reason is that our life’s roles are often shifting around midlife. Another reason is that your values are starting to shift. At midlife, you’ve earned some wisdom and it’s natural for you to want to make some course corrections. You want to look back in 10 or 20 years and not have regrets about the choices you are making now.
Here’s the definition of purpose that we are working with, from Richard Leider:
Purpose is that deepest belief within us, where we have a profound sense of who we are, where we came from, what we're here to do, and where we are going. It's a source of deep vitality and vision.
(We added the words “where we are going”).
Purpose creates a unique kind of energy and vision in our lives.
Humans have a general vocational purpose: it’s to be image bearers. We are made in the image of God. We are image-of-God bearers.
John Paull II writes of a transformation of the world: that is a call to stewardship of creation. It’s part of the human vocation described in Genesis wherein humanity is made in the image of God and is given dominion. Adam is made in the image of God. God’s dominion is wise. As a steward of vocation, Adam is reflecting God’s image into creation. God made humans. Humans reflect him into creation.
So part of being in Christ means we're in this kingdom with Christ and we're living this vocation of worship and stewardship that the spirit makes possible.
A question I like is: How am I bringing about the restoration of the kingdom? What's the bit of the kingdom that I am working to transform. What’s my part? What is my purpose? What am I bringing to the party?
The kingdom is big: it’s the whole world! It’s the entirety of human endeavor. There’s many ways to bring about restoration. Talk about a target-rich environment!
Purpose and meaning operate at many different levels in life. There’s the moment to moment. There are short term and long term. There are ultimate and also secondary purposes. Big and small. Personal and communal. There’s the realms of the spiritual, the mental, and emotional.
Having a sense of how you are carrying out your general vocation is part of that picture.
We have much more to share and discuss on this topic! Glad you can be here with you today.
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Here’s one more take on Romans 8!
In this episode, we are focusing on the glory of God: what is it? What does it mean?
And whatever is Paul talking about when he says God’s children will be ‘glorified with him’? Can Christians really partake of the glory of God?
Paul starts by encouraging us to “celebrate the hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5: 2) and continues to help us understand what that all means in chapter 8.
And here’s the thing: it might not be what you imagine it to be. To understand Paul, we need to place ourselves in the position and the worldview of the 1st-century Jew and hear what they would have heard in Paul’s exhortations.
Think: God’s faithfulness, the reign of God in Christ, the glory of Rome, the coming of the new age, resurrected bodies, and dwelling with the Spirit!
Because when we are in Christ, there is no condemnation. . . AND also, there is the hope of ‘the freedom that comes when God's children are glorified.’ (Romans 8:21)
Join with us in strengthening your hope in the glory of God and in his promises for you!
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Book of Romans! It’s not an easy read! We will have a couple of episodes just on Chapter 8.
There’s a lot of HOPE and assurances in Romans. There are many more themes, including patience and suffering. It’s all going to be worth it, Paul says.
Chapter eight of Romans starts with this: Therefore there is no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus.
Let’s all make that a verse we remember, just like we remember John 3:16. No condemnation.
It’s so easy for us to skip over it. To start thinking about all the reasons why we should, could, or might be condemned by God for acts or omissions. There’s a big negativity bias in human nature.
It’s natural for us to be concerned about our personal salvation. To worry about being condemned.
Paul’s letter to the Romans provides the Roman Christians with a lot of assurances. One of Paul’s assurances to them is that, since they are “in” the Messiah, there is no condemnation for them.
Spend a few moments with that.
Certainly we need to make strong efforts to “walk the talk.” The book of Romans has themes that recall the Exodus story. We don’t want to fall back into the spirit of slavery (like Israel in Egypt & the complainers that wanted to go back to it).
Paul, apparently, has scandalized others with this kind of talk “no condemnation” because he has addressed objections, earlier, in Chapter 5, where he says, at verse 15: “What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! “
I love what Fr. Jacques Phillipe says: “The reasons that we lose our peace are always bad reasons” (In Searching for and Maintaining Peace).
We can’t let the world, our fear, our limitations, the devil, the whatever, rob us of our peace that we have in Christ Jesus.
We are doing the best we can in our Christian journey. We fall short. Regardless, there is no condemnation.
Hang onto your peace because there is no condemnation.
Peace will make you more powerful, effective, sane and healthy.
Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
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Do you want her to hear you? You must hear her first.
Do you want him to see your perspective? You must see his perspective first.
Being SEEN and HEARD is important to any relationship that has depth and vitality.
The person in front of you has DIGNITY. God made him or her. Recognizing the dignity of the other person is your job. It’s up to you.
When you are speaking with your young adults, and pretty much anyone, DO THIS: be on the lookout for how you validate them.
When they know YOU understand their perspective, and it’s a perspective that makes a lot of sense, then they will be more open to seeing your perspective.
When she’s telling you what she’s thinking, feeling, and experiencing… then it’s your turn to explain to HER why it’s understandable that she’s thinking, feeling, and experiencing that. Validation is about showing that, “Hey, considering your experiences, your perspective on life, what you've been through, and your values, it makes sense that you are thinking/feeling that way.”
It takes some understanding. Perhaps you will need to ask a few questions so you can “get” the experience that they are having.
Listen to the podcast and get a sense of what the skill of “validation” is all about. Look for an opportunity to practice this skill in every conversation. The results will surprise you!
Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
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Our children, at any age, are always hoping to feel loved by us.
Receiving love from your mom and dad is a primary psychological drive. It’s a reason why psychologists are always trying to get you to straighten-out your relationships with your parents.
As parents, let’s make sure we fulfill our role. It’s our unique opportunity.
COLLABORATING will help you stay in that role.
Thinking in terms of COLLABORATING with your young adults during their transition to independence helps shift the relationship to a life-long, loving, adult, relationship.
Because collaboration means both parties are working together towards a shared goal.
Collaboration is sometimes a style of approaching a conflict. It’s also a way of working towards shared goals.
Shifting to COLLABORATION is a BIG shift for most parents. We are deep into “control” or “advising”. Collaboration is a motif for building the relationship while reaching shared goals.
“A summer job” is a shared goal when a parent is hoping their student will find a decent summer job. Hopefully the student is a self-starter, but she might need some ideas, some transportation, some boundaries around hours, to cooperate with the family vacation, or so forth.
A tip for being a great collaborator is: learn how to pursue an INTEREST instead of taking a POSITION.
Positions are the particular solution we propose; these serve a larger Interest. An Interest is the larger thing that you are trying to accomplish with your “position.”
Listen to the podcast episode to hear more about the what, why, and how of collaboration.
Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
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What’s the best way to give advice? Our young adults generally don’t want to hear it. They’ve had plenty of it from us in the past.
They likely need lots of advice, however. Or could, at least, use some to avoid making costly mistakes.
There’s also something that we often offer when we give the advice: it’s something that they intensely dislike.
We discuss some of the biggest DO’s and DON’Ts for managing our relationships with our young adults.
What’s a story you have about successes or challenges in relating to your young adult children? We would love to hear from you!
Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
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There’s a huge goal to never lose sight of when relating to your young adult! This huge goal is: to create a healthy and loving relationship with our adult children.
Our expectations of them can conflict with that goal. It’s human nature to focus on what’s NOT happening and to be impatient for what we think SHOULD be happening. We have expectations rooted in our own personal history. Let’s bear in mind that the culture is not what it used to be. Life’s path is less settled and predictable in terms of transitioning into independent adult roles. There’s also lots of brain maturation still happening into the late twenties.
As parents, we are transitioning from a role of control (as if we ever really had that!) to a relationship of mutual respect and influence. It’s up to us to model what mutual respect looks like. Our control of our children’s outcomes, meaning the “results” they get, was always limited. Most parents need to consciously move away from taking responsibility for the outcomes their children have. And to release control to them for their experiences of being happy in their circumstances.
At the same time, our kids will ping pong from wanting to be fully independent to wanting us to step in with advice and solutions. They are in a big transition (see episode 2) and need some space to start working it out.
What’s a story you have about successes or challenges in relating to your young adult children? We would love to hear from you!
Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
Email us at: TheCatholicMidlife@gmail.com
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Noreen helps us find wisdom and receive grace as we accompany our aging parents as caregivers, children, and companions as they age and need our help. We talked about what she learned, how God showed up for her, and how she managed her parents’ aging and deaths. Join us as Noreen, a lovely lady of humor and persistence shares some of her touching stories and inspires us. Her book, Keep at it, Riley! is the memoir of her experiences. What’s a story you have about life with your aging parents?
We would love to hear from you! Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
Email us at: TheCatholicMidlife@gmail.com
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In the interview with Noreen
Noreen’s email:
Website: www.noreenmcinnes.com
Facebook Page: @KeepatitRiley, https://www.facebook.com/KeepatitRiley.
Get her book, Keep At It Riley from https://www.newcitypress.com/keep-at-it-riley.html
or on Amazon
Happiness, striving for happiness, is important in everything you do. Happiness sets us up for success - in Work, Love, and Play. In spiritual life. In doing the right things. In all of the above. Create an ethic to strive for happiness.
Martin Seligman, the positive psychologist was out in his yard doing yard work. His daughter was maybe five or six. She said, “Daddy, do you remember when I was four? And I had to learn to stop whining and it was fairly hard for me, but I learned how to stop?”
Martin said, “Yes, I remember.”
She said, “Well, I think if I could learn how to stop whining, you could learn how to stop being so grumpy.”
He really took it to heart. He thought, “I could learn to be less grumpy and there's actually a lot of really good reasons why. I would want to do that.”
Last week, in Episode 11, we talked about Seligman's model of happiness as having three levels: the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life. The meaningful life is generally associated with using your strengths, your best virtues, and your highest values in the service of something bigger than yourself.
I am sure that reminds you of something as a Catholic.
In Matthew, 22:37, Jesus says the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and soul and mind. And the second is like unto it: love your neighbor as yourself.
It’s funny how happiness and holiness coincide.
God made us for happiness. We want to be with Him. We want to be happy.
That great spiritual life wants to be integrated with the rest of you! Including with the mental and the emotional realms of you.
There are endless studies that show why it's great to be happy. To be happier. Happy people are healthier. They live longer. They overcome challenges better. They're more resilient. They have better relationships. They have more career success. They have less stress and anxiety.
You want to hang out with happy people. You probably wish the people around you were happier - it would make your own life better.
They likely have the same thought about you.
One of the biggest obstacles in spiritual life is discouragement. Happiness is a counter to discouragement. It requires us to trust in God, because that is fundamental for hope. Happiness requires hope that we are going somewhere, that what we do means something. That what we are experiencing will lead us to happiness.
Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper wrote a treatise on hope. He says that one of the characteristics of a truly hopeful person is that they have a kind of youthful joy and experience of life that has an optimistic view. A perspective that lives life with a kind of a freshness of outlook and an interest and joy and awe and inspiration.
Let's strive for happiness. Let's find our hope and let's be those joyful people.
We would love to hear from you! Send us a text with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.
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We’ve been discussing happiness. Aquinas views the desire for happiness as ingrained in and being inseparable from, our humanity. We want to be with God because we desire happiness. We are made for Him.
There are some schools of thought based on an idea that we should be disinterested in happiness and entirely focused on serving God and others. That’s not how human nature works.
Happiness is sometimes used to refer to just feeling good or pursuing pleasure. We are talking about something broader than that.
Humans are pretty good at giving up a short-term pleasure in favor of more fulfilling activities. Think in those terms.
We are embodied persons, not spiritual machines. There’s a mental and emotional life that we want to have in alignment with our spiritual life.
Here’s a perspective on happiness offered by positive psychologist Martin Seligmann. He suggests three levels that exist simultaneously for us:
The Pleasant Life - appreciating basic pleasures like companionship, our environment, and our bodily needs.
The Good Life - creatively using our unique virtues and strengths to enhance our lives.
The Meaningful Life - fulfillment in employing our unique strengths for a purpose greater than ourselves.
We all need to learn to set the pleasant life aside for something bigger. Hopefully we learn this before we waste a lot of time pursuing pleasure to the exclusion of the bigger picture.
At the same time, remember that the pleasant life has a role to play in contributing to what it means to be a flourishing human. To be a human that can live up to his or her potential. That gets things done. That is effective. That wants to be here.
Give the pleasant life some respect. It has a role to play for you.
The good life is about engaging character strengths, those virtues and talents that you have, those things you like to use when you're doing good - when you're making things happen, and accomplishing things. When you are using your strengths, it’s helpful to create engagement - that sense of being involved, of making a good effort.
Everyone has things they do well. Leverage those if you want the good life. It creates a lot of satisfaction. If you feel like a cog in the machine, it’s tough to show up at your best.
Engagement is often overlooked when we are thinking about “what’s missing” in life. We often have pretty good intuition about other factors. When the activity is engaging you in a worthy challenge aligned with your values and virtues, it starts “pulling you in,” and you are likely in a role where you are effective and have enjoyment or at least satisfaction.
The meaningful life involves living with purpose and meaning; connecting your strengths, your values, and who you are, to something that's bigger than yourself, and making a contribution to something bigger than you. This requires action.
Focusing on your strengths, your values, and your highest purposes is so helpful. If you are focused on somebody else’s values, or what somebody else thinks is what you “should” be doing, it starts to feel like you are living somebody else’s life. That you lack choice.
God made you uniquely and for purposes that you and He will work out. Fitting into someone else’s schema for your life is not such a great plan. Because you were made to freely choose. It’s up to you. You have to own this and step into it.
Nobody will do this “for” you. You do it.
Listen to the podcast, we had a fun convo on these topics.
Take a quick moment to email a friend and tell them to check out The Catholic Midlife podcast. They can easily find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and most major platforms.
We would love to hear from you!
Email: TheCatholicMidlife@gmail.com
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It is important as spiritual beings, as Christians, and Catholics to strive for happiness. And we can make a lot of choices for it that are perfectly in alignment with our highest values and everything we believe. Happiness helps us be what God intends. We use the word “happiness” to refer to thriving, flourishing, and cooperating with grace. Purpose has an important role to play in happiness. You have spiritual, mental, and emotional components: you want these things to be in congruence because you want all that awesome Catholic and interior spiritual life to flow through you without getting derailed by the mental and emotional aspects, which are very much a part of you.
It's actually disturbing how many people get to midlife and say, I've been doing this thing for so many years and actually it's not aligned with who I am. And gosh, now that I think about it, it really is affecting my happiness in life - my flourishing, my thriving.
If you are trying to create a sense of purpose, think in terms of action that connects you to something bigger than yourself.
Don’t get pulled into our “success” culture and think you need to be doing some “big” thing. God loves you and we don’t think His ideas of what’s “big” or “small” don’t match very well with our own ideas. Love has its own calculus.
We would love to hear from you!
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Saint Augustine was asked a difficult question: what to ask of God? He said Ora beatam vitam: meaning “Ask for the happy life.” What?? It’s good to be happy. It’s important as spiritual beings, as Christians, as Catholics, to strive for happiness. Humans desire happiness as an inseparable aspect of their nature. There are quite a few misconceptions about happiness. Find out if it’s really OK to pursue happiness. We would love to hear from you!
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We have a role to play in the Kingdom of God, now. With His Easter resurrection, Jesus inaugurated His new Kingdom. We each have a role and identity in this Kingdom. Listen to Karen explaining how this Kingdom is part of a two-stage process of God unfolding His purpose and, by implication, our roles. Then listen while Curtis uses analogies to the Lord of the Rings to grapple with what it’s all about. Trigger warning: Karen uses the E-word (eschatology).
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Knowing about the hopes of the Jews as seen through the Old Testament helps us better appreciate what the kingdom of God in the New Testament is, and what that might mean to us. We share how this shifts our perspectives: From pursuing to having; From chasing to possessing; From me acting as an individual to being invited to participate in God’s cosmic project of salvation and transformation, a project that is rooted in Heaven and Earth, now.
Rites of passage in traditional societies show a firm grasp of the phases of transition. Catholics know a thing or two about tradition! We have rites of passage, for sure. Also, liturgical cycles are tied to the seasons. There’s no single modern rite of passage for midlife. But midlife transitions can bring a transformation in outlooks: we discuss a few of them.
Description: Transitions have an ending; it’s called the New Beginning. When the New Beginning starts to show up, you are starting on the end phase! This phase can be fuzzy, so having a mastery focus is very helpful. Christian spiritual masters talk of living in the present as a spiritual discipline; a mastery focus helps us with that, too. The New Beginning may not be what we expect!
There's a lot of uncertainty and insecurity in transitions. Let's decide to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, to practice hope, and to get the most out of our transition process!
Grit and Grace in Midlife Transitions is the topic of Season One. Understanding a few basic things about transitions is super helpful for personal and spiritual growth. Transitions include letting go and receiving. If we want to be filled with new things, it’s hard to receive them if we are full of other stuff. It’s like the old wineskins that can’t receive the new wine. Listen and get the low-down on transitions.
In this episode, Karen and Curtis dive into the phases of transition and the power of endings, letting go, and choosing to own your transition. There is new wine available to us, so why do we say, "Nope! I'm good with the old!"
We decided it would be fun to ask each other questions by way of introducing ourselves and what’s behind the podcast. Listen to Karen try to keep Curtis from digressing in this fast-paced mutual interview. Backgrounds, books, blue-collar, when we hear the F-bomb, Hope, and other essential info is all right here! We also invite you to start sharing your insights with us around the show; we decided to open up a Facebook group: The Catholic Midlife to hear your perspectives! .
We (Karen and Curtis) introduce The Catholic Midlife podcast. We cover topics such as: Why midlife should be intentionally treated as a transition - an important one! Why we started a podcast for Catholic midlifers. And a key Spiritual theme that shows up over and over in midlife and in our coaching practice.