Dr. Peter Malinoski shares some dark moments of his story of medical trauma from when he was 11 years old in 1980 with Kathryn Wessling and Gabriel Crawford from Catholic Story Groups at CatholicStoryGroups.com. Discover the power of exploring stories. Join him for this episode to discover how essential story is to your personal formation. We first discuss what a story is, review tips for writing your story, and offer recommendations for listening to a story well. 

Tim Glemkowski and Joel Stepanek, key planners and executives for the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress, join Dr. Peter Malinoski on this episode to continue our series on integrated personal formation and discuss the kind of transformation you can expect at the NEC, as well as what you can do to prepare for it, both in the natural and spiritual realms. We explore how the four dimensions of Catholic personal formation -- human, intellectual, spiritual, and pastoral -- are incorporated into the NEC revival sessions, impact sessions, breakouts, exhibits, and all the other offerings. Finally, Joel and Tim offer you suggestions to help you get the most out of this experience whether you attend in person or virtually. 

Join Dr. Peter and our audience members to experience a guided meditation on your parts’ needs for integrated formation. Guided by John Paul II’s four dimensions of personal formation (human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral) you have an opportunity to see what a part of you needs. Several audience members debrief from the exercise and we all discuss with some Q&A. 

Our guest, Dr. Bob Schuchts, shares with us his decades of experience as a healer through his discussion of his four identities of love, the four dimensions of formation, the integration of personal formation in the work of the John Paul II Healing Center, the centrality of love in healing, the necessity of felt safety and trust, and the importance of distinguishing the natural from the spiritual, especially with parts and demons. 

Catholic thought leader, human formation specialist, and podcaster Jake Khym has more than 20 years of experience in a wide variety of ministry settings and he joins me in this episode to discuss integrated personal formation.  In this episode, we focus on these major themes: 1) your heart; 2) your identity as a beloved little son or daughter of God; 3) the integration of formation within the heart; 4) love as the gift of oneself; 5) change vs. growth vs. flourishing; 6) the importance of emotions; 7) how good formation requires relationship; 8) getting into the messy business of your own personal formation; and 9) Jake’s top resources for personal formation.  

Fr. Boniface Hicks joins us once again as we continue our series on integrated personal formation, this time with a Q&A from our live audience. Fr. Boniface answers a wide range of questions about spiritual and pastoral formation, including: 1) What counsel can you give to those who have experienced poor spiritual formation, especially from formators who only acknowledge the spiritual realm? 2) How do you deal with St. Ignatius of Loyola’s “evil spirits” from the IFS perspective? Would this involve a more compassionate approach to temptation? 3) How do you leverage parts in spiritual direction when your director has no experience with IFS? 4) In the context of Colossians 1:15-20, can you share how your inmost self holds space for an encounter with Jesus and some of your exiled parts? 5) Can spiritual direction be positive and productive if the directee has a strong hiding part or protectors that don’t want to be transparent with the director? 6) Can you talk about the prophetic timing of human formation in the context of Pastores Dabo Vobis, given the cultural issues of the meltdown of the family, marriage, etc.? 7) How do different kinds of suffering relate to our parts? 8) In resisting spiritual bypassing, is there not also the risk of bypassing the spiritual, bypassing the walk with Jesus? Is there a way to navigate this?

What makes good spiritual direction?  What makes good spiritual directors?  And what gets in the way in spiritual direction?  To answers these questions, Fr. Boniface Hicks, joins us as continue our series on the integration of personal formation for Catholics. Fr. Boniface is a Benedictine monk and the Director of Spiritual Formation at St. Vincent Seminary as well as the Director of the Institute for Ministry Formation.  He is an accomplished retreat master, author of four books on the spiritual life, and a seasoned expert in what it takes to accompany others on their spiritual journeys.   We explore the formation that spiritual directors need, how you can recognize when something is lacking in your spiritual direction and the most common human formation challenges and deficits that Catholic spiritual directors are likely to encounter in themselves and in those they serve.  

What do the roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and apples of a tree have to do with your Catholic formation?  Find out how these, combined with sunlight, water, and soil, bring us an integrated understanding of personal formation grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person, drawing from Church documents and the sciences of the natural world.  By looking at an apple tree, we can understand our own formation and where we need to change and grow much better – and not just as solitary trees, but together, in community, in a forest.  Join me, Dr. Peter Malinoski, as we learn how to flourish in love and for love, as Catholics journeying together.  

In this episode, we discuss how models help us more fully understand Catholic personal formation by showing distinctions and relationships among human formation, spiritual formation, intellectual formation, and pastoral formation. Next, we examine my new model that views formation through a mathematical lens. I explain each dimension of formation, likening them to a branch of mathematics, and draw from Pastores Dabo Vobis and other Church documents to illuminate the inter-dimensional relationships in personal formation. Finally, I tell a fictional story that illustrates how deficits in one domain of formation can negatively impact all the other dimensions of formation.  Check out the video on our Interior Integration for Catholics on YouTube at https://youtu.be/YDztbbNBBtk or on our IIC landing page at https://www.soulsandhearts.com/iic

In this episode, philosopher Matthew Walz, Ph.D. the Director of Intellectual Formation at Holy Trinity Seminary, explains the integration of the four pillars of formation laid out in Pope St. John Paul II's Pastores Dabo Vobis. We dive into why it is so important to integrate the four types of formation and whether there is a hierarchy or sequence among them. We then discuss Dr. Walz’s models of integrated formation first presented in his article, “Toward a Causal Account of Priestly Formation: A Reading of Pastores Dabo Vobis”, which can be found here: https://www.hprweb.com/2021/01/toward-a-causal-account-of-priestly-formation/. Dr. Walz explains how the four dimensions of formation — human formation, spiritual formation, intellectual formation, and pastoral formation — parallel Aristotle’s four causes, which are the material, formal, efficient, and final causes. The types of formation also parallel the “four loves”— love of self, love of God, love of truth, and love of neighbor. Finally, these four kinds of formation parallel the dimensions of Christ — Christ in His human nature and as priest, prophet, and king. We wrap up this episode by discussing what Dr. Walz means by “dimensional trespassing" in the process of formation.