-
How to Possess Your Soul in Troubling Times
By your patience, possess your soul said Jesus in Luke 19:20 after warning his followers of persecution and hard times. The phrase possess your soul really hit me. After all, my husband was laid off unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago and if anything, I have not felt in possession of myself. Angry, frustrated, and disappointed, yes. Patient? Not particularly. We seem to be living in times where possessing your soul or exhibiting patience is no longer a virtue. The talking heads on cable news interrupt and berate each other nightly, their main purpose to inflame their audience. Patience does not get ratings. Losing it nightly in front of cameras…
-
Three Methods that Helped Me Conquer Anxiety
I became aware of my anxiety, ironically, when suddenly I had less to fear. I found myself a single mother of four wonderful daughters and free of a narcissistic and cruel ex-husband. I was so used to feeling numb that when I began to reconnect with my emotions, all the fear I lived with for years came to the surface. My approach to life, similar to my father’s, is to get a few books on a topic and begin to educate myself, but somehow specific methods for curing anxiety proved elusive. The one thing that kept popping up in my research is that the brain is plastic, and we have…
-
Mindfulness and Discernment: Make the Connection
Hannah Whitall Smith, a Quaker from the mid nineteenth century, once said, “Mind the checks.” I respect this advice deeply, mainly as a result of not minding the checks. I once took a personality test that was supposed to determine who in the Bible my personality was most like. Unlike the phony Facebook tests that determine which Disney princess you should have as your maid of honor, this test based itself on the Meyers Briggs personality test. How exactly its authors determined the results for the men and women in the Bible, I do not know. However, my test resulted in a certain similarity to Joshua, who was brave and somewhat…
Healing Through Art & Words
