Living with Heart: From Birth to Death

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com).

Episode Highlights:

The Boy & The Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency by Chip Dodd 

A story/workbook for helping codependents find freedom from codependency.

You are gifted, and there is a world in need of your gifts.

Loneliness is the biggest pain that people are facing now. What people need is to be known from the inside-out, rather than distracting ourselves from our loneliness (need for genuine relationship) through social media.

Diagnosing and Treating Co-Dependence by Timmen Cermak

5 Things God designed us to find fulfillment in:

1. We are created to use the development of our inborn self-awareness through feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope to find and live in authentic relationship.

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1. With that in-born self-awareness, we are able to be “response-able” to our inner make-up.  (We’re created to develop the ability to respond to our outside life by using our inborn makeup: feelings, needs, desire, longings, and our hope. We need our “makeup” affirmed and confirmed so we can keep being able to use it, so we can grow “response-ably” which ultimately becomes responsibility.)

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1. We are created to find genuine relational connection through being “response-able” and through using our inner self-awareness.

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1. We are created to initiate our lives from our hearts, with others who have the same capacity. (We are looking to connect with others who are also living a life of relational fulfillment. They are aware that we are all 99.9% the same.)   "It's a Small World"

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1. We are created to be in relationship with others, God, God’s creation, and the others in it.

When we live our lives fully out of the 5 fulfilments, we are able to be healthy grownups who do what Jesus said in Matthew 7:7.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”  Matthew 7:7

Matthew 7:7 is for grownups; grownups are just children who have gotten older and who have remained fully present in their lives. Grownups are able to live out of their fully present lives.

Jesus encourages grownups to:

• Ask so they can receive.

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com).

Episode highlights:

The Boy & The Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency by Chip Dodd

God is a great garbage man; He wastes nothing in our lives. 

• God values His own creation;

Bring your child-heart to God and give Him your pain, suffering, and your struggle, and even your questions. God can deliver you. He delivers people through circumstances, prayer, His word, other people, and illumination of your heart.

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength,” Ephesians 1:18-19

Paul was a man who knew that to love, is to suffer. Therefore, he needed a place to take his suffering. Paul refers to God in this passage:

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.”  2 Corinthians 1:3-5

So, we can either choose to believe that while God is good, we still suffer; yet we have a place to take our suffering. We can take it to God, who cares for us.

OR

We will stifle suffering unnecessarily, and just live miserably.

The Boy & The Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency by Chip Dodd

“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he. ‘Eat and drink!’ he says to you, but his heart is not with you.”

Proverbs 23:7

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com).

Episode Highlights:

Codependency is the loss or the sacrifice of: 

• God-created true self. 

Codependency is not being able to: 

• say what you feel. 

We are made for love; we are made to be connected.  

In order to be accepted and loved by our significant caregivers, we often end up hiding our own needs. Examples: If I don’t like sports, my dad will not love me. If I don’t make good grades my mother will be so  disappointed. If I have opinions that are different from my teachers, they will reject me. If I’m not artistic like my older brother, I won’t be as loved.

We end up acting a certain way or pretend to be someone we are not in order to be loved. We  eventually begin to “believe” in the pretending rather than being our true selves. We slip into denial. 

We perform for love instead of being ourselves. 

God designed for us to: 

• be who we are made to be; 

In a codependency environment we end up:  

• doing what we’ve got to do;  

Codependency becomes the belief that I can perform enough and do enough so that I can finally rest, trust, be believed, have my worth, and be valued. 

Codependency is a disorder of distrust. You trust the anxiety. You don’t trust listening to your own fear and exposing it.  

Sadly, if a codependent person stays stuck in their past and sOll believes feelings are the enemy, they will,  no matter how much they are loved, never trust the love.  

Codependency is bringing your “bucket of desire” into life, and your caregivers poking holes in the  bottom of it so that in your future, no matter how much love gets poured into it, it goes right through it. 

There’s not enough love; there’s not enough approval, there’s not enough trustworthiness because it all  slips right through the holes in the bucket. 

Codependency recovery is about repairing, or healing, the holes in your bucket (revision). 

Codependents are always trying to find their fulfillment externally by withholding what’s happening in  them internally. 

The Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd 

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). 

Episode Highlights:

Click here if you would like more information about Champion's Path

Chip Dodd- The Boy & the Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency

Melody Beatty – Codependent No More

•  The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations for Codependents

Sarah Young - Jesus Calling

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Episode 31: The Rediscovered Treasure (Part 4)

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). 

Episode Highlights

Needs are: 

• how we’re created. 

Our need to belong and our need to matter are more important than food, shelter, and clothing. We will give up food, shelter and clothing in order to belong and matter. The unseen needs are more  powerful than the seen needs. 

God gives us the desire of our hearts. 

We are born with longings. 

We long for justice. (We see a small child lying in a bed in a pediatric intensive care unit with bandages and  tubes, and we cry, “NO!” We don’t have to know the child to recognize the injustice of it.) 

We recognize that we are not made to die of disease. We’re not made to kill each other. We’re not made  for war. 

We are made for love and peace and eternity and raising each other up. 

We are made to experience the grace of a hand that can reach into the farthest depths. There is no mistake  that is so far away that God can’t reach us. 

We long for a place where we can put our heads against a safe shoulder, where there are arms to go  around us, and there is a voice that says, “It’s okay now, it’s okay. You can rest now.” We long for a place  called “home,” where God lives. 

Longings are deep cravings within our hearts that will never be fulfilled as long as we live on this earth. It’s living in the wishing every day. It’s living in the wanting forever. It’s meeting God every day, and God says,  “One day it will all be complete.” 

Surrender your heart every day, and it will change. Walk in the surrender every day. Live in the world of  miracles. Tell the truth and live in the truth. Open your eyes to see the joy of what happens when we walk  in the truth. 

If we do not deal with our hearts, we end up living counterfeit lives.  

• We grow into shriveled, little trees, not oaks of righteousness. 

We pursue all forms of counterfeit fulfilments instead of believing that God can fill us. 

Sadly, we end up practicing hopelessness. We practice hopelessness as a way of not taking a risk to believe  that our heart’s yearnings are real. We refuse to believe that our feelings really matter. We refuse to be  vulnerable. We refuse to surrender our lives to the God Who made us. 

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). 

Episode Highlights

We are born as emotional and spiritual creatures. We are born with feelings.  Before we ever think or speak our first word, we are expressing ourselves as feeling creatures. 

We experience life in the very beginning as God made us through our feelings and through the  longings to be in relationship with our mothers and fathers.  

We came out of the womb experiencing life through what we feel.  

We came out of the womb looking for who was looking for us. We were looking for emotional  and spiritual connection through relationship, before we were ever able to think or speak. 

This emotional and spiritual language is the language of the heart.  

We communicated from the very beginning of our lives with our feelings.  

Hurt 

• is a feeling you feel when you experience a wound. 

Hurt that is not acknowledged becomes resentment. It is the impaired expression of hurt. It is a justification of your right to act badly towards another person because you carry a pain  that they’ve given you. Resentment takes us out of relationship. 

People who won’t acknowledge their hurt, hurt others with their resentment.  (Hurt people, hurt people.) 

Loneliness 

• God gave us loneliness so we would seek out relationship. 

Loneliness that is not acknowledged becomes apathy.  

Apathy develops when you try to make your heart stop caring about relationship.

Sadness 

• is a feeling you get when you lose something that matters to you or is important to  you. 

Sadness that is not acknowledged becomes self-pity. Self-pity is a way of trying to escape your  pain. 

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). 

Episode Highlights

The focus of this episode is a recording of a men’s retreat that Chip did in Texas in 1993. The retreat  content was edited and put on CDs. The CDs were included with the first edition copies of The Voice of the Heart published in 2001.  

You’ve got to get defeated to become rich in this “God world”. 

God says that what He is after is our hearts. Our hearts that He made, that He created, that He  loves. 

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. 

They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” Jeremiah 17:7-8 (NIV) 

What is feeding the roots of the tree? Its roots are planted in what feeds it, and it receives emotional and spiritual food. 

God feeds our hearts with emotional and spiritual food.  

God stamps our hearts with feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope at birth. This is what God is after. This is what puts us into a relationship with the God of our forefathers.

Through our feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope we end up growing into a strong person who others can love and trust.  

Torment in our lives does not come from exposing the truth about our hearts; torment comes from the energy we take to keep our hearts hidden. 

We are as sick as the secrets we keep within us, from the smallest manipulation to the largest  secret. 

The difference between an unhealthy family and a healthy family is the willingness to seek forgiveness. Healthy families seek forgiveness. 

Truths: 

Pain of the heart is the teacher. 

Love is the lesson. 

Life is the result. 

Sharing that is the practice.

God loves us so much that He will go to any length to get us back. There is nothing we can do to earn it. God doesn’t need anything we have.  

God does not need us:  

He craves us. 

He wants us. 

He wishes to be with us. 

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” Luke 19:39-40 (NIV) 

God doesn’t need us; We need Him. The price we pay for needing Him is having to go through the  excruciating and glorious pain of being loved, without being able to do anything to get it. 

What we can do is live out our salvation. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He came to bring life  and life abundantly.  

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). 

Episode Highlights

The focus of this episode is a recording of a retreat that Chip did in Texas in 1993. The retreat  content was edited and put on CDs. The CDs were included with the first edition copies of  The Voice of the Heart published in 2001.  

The CD intro song is “Capshaw.” The banjo is played by John Balch. It is available on iTunes and  Spotify. John’s website is hidebanjoheads.com. 

Living With Heart Podcast “Becoming a Portable Sanctuary” Episode 26 

The message on the CD is just as true today as it was in 1993 when Chip did the retreat. 

Our God absolutely looks toward us, moves into our world, and changes our lives, not a little, but a lot, not as an event, but as a journey. 

Our God is not a god of an event; He is the God of the journey and the God of relationship. God is also our destiny. 

“Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” Genesis 3:9 (NASB) 

“…Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of  life.” Revelation 22:17 (NIV) 

God is in pursuit of our hearts; He is in pursuit of what He created. 

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”  Psalm 139:13 

When we came into this world, we were stamped with the image of God. God made us in His image. 

You and I were created to live fully. We were created as emotional and spiritual creatures,  created to live fully in relationship with myself, with others, and with God.  

We are made to live fully in 3D. 

• We’re made to feel it. 

We are made in the image of God!

Everything about life is about relationship. 

The 18” journey from our heads to our hearts is the longest journey that we will ever take. It is a  journey of wholeness. The journey never ends. If we don’t make that 18” journey, we will be a  failure. We will fail within the walls of our own home and we will never be of maximum service.

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). Continue reading below for an in-depth review of this podcast. 

Episode Highlights

Awaken-Awakening is to know and experience ourselves as emotional & spiritual creatures, created to live fully. We do so through relationship with ourselves, others, and God. We awaken to feelings,  needs, desire, longings and hope, or “The Spiritual Root System.” And we awaken to our inborn need  to connect. 

Free Resource, The Spiritual Root System 

Acquire-Acquiring is to gain the skills of using how we are created to live fully in a life that is  wonderful and yet difficult. We are created to live full lives in relationship with ourselves, others, and  God. In living full lives, we embrace and express our feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope with  others and God. When we awaken and then acquire the skills of living fully, we are moving through  life in the River of Euphoria. 

Free Resource, The River of Euphoria 

Arrive-Arriving is a reference to us becoming people who are Portable Sanctuaries. People who are  Portable Sanctuaries are people who live in the River of Euphoria and have become safe people  because they offer replenishment to those who are empty. They offer redemption to those who feel  worthless, and they offer restoration to those whose storehouses are empty. We never fully arrive;  we are always growing and learning. But we become more able to be of service. 

The Four Essential Questions allow us to remain in the life-long process of Awakening, Acquiring,  and Arriving. 

The Four Essential Questions are: 

• Where am I? (Where are you emotionally? (I feel sad. I feel hurt.) 

These Four Essential Questions are never summed up or finished completely. They are circles that  are moving forward, headed toward where you are made to go. They continue for the rest of our  lives.  

These Four Essential Questions allow us to continue to grow. The answers keep us connected to awakening, acquiring skills, and arriving over and over again. 

These questions keep us fully involved in living exactly how we are created to live and move us to do  what we’re made to do. 

We are created to do one thing in life, and that is to live fully. Meaning, purpose, and significance  develop out of being fully alive emotionally and spiritually.

The only way we are going to remain fully alive is through all of the relational experiences we have with others and God. 

If you’re fully alive: 

• You will find your meaning. 

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com).

Episode Highlights

We cannot escape the way God designed us. (Only addiction gives us the illusion that we can.)

There is no escape from our design. We’re designed by God as feeling creatures who are spiritually hungry and craving. We’re designed to do one thing in this life, live fully. And we can’t live fully unless we are doing so in relationship with ourselves, others, and God. And being fully alive, expresses God’s glory.

A human being who is fully alive as God created us to be, is God glorified, because He created us to shape, make, do, multiply, create, serve, help, etc. It means to care when others quit; to continue on when others stop; and to walk when others lie down. 

Where do we draw the strength and courage to carry on? It comes from God Who generously gives it to us. Given to us so that we can give it away to others. God made us to live like that.

Once we give ourselves to The Process, we have gotten off The Ladder. We are living in the River of Euphoria. The river takes us forward to becoming a Portable Sanctuary.

More on Euphoria River in Episode 18, “Living Fully in ‘The River”

FREE DOWNLOAD > River of Euphoria 

What is “The River of Euphoria” or “Euphoria River”?  Euphoria means “good bearing.” The River of Good Bearing. It means to bear life well. Live the good life. It’s a flow. It’s a promise. It’s a process.

The river is where we meet God’s faithfulness.

Euphoria means “to bear well”.

Hyperphoria is an escape to action. It is anxiety-driven.

Hypophoria is an escape to apathy or escape-to-control.

Both hyperphoria and hypophoria are about escaping having to feel.

The Three Movements of living fully, that move us into becoming Portable Sanctuaries are:

• Awaken-to return to or awaken to feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope and imagine what can happen if you enter living fully again.

Once you awaken and begin to be in pursuit of the life you’re made to have, you need to know how to do hurt, sadness, loss, celebration, grief, hope, desire, needs, and fear; in other words, we live life as feeling creatures who have to struggle.

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