Today’s podcast answers a question from someone who feels completely disconnected from God, specifically His love and forgiveness. Children, when in stressful situations, will often cope by blaming themselves. This can lead to a life of guilt over things they never did wrong. This can often lead to believing and feeling like the love of God is for everyone except us.

Today’s podcast offers a reflection on how the healing work is a profound way of taking up our cross as well as deepening our ascetical life. It is very important to be reminded that our healing work is not outside of our spiritual life nor contrary to it, but rather an integral part of our spiritual life and a great enhancer of it.

Today’s podcast answers a question from someone who is suffering from social anxiety, to the point where they no longer interact with people or go outside. The constant ruminating over how we talked, communicated, or interacted, can cause some to completely avoid interactions. Today’s podcast focuses on casting a light on the path that the submitter of question can take so that the sound of their voice and their own thoughts do not cause them pain.

Abandonment and rejection are painful experiences that can make us feel like we have no emotional home. Also, they can make us live like we are living a life on the run; running from humanity, and from ever having those experiences again. Unfortunately when we do this, we will never heal and we will stay trapped in the abandonment and rejection we experienced. Today’s podcast answers questions from someone who had such experiences and is encouraged to bloom where they are planted.

Today’s podcast answers the question from someone who spent years in a monastery, but after some struggles stepped away but plans on going back. The submitter of the question is struggling with their understanding and perceptions of their experience, and wondering if they need more counseling to resolve what feels unresolved.

Today’s podcast answers a question from someone who endured painful experiences at an early age and is struggling to understand how they can find their way back to a healthy place in the church, with God, and as a healthy orthodox Christian. Traumatic experiences leave us feeling bad, shameful, and defective. We often have to come to realize that it was the experiences that were deeply flawed, not us. Trauma teaches us to expect far more of ourselves than God would ever expect.

Today’s podcast answers a question from someone who had a negative experience in confession and is afraid to go back. The discussion focuses on what healthy confession should look like and how confession is in encounter with God. It is an opportunity to, in an experiential way, experience the mercy and love of God. It is important that we find our way back to confession in order to give ourselves an opportunity for a positive confession experience and to unlearn the procedural memories that formed from the negative experience.

Today’s podcast takes a break from answering questions and offers a glimpse or even a sneak preview of what awaits us on the other side of the healing work. Truly we can reach that state where the healing work is done and we are free to just be completely mindful of the present. Where we can find ourselves in a complete state of peace and mindfulness in which there is no more clutter or noise from the pain of the past, but just a profound awareness and sense of God’s presence. It’s a peace that emerges when, as the Apostle John said in Revelation, “the former things have passed away.”

Today’s podcast answers a question from someone engaged in the process of healing trauma. In the process of their counseling they have tried some exercises from somatic therapy. Trauma is not only stored in memories, but in the body. Many people are phobic or nervous about anything that involves focusing on the body. However, in our orthodox tradition, the body is not bad and is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Expelling trauma from the body is a good thing.

Today’s podcast answers the question of what does the late stages of the healing work look like. How do we recognize it and what exactly are we striving for. It is important to be able to recognize that new space when we arrive. We need the necessary knowledge so that we can recognize the past from present and utilize the tools we learned along the way. It also means learning to accept the sunshine after the storm. In other words, if we don’t recognize it, we might not know to start living it.