Learning Your Heart: Sometimes Therapy Helps

Here is something true.

Once you acknowledge those subtle intimations and allow yourself time to collect and reflect on key moments in your life, a whole new and unexpected world begins to open up. You become more in touch with the breadth and depth of your story, and you begin to disentangle yourself from what is merely expectation versus truth. 

You strike out on the path of greater self-awareness, and here’s the difficult part: sometimes the path gets quite thorny indeed.

Who are we? What roles have we played in the world and the lives of those around us? Are those roles true? Are they healthy? What do we believe about God? How did we come to believe those things? Do those beliefs align with what is really true about God? These are just some of the questions that present themselves as we allow those subtle intimations and key moments a voice in our lives, and let’s be honest: these are great, big questions.

This is where I’ve found that therapy can be quite helpful. It creates a safe place to sift through the pieces of our lives with an eye toward greater self-awareness, conviction, and healing, and it provides for a safe and concrete relationship in which to take small steps deeper into the truth of who we are.

Sometimes the help of a trained professional can be the greatest, most generous gift we give ourselves. 

I have been there. It’s not something I’m ashamed to admit, nor is it something I’m shy to recommend. Making sense of our world and the truth of our inmost beliefs and deepest experiences on our own can be confusing and overwhelming, and sometimes we can do more harm than good to ourselves when navigating these waters on our own or only the help of well-meaning friends.

Therapy is not for everyone, and it’s certainly important to find someone who is competent, caring, safe, and professional for this kind of working relationship. But the bottom line is this: you don’t have to navigate the territory of your story and your heart all on your own.

What are your thoughts on therapy? Is it something you’ve found helpful in your own journey? Do you have misgivings or hesitations about it?

Learning Your Heart: Practicing Prayer of the Heart

One of the richest ways that I’ve learned to connect to the truth of my heart over the last several years is through what Henri Nouwen calls prayer of the heart. 

In his book The Way of the Heart (which I highly recommend — it’s a simple yet tremendous book), Nouwen distinguishes between prayer of the mind and prayer of the heart.

Prayer of the mind, he says, is what happens when we merely talk to God or think about God. Both of these activities are done from a place of detachment. We talk to God about things on our mind or things we’re trying to work out. This becomes a pseudo-form of prayer because we are, in effect, merely talking to ourselves. And thinking about God creates no engagement with God at all. What we think is prayer is more intellectual exercise or the creation of theological propositions. Who we are at our core has not shown up at all.

Prayer of the heart, however, is a different experience of prayer altogether. 

Prayer of the heart happens when the truth of who we are encounters the truth of who God is. 

How does that happen?

Nouwen gives us a helpful mental image of what this looks like. He quotes one of the desert fathers, who said:

“To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seing, within you.”

— The Way of the Heart, p. 73

What a great and helpful image this offers us! When I practice prayer of the heart, then, I actually imagine my mind descending through my body and landing every so slowly in the place of my heart.

My mind is often a jumbled, monkey-mind mix of thoughts and anxieties and projections and fears and to-do lists and questions, all colliding together and struggling to find any semblance of resolution or rest. But when my mind and heart begin to dwell together, the reality of who I am, in all my fullness, is present. The truth of myself is laid bare. I become aware of who I am and what is truly there.

And there, I find God standing before me, encountering this fullness of the truth of myself.

He sees me, and I see him. Here, we share a conversation.

We begin to engage in relationship.

Can you take a few moments and practice this prayer of the heart? Imagine your mind — everything within it — descending through your body and coming to rest in the place of your heart. Lay bare the truth of who you are in that moment. Then imagine the Lord God before you in that place. Allow him to see the truth of yourself, and allow yourself to look openly back upon him. What is this experience like for you?

Learning Your Heart: Reflect on Key Moments

Last week I shared that we’re going to do a short series here about how to get in touch with the truth of our hearts, so as to bring our hearts into greater authentic relationship with God. The first post encouraged you to acknowledge those subtle intimations that flit into your awareness on occasion, asking for your attention but which perhaps get pushed away quickly because they disrupt the status quo. 

Today, I’m going to invite you to begin collecting and reflecting on key moments. 

I’ll go ahead and warn you right now: this is a big one. Not only is this likely the most illuminating step you can take along this road to learning the truth of your heart, but it also probably takes the longest to do. In all seriousness, this process can unfold over a period of several years. 

Be patient with yourself. Be patient with the process. This is not a race. It’s a lifelong — and really, an eternity-long — relationship with God we’re about here. 

The purpose of collecting and then reflecting on key life moments is that those moments reveal what we’ve taught ourselves about life, ourselves, other people, and God. In those moments, we ingested experiences that became messages — usually at the level of our subconscious — about who we are and how life works. 

It happens in a split-second, but it leaves a life-long mark. 

In those moments, we got disconnected from our hearts. The messages became the main thing — the means to our survival — and our hearts got left in the dust. 

All of this sounds theoretical. What does it look like in real life? I’ll give you an example. 

Three key moments happened in the context of my childhood elementary school experience. One happened in first grade, one happened in second grade, and one happened in third grade. In all three instances, different classmates caught me off-guard in moments of real vulnerability and proceeded to humiliate, mock, or degrade me. 

Taken on their own, these moments may have taught me nothing more than the cruelty certain people can have in their hearts and wield upon others. But collectively, they taught me something much more substantial that I proceeded to carry with me for many years: I’m not safe. Stay on your guard. Don’t let anything catch you unaware. People are cruel. They will degrade and diminish you if you don’t keep them from it.

As a result, I cut myself off from vulnerability. I turned off the pain and turned on the super-attentive and watchful self. I proceeded cautiously through life. My mind became a whiz at crafting contingency plans and sizing up situations from all angles before letting myself proceed into them. 

I became a machine of sorts. 

We have to go back into the archives of our memories and start collecting those key moments. And once we collect them, we need to reflect upon them. 

What are those moments for you? How did they impact you? What did they teach you? How did they affect the way you lived your life from that point forward? 

Learning Your Heart: Acknowledge Those Subtle Intimations

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that there came a point of reckoning for me at age 19 that I didn’t know the truth of my own heart. Jesus — God — clearly cared about the heart, but then I saw lots of people in the Bible who thought they knew God and were close to God but clearly didn’t know God at all. 

What kept them from God, I learned through getting to know Jesus, was their lack of awareness of the truth of their hearts.

So I had to spend time learning my own heart. And then I had to learn how to bring that truth of my heart into relationship with God. 

How did that happen?

Truthfully, it’s been an ongoing process. The heart is cavernous, and its layers unfurl and unfurl over a lifetime. This is why our relationship with God is able to keep on growing — because we keep on growing and discovering new truths inside our hearts that we can bring into relationship with God. 

But over the next few days, I’m going to write a few posts here that speak to some of the things I learned in those earliest of days about getting to know my heart. I’ll also share some of the ways I continue to get in touch with the truth of my heart before God today. I’m calling this short series “Learning Your Heart.” 

So, where is one place to start learning the truth of your heart? 

I’d say one place to begin is to acknowledge those subtle intimations. You know the ones I’m talking about. It’s those thoughts that flit through your mind on occasion that unsettle you, those things you push away pretty quickly because you think they don’t make sense or would disrupt the status quo of your life, those thoughts and hopes and feelings that seem out of the question to you or those you know. 

I’ve shared before that, for me, one of those subtle intimations was my inability to really get what grace was about. I grew up in the church and sang all the songs, read all the scriptures, and could spit out, verbatim, what it meant to be a Christian. It meant believing we were saved by grace and depended on Jesus to give us access to God.

But there was a nagging thought that visited while singing worship songs and reading verses in the Bible and talking about this faith: What is grace, really? And do I really need it? I want to honor God with my life, and God knows that. Truthfully, I do a pretty good job with my life. Since God knows my intention to honor and please him, why do I really need grace? 

These are unsettling thoughts for a Christian, to say the least. 

But I didn’t understand it. And learning my heart meant acknowledging that truth. 

Here’s the good news. God wants a relationship with the real people we actually are. That’s why learning the truth of our hearts is so critical — knowing the truth of our hearts is what brings us into authentic relationship with God.

So one place we can start is by acknowledging those subtle intimations that we have.

What subtle intimations do you have? What thoughts or hopes or struggles or feelings stumble into your awareness at times, only to get pushed away? What if you stopped and really acknowledged their existence? 

Do You Struggle to Know Your Heart?

Yesterday we talked about the religious leaders of Jesus’ day and how they didn’t get along with Jesus at all. We talked about their motivation to keep the rules and abide by laws in order to impress God and people. For them, life was about managing an image and trying to remain firmly in control of that image.

But then Jesus came around and turned their ideas completely upside-down. 

He said things like, “When you pray, don’t do it for show. Go into a secret place and talk to God, just you and him. That’s when your prayers will ring true.” And, “When you fast, don’t let people know. Do it in secret, between you and God. That’s when your motivation will be pure.”

He talked about the heart being the place where our treasures lie. He talked about knowing our own shortcomings instead of focusing on the shortcomings of others. He told many of the people he met what was true about them, and they were always amazed at just how well he knew who they really were.

There are so many instances that show Jesus cares deeply about what’s true inside of us. 

When I first realized this was a pretty big deal to God, it was such a mystery to me. I wasn’t so sure I really knew what was true inside of me.

And truthfully, when I read the pages of the Gospels that first time, I was surprised to see so much of myself in those religious leaders — I hadn’t realized that was true of me until it stared me right in the face. 

Also, I had lived like those religious leaders for so long, I thought everything I did was pure and impressive to God. 

I didn’t know my heart at all. 

It took me a long time to learn my heart — to get to know what was really there.

In the next few posts I write here, I’m going to share some of the things I learned about that process with you — ways I learned to get in touch with the reality of my heart. Perhaps you will find it helpful to your own process of discovery and self-knowledge before God. But for today, I’m wondering: 

Have you ever struggled to know the truth of your heart? Is it a priority to you to know your heart? What do you think of Jesus’ emphasis on this? 

Are You in Touch With Your Heart?

I remember the first time I really spent time getting to know Jesus (you can learn more about that time in my life in this video post here), I was struck by the disparity between the religious leaders of the day and Jesus.

They didn’t get along with Jesus at all, and he didn’t get along with them. And the reason why, I came to realize, was because they cared more than anything about keeping laws and abiding by rule books. What’s more, they cared about these things in order to impress God and impress people. 

They were caught up in their reputations and their own social image. 

But then Jesus came along and said, “This isn’t the way to God. Abiding by rules and protecting your image isn’t going to captivate God’s heart.”

What is going to captivate God’s heart? 

Being in touch with your own heart and bringing that reality to God.

When Jesus came on the scene, he went straight to this truth. He told those religious leaders — in not so endearing terms! — that they had no idea what was truly going on inside themselves. They were so focused on outward appearances and external activities that they were completely out of touch with their inner truth. They had no idea what truly motivated them to do what they did.

Are you aware of what’s true inside your heart? Is there anything that scares you about inspecting your heart and then letting God see it?

It's Love, Not Religion

Recently, a friend of mine who is going through a significant shift in her faith life sent me an e-mail asking the following: 

How do you do it? How do you go from a non-denominational church to an episcopal church? How do you post a prayer from St. Teresa of Avila on your website and still feel close to God? 

I can so relate to these questions.

I never knew the language and practices of church tradition could ever speak to me. I never knew written prayers — the same prayers people have been reading for centuries and are read by me, the same words, over and over again each week now — could speak to my heart in a real and deep way. 

I didn’t know those things could make me feel close to God, given my original church upbringing and experience. But they do. 

Here is what I answered my friend: 

You asked how I can go from a non-denominational church to an episcopal service or put a prayer of Teresa of Avila on my blog and feel close to God. I guess because when I read that prayer of hers or I visit the episcopal church, I feel like they put me in connection with the God I have come to love so much. It comes from a place of love in me that God has helped develop in me over the years. 

No matter what the external practice of our faith looks like — whether we attend a formal or informal church, our prayers take a certain format or are more free-flowing and spontaneous — it’s the inward posture of our heart that makes the difference and matters to God. 

That inward posture God desires in us is one of love. 

Two people can attend the same liturgical church service, say all the same prayers, and go forward for the same invitation to communion but have two totally different experiences. For one, those prayers and that eucharist can touch the deepest places of their heart and connect them to God because their heart is oriented toward reverence and deep desire for God. For the other, those actions can be mere routine, something they do not experience at all in their hearts, something they do because it’s what they’ve always done and think they’re meant to do. 

Where do you fit in this?

Do you have love for God? Do you desire to love God, even if you don’t right now? What moves you toward or away from that love for God in your heart?

What Would You Say to God?

Lately, we’ve been talking about prayer:

… how prayer can mean finding a few quiet moments to sit before God in simplicity and honesty.

… how our concept of God evolves and shifts and yet always connects to the ways we pray.

Today, I want to invite you to consider your side of the conversation in prayer. Specifically:

What would you say to God today?

Before you answer this question, I want to encourage you to listen — really listen — to what your heart’s voice has to say.

Did you know your heart has a voice? It does.

It is the part of your being that makes up who you really are. It lives at the very center of your being, and it speaks the truth of what you believe. It’s where your true identity and your core beliefs commingle and dwell together. It is what God sees when looking upon you, and it is where God wants to meet you in relationship.

The regular pace of life doesn’t create a hospitable environment for the heart to speak. Life keeps us busy, and distractions abound, and the sheer noise of the world becomes so utterly loud. 

The heart must be invited to speak in order to be heard. It requires that we take the time to listen. To care. To lean in and really hear.

So today, for a moment, come apart from the noise and distractions.

Take a moment. Still yourself.  

When you become very quiet and listen to the truest voice pulsing deep at the center of your being … what does it have to say? And can you speak those words directly to God?