Today's Heartlift with Janell
Sometimes the story we tell ourselves is not really true. Sometimes the story others tell about us is not really true. On "Today's Heartlift with Janell," Author, Trauma-informed, board-certified marriage and family specialist, and Professional Heartlifter, Janell Rardon, opens conversations about how emotional health and mental fitness effects absolutely every area of our lives. When we possess and practice healthy, strong, resilient emotional health practices, life is so much better. Read Janell's newest book, "Stronger Every Day: 9 Tools for an Emotionally Healthy You."
Today's Heartlift with Janell
286. Reflections on Season 16: Perception is Everything
What if your perception could entirely reshape your life and spiritual growth? Join us as we conclude Season 16 with a reflective journey through the themes of holy curiosity, childlike wonder, and the healing power of nature. Through practices like forest bathing and looking at the understory of the forest floor, we learned the importance of calming our nervous systems and nurturing our mental and emotional health.
Revisit Season 16’s episodes to enrich your journey toward becoming your true, magnificent self.
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Hello and welcome to today's Heart Lift with Janelle. I am, janelle, your host for today's conversation, which happens to be our final episode in season 16. Drum roll please. What a season it has been. And interestingly enough, as I look back over the season, it started with the elusive power of perception.
Speaker 1:Cs Lewis wrote this what you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are. We looked at perception and how important our perception process is to the quality and the meaning of our lives. Little did I know what would be asked of me along this journey. A lot was asked of me. We read that easy is defined as causing or involving little difficulty or discomfort, requiring or indicating little effort, thought or reflection. I wrote we all want easy, don't we? Yeah, I think so, and I know that I've asked for it and I've even prayed for it, even if it's just for a short season. Yet real spiritual and mental growth often requires the opposite, which led us to a conversation on how perception even affects our prayer lives. We asked ourselves this important question what does perception have to do with our prayer lives? And I wrote. I concluded love to hear from you everything, absolutely everything. Because the perception process is a continual process. Remember, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even when we're sleeping. We learned our perception process is moving, it's continual, it's always informing every single aspect of our lives, including our spiritual formation.
Speaker 1:We had the beautiful Janet McHenry on, author of Praying Personalities, finding your Natural Prayer Style, and she invited us to understand we each possess. This is what I loved about this conversation with Janet. I feel like she relieved me of so much guilt and even shame still that I am possessing that I'm not praying enough, or I should be doing this or I should be doing that. And she writes you have a unique, god-breathed design for prayer. We've all heard the you shoulds on prayer from pulpits. She writes presenters and well-meaning friends. But when none of these ways feels natural, what's next? I encourage you to go back and learn more from Janet McHenry in her book on prayer and praying personalities, because it informed me and relieved me and ignited a passion to pray, as I so feel led to do within myself, and I've shared with you.
Speaker 1:My prayer style is I love to be in nature. I love to talk to God all day long. I love to talk to God all day long. So I thought it might be fun to talk about some of the words you know how I love my words and the words under the words that our guests brought to us this season. As I interviewed each guest, I started to notice strong themes coming out from them. Just as now I'm already interviewing for the next seasons and I see themes evolving In this season 16,. Here are some of the words that I felt were really resonating and inviting us to take some time to sit with them. We might say in the therapy room I want you to sit with this, I want you to sit with this, I want you to muse over this, I want you to walk with it as you would with a friend, and see what it might whisper back to you Holy curiosity.
Speaker 1:Curiosity was a major theme in all of our interviews and our episodes this season a return to childlike mystery. When we can hold mystery in our hand with holy curiosity, it tends to calm down our nervous system and take us from our sympathetic nervous system into our parasympathetic nervous system, which we call rest and digest. Sympathetic is fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and it's linked to our threat system, right, our survival system. It's necessary. But we don't want to live our lives from that place, from that amygdala in our brain, right, those two almond-shaped little things in our brain that keep us triggering and keep us in a heightened state of vigilance, and we want to live in a state of calm. And so when we live from this holy curiosity, which is a strong desire to see something novel or gratify the senses with something new, so I love this gratifying our mind with the senses right, you, heartlifter, are so wise, now that you've been on this heart lifting journey, that you know that trauma, emotions that are too big for our body, that we disembody, that send us into a spiral of shame or guilt or fear or worry or deeper anxiety or distress or panic, can only be healed through the senses, the five senses. Typically, something has happened in our life in early childhood or adolescence, and it has been buried, repressed, deep into our subconscious and we're really not aware of it. And we have to activate our senses. That's why our deep dive into nature in this season has really been at the forefront, because research studies so much is coming to the surface about the power of nature to help us manage our emotional and mental health, I took a deeper dive into forest bathing in this season because I traveled to Belgium.
Speaker 1:I got to go to the Hallerbos and see the bluebells blooming amid the beech trees and it awakened to something in me. Even trudging a stroller through the mud was just cathartic for me and I came home with such a curiosity about it. I had heard about forest bathing. Obviously I know about nature and I love nature and the outer banks of North Carolina and the ocean has always been my source for peace and calm and serenity. But this new introduction to forest bathing and how the mountains and how forest and nature and trees I had to know more. That's why I have a podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm a teacher, I study. I have to teach somebody else what I'm learning. I can't keep it to myself. And holy curiosity to me is what Matthew 5, 6 brings to the table. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled. I want to hunger and thirst in my life until the day I go to heaven, because that hungering and that thirsting just activates and amplifies the reason for living to me. Second, we talked about sacred shifts. So holy curiosity and then shifts.
Speaker 1:Shifting was a very big theme in this season and in the next forthcoming season, because it's already rising to the top. I think there are many shifts going on in the world and author Jody Grubbs helped us to understand that a shift is not a complete turnaround in another direction. It is just you're going in a direction and you have to make a little change over here or a little change over there. So it's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's just making these little tweaks and pivots and adjustments in how you're moving through your life. It was very important to me because I am in a shift. I'm not in a complete turnaround, I'm not in a complete death of a vision which I definitely experienced when I had to sell my dance studio in the late 90s and not really be a dancer girl anymore. I'm not there, but I'm in a definite period of shifts. Please let me know if you are in that season, perhaps yourself.
Speaker 1:Another really strong theme brought to us by Jodi as well was capacity and how. We have to know our capacity and we have to know how to give ourselves permission to slow down. We've been talking about writing permission slips. I can remember since Dr Brene Brown came out with her brilliant work and she said write yourself permission slips. So what do you need to write yourself a permission slip for today? And what I took away most from Jodi is yes, I can find island living in the city, which I'm doing Hope you are too but also this important fact that I just don't have the capacity for that right now, to actually use that in life with others or with yourself. I just don't have the capacity for that right now, and so I'm going to have to use that word I don't like to use, which is no, and to some of us high functioning type A's, whatever you are, that can sound like a cop out or I'm not good enough or I should have more energy, but that's not truth, because we see Jesus model that for us time and time again by going away to a quiet place to align with his Father. So as we give ourselves permission to slow down, we can also give ourselves permission to recognize we have a limited capacity In the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
Speaker 1:John Mark Comer writes this some of our limitations are involved in our personalities and emotional wiring. We have only so much capacity. So see this message. Our themes are showing up everywhere. He writes. I'm an introvert, I'm actually deeply relational, but my relational plate is small. I'm also melancholy by nature. So am I. I hate to admit it, but some people havea lot more capacity than I do. They can relate to more people, carry more responsibility, handle more stress, work more hours, lead more people and so on than I could ever dream of. Even the best version of me can't do it all.
Speaker 1:In his book the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, he writes we have limitations, lots of them, and so I just read one to you, and he said our bodies are a limitation. Yep, we can only be in one place at a time, and hence the rub on limitation our minds. He quotes the apostle Paul. We can only know in part, and the problem is we don't know what we don't know. Nobody is an encyclopedia. We all miss things, as the saying goes. My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. What we don't know often can and will hurt us.
Speaker 1:Our IQs, which are not the same across the board, also limit us. Yes, the mind is much like a muscle and we can exercise it to its full potential. But no matter how much I read or study or how many degrees I pursue, he writes, I will simply never have the intelligence of many of the people I most look up to. This is a significant, fairly significant limitation. And then he writes on our giftings On a similar note as above I will simply never have the giftings of many of the people I most look up to. Comparison there, it is just eats away at our joy, doesn't it? Whatever your thing is parenting, painting, music, entrepreneurship, origami, whatever there will always be somebody better at it than you. Always, he writes, stings a little bit, doesn't it? Yeah, it does, but why should it? What is it about the human condition that makes it well, nigh impossible for many of us to celebrate both those who are more gifted than we are and our own best work? When did the standard for success become a celebrity's magnus opus? Not our own sweat and tears. And he offers one more that well, many more, but I want to read on this one Our seasons of life and their responsibilities, like going to college or raising a young child or caring for dying parents.
Speaker 1:Here it is In some seasons, we just have very little extra time to give away. I'm going to say this again In some seasons, we just have very little extra time to give away. Many have noted that most of us are money poor when we're young. But we have time, especially when we're single. But as we age and pick the constraints that define our lives, it flips. Many of us now have money but are time poor.
Speaker 1:I'm nearly 40, he writes, I own a home, have money to occasionally eat out, even vacation in Kauai every few years Things my 20-year-old self would have only dreamed of. Yet I have just shy of zero free time Between my work as a pastor and my even more important work as a husband and father. My days are jammed full. Family is a limitation. I've thought about renaming my kids Limitation 1, limitation 2, and Limitation 3. That's such an interesting framework. They cost me and this is true of any relationship you have, but especially of your relationship with your kids an enormous amount of time, energy and intention. This isn't bad, it's wonderful, but it's a limitation for this season, one that is over two decades long, and I would say decades and decades, because I have children that are adults and they still are now grandchildren, so they're requiring a great deal of my time, and happily so me to have to make adjustments, little pivots, little shifts, because I only have so much capacity. Even though younger days, I don't think I did. I had to learn some hard lessons about limitations. And so here we are, giving ourselves permission to shift, to have holy curiosity to understand our capacity, not someone else's. And then in our discussions about ultralight backpacking, they were so, so exciting and so incredible with Glenn. So exciting and so incredible with Glenn. And my takeaway from Glenn was examine what I am carrying right now. Examine what I am carrying right now. How about't need to carry anymore?
Speaker 1:Earlier this year, I woke up in the middle of the night, heard that little whisper, and it was quite clear actually, and led me to Isaiah 46, particularly verse 4. Go ahead and read all of Isaiah 46 if you'd like, but it says this Go ahead and read all of Isaiah 46 if you'd like, but it says this Even to your old age and gray hairs, I am he. I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you. I will carry you, I will sustain you and I will rescue you. I will carry you, I will sustain you and I will rescue you. I have made you and I will carry you. Wow, that's a shift. When I read that and I've been thinking about it, writing about it in my journal, musing, walking around, thinking about it. Okay, god, what does that actually mean? If you're carrying me, then why am I carrying so many things? And we're all very familiar that he just says to cast your cares upon the waters and he will care for us. So I love that so much and I think Psalm 46 really offers us a whole great deal of deep, deep ease and peace.
Speaker 1:We learned more things about forest bathing and blooming and gardening and breath prayer and the mattering effect, and we closed out with the beautiful Lori Ferguson Wilbert and her book the Understory. She invited us to look down. Right, we've been told so many times to look up, and in the Hallibos Forest in Belgium I was looking up, but I also did look down because the little blue bells aren't very far from the ground, and so I did see the understory of the forest floor, but I didn't know that's what it was called at the time. Little did I know that Laura was going to expand my understanding of that. I love it. And she told us to look down and see what you see Ground yourself.
Speaker 1:Grounding is so critical right now in the world in which we're living in. She taught us a lot about the beautiful Wendell Berry in his writing and in this poem, the Peace of Wild Things, he writes when despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty, on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief, who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief, who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free in the grace of the world and am free For a time. I rest in the grace of the world and am free. Look down.
Speaker 1:She asked us how are you living right now, in the now? Some other ways to say that are be still and know I'm God right, psalm 46. It could be, be here now. All of these are beautiful, grounding places and my final takeaway from Lori was also given from Wendell Berry but to be at peace and in place. So that's where I want to close today. How can we, in this wild world, find the peace of wild things? How can we find rest in the grace of this world, be at peace and in place and be free? Well, there are many, many beautiful takeaways from this season and it is my greatest desire, in the words of Andre Crouch, that you flourish by being magnificently yourself. That's what we're all really moving towards being a flourishing human being and being magnificently ourselves.
Speaker 1:So just a little business before I close. I have a special treat for you. Next week I will be traveling, going to meet grandbaby number four and then going to celebrate at a baby shower, grandbaby number five. So to be fully present, at peace and in place and magnificently myself, I will be disconnecting and connecting with my loved ones that are all around me.
Speaker 1:But next week, tune in for a very beautiful audio meditation I've created for a Bible study that I've been working on, a small group trade book, whatever. I'm not sure how it'll all end up, but I originally created it to be a six-week study and it's called by the Brook and the audio meditation is called by the Brook. So I will have that for you next week, just so you can review Season 16, take it in. Like I said, go to Apple Podcasts All the transcripts are there for you Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcast and just exhale and take some time to go back through all the beautiful, beautiful episodes Each one has such a strong takeaway and, in the meantime, find your island in the city, give yourself permission to slow down, become the wallflower that blooms and becomes your authentic self, and just be at peace and in place you.
