Today’s podcast answers a question from someone who has come to realize their sense of self is damaged. This part of the healing work is often overlooked due to it being so close or detouring it due to us being nervous about the concept of “self”. If we have a damaged sense of self, it means we believe that we are unlovable, not worthy of love, and simply not good enough. This can predispose us to looking to external sources for validation, which can endanger us spirituality and set us up for more grief and shame. Self-abandonment leads us further away from God, self-denial brings us closer to God.

Today’s podcast speaks on the topic of paralysis. Specifically paralysis in which a part of ourselves goes off-line and shuts down as a result of some fallen experience. There is a steep cost for this in the form of regret, which can make insight a bitter pill. We can be paralyzed by fear, guilt, shame, disappointment, and even by the ego. Second chances are always available. How to go about reversing paralysis, and even protecting ourselves from future paralysis, is discussed.

Today’s podcast uses the liturgical space of this week being in between the Sunday of the Myhr-bearing women and the Sunday of the paralytic as an opportunity to highlight the role of humility in the healing work. When humility has not been established, we set ourselves up to be re-traumatized and for more rejection experiences. Humility clears those dangers away so that we might heal in a more efficient manner.

Today’s podcast focuses on how trauma and painful experiences shrink and narrow our perception of the world. There is discussion of the concept of our “perception box” which gives us something concrete to focus on in our spiritual lives. Learning to expand our perception box, to let all the data in, can help stop the process of past painful experiences being super- imposed on the present. Rather than constantly repeating the past, suddenly we are living a life free of it.

Today’s podcast discusses how that which is so close to us is often that which is the most unseen. Nameless fears, which are buried in our implicit memory, can define and be the driving force in our lives until we become consciously aware of them. While this can be a very painful process, it can also yield the most fruit and give us the biggest leaps forward in the healing work and in our spiritual lives.