Searching for Sacred

In my younger years, I played guitar in various worship bands.  I was never much of a singer as I cannot carry a tune in a bucket, but strumming and chords I can manage.  My first guitar made it through my college years where I would throw a journal and the guitar in my car and find a quiet spot in the mountains to think, write, and sing my heart out in these secret singing sessions from the soul.  Not the smartest thing in the world driving into the backwoods mountains alone, but to quote John Muir, “The mountains are calling and I must go.”  These times alone in the mountains were the spots where my soul found voice.  Where I could sing off key with no judgment and let the poetry flow from my pen and guitar.  From this vantage point, those times look like hippie loving freedom and glory days.  In all honesty, these were times of wrestling with God, faith, rage, and grief.  And it occurred in isolation outside of community....

Beaches and Swimsuits. I just got back from a beach vacation.   Translation, the nightmare swimsuits!   Open up the inner dialogue of comparing my body to everyone around me and criticizing my own imperfections. I am chubby.  I told my husband before we married that I would always be a little bit fat and if was not able to accept my fluffy body he probably should not marry me.  While I joked about my fluff, my internal voice was downright hateful.  I hated my rolls, muffin top, and cottage cheese thighs.  The dialogue in my head was verbally and emotionally abusive.  I punished my body with diets, starvation, and restrictions only to begin a cycle of binging, stuffing, and carb frenzies.  I punished myself by refusing to buy new clothes until I lost that 20 pounds and could buy the size I thought I should be.        In a healing session, I was asked to breathe in compassion....

A Lexicon of Healing.  A journey towards home. Shifts. Back in another life when I was learning to be a therapist, we talked about 1 st and 2 nd orders of change.  The 2 nd order being those seismic shifts that rock the core of our being.  I am in the middle of one of those great shifts right now.  This second order change started innocent.  I turned 40 and with it came a natural progression of mid-life questions and reflection.  Each decade has had a theme.  The first, trapped.  The second, escape into Jesus Freakdom.  My twenties were marked by rebellion and wild adventures.  Thirties were about ch-ch-ch-changes and a numbing business.  This decade was filled with tasks, small children, a religious conversion, and major career change.  And now here I am fresh into a new decade wondering how I got here, what wisdom do I wish to carry forth from the previous decades and what can be left behind as scrap book photo...