Faith & Feelings

At the heart of the spiritual journey is relationship.

Growing in self-awareness is not an end in itself, but the heart and the means to deeper intimacy with God. As author and ministry leader T.J. MacLeslie and I talk about today, Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known.

In this episode, T.J. generously invites us into his story as he shows us why the spiritual journey is so much more than conceptually knowing God, but experiencing encountering Him. He shares how he began to untangle who God is from wounding experiences within the church, and what it looks like to pursue a real relationship with God — one that goes far beyond religious activity.

"You're not good enough.” "You need to try harder." "You’ll never keep up.” “There isn’t enough time.”

These are the sorts of voices that can hum just beneath the surface of our minds, pushing us to act in unsustainable and frantic ways. So many of us long for the peace that comes with a life marked my internal calm and groundedness, but we feel gripped by anxiety. We don’t know what to do with these unhelpful thoughts circling within. How do we make sense of this inner chatter? And how do we settle enough to hear God’s voice?

An important part of growing in self-awareness is learning how to make sense of these competing voices. That’s what author and spiritual director Gem Fadling and I talk about today. Gem brings decades of wisdom and personal experience to this conversation as she teaches us how to identify these voices, slow our internal pace, and move towards greater wholeness. 

God designed our bodies to tell us incredibly important things when it comes to growing and healing.

In fact, I believe that one of the primary places we can grow in self-awareness is not books or podcasts or personality tests...but learning to listen to our own bodies. Why is this? Our bodies know more than our minds often do. And they are constantly speaking, revealing truth about what’s happening in the present or what happened to us in the past.

In this week’s episode, I explain why it’s so important to listen to your body, and I offer one practical way to begin.

While the work of self-awareness begins with pursuing a better understanding of our lives and stories, so many of us can stop there. 

As licensed therapist, author, and professor Chuck DeGroat and I talk about today, we often keep this awareness in past-tense, not understanding how our bodies are still holding these stories. We can ignore symptoms and bodily sensations like hypervigilance, sleeplessness, or exhaustion telling us the story of where we really are. And our bodies never lie. They often give us the best data about what’s happening within.

Chuck brings such beautiful storytelling and teaching to this conversation as he shows us what it looks like to practice awareness and attunement to our inner experience, and how to pay attention to what our bodies are telling us. 

For most of us, feelings are messy. 

Oftentimes, we don’t have words for what we’re feeling, and we get stuck in a dark and painful place. Because emotions can be complicated, we have so many strategies to not feel what we feel. But this often leaves us with a sense of numbness. We feel confused and chopped up inside. 

Giving our feelings language is like turning on the lights. It’s how we begin to wake up to wholeness, to beauty, and to our own hearts again. Learning to notice, name, and process what we’re feeling is also a key vehicle for growing in self-awareness. That’s what author and spiritual director Anjuli Paschall and I talk about today. Anjuli brings such profound depth, vulnerability, and wisdom to this conversation as we talk about how to name our emotions, process them, and find God’s presence in them.

While Josh and his family was doing ministry in China, he was detained and interrogated by authorities and had no idea if or when he would be released. 

In this week’s episode, Josh graciously shares some of his journey with self-awareness, and how this unexpected crisis led him to a deeper encounter with with himself.

While few of us will share the particularities of his experience, I think Josh beautifully puts words to the inner disorientation that all kinds of crises bring: feelings of shock and shame and a deep disrupting of identity. He transparently shares what it was like for him to begin processing this crisis. He talks about how he initially tried to distance himself from the pain, and also, what he began to discover – about himself and God – as he leaned in. 

One of the things that I’ve learned about self-awareness over the last few years is that self-awareness is something we can choose, but it’s also something that happens to us.

It comes at certain points in our lives without our consent, experiences of pain and crisis often becoming the catalyst for this deeper awakening. While I don’t hold to the idea that God causes crisis and suffering, I do know that these things come along, and God uses them. He often uses them to facilitate our own encounter with some of the deepest parts of ourselves.

In this episode, I talk about 3 kinds of crises that our journeys hold: developmental transitions, intrusive events, and internal uprisings. I also talk about why our responses to self-awareness are so important. How we respond can either increase shame or motivate change…and this makes all the difference.

*Some of the concepts of this episode were taken and adapted from “Regerts” by Jennifer Hunt.

When I reflect on my own journey over the last 7 or 8 years, I can’t think of something that has changed my life, my relationship with God, others, or even myself more than self-awareness.

I truly believe that pursuing a deeper understanding of our own hearts and stories is one of the most spiritually formative and transformative things we could ever do. That’s why I’m so excited to invite you to join me in this new series on the podcast called “How Can I Be More Self-Aware?”

In this episode, I talk about what specifically makes self-awareness so important and highlight 3 different kinds of self-awareness that we’re invited into. I also offer some reflective questions that will help you get a sense of how well you know yourself right now. 

How well do you know yourself? 

Growing in self-awareness is probably one of the hardest, but most important things we could ever do. Why? The short answer is this: you can’t change what you don’t know. But one of the trickiest things about self-awareness is that most of us are on autopilot and don't even know it.

So many of us are moving through life and not paying attention. We’re living by default... numb and disconnected from our hearts. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re going through the motions, but you’re not really living. You’re not present to yourself or your relationships. You long to be more awake to joy, to hope, and to passion, but there’s this sense inside of you that you’re missing your life.

In this next Faith and Feelings series “How Can I Be More Self-Aware?”, we’re going to be talking about what it practically looks like to grow in self-awareness. We’ll also be hearing from some amazing guests who will be sharing their journey with self-awareness and what they’ve learned along the way. 

I think that everyone could testify to how imperceptibly incremental our spiritual growth can feel in some areas of our lives.

 If you’re like me, you’ve often felt a disconnect between the theology that that you believe and the reactions that leak out of you in everyday life. Even though you know something is true in your head, it doesn’t seem to be shaping your heart or steering your hands.

In this conversation with a family friend, Chip, he shares a recent story of dysregulation that puts words to all of these tensions so beautifully. We talk about what initiated a deep inner change in his life five years ago (after decades of following Jesus and years in full-time ministry), and he models how true spiritual growth and emotional maturity often begin with getting to know your story and learning to tell it more truly.