Becoming Me
Becoming Me
How can I experience the unconditional love of God?
Episode 139
In this episode, I address a thought-provoking question from one of my subscribers who asked how can we experience the unconditional love of God. I delve into the concept of embodied spirituality, underscoring the indispensability of involving our entire being—body, senses, and soul—in our spiritual journey to connect with God's love more authentically.
I share practical methods to engage with God in daily life which serve as pathways to recognise and feel His presence more tangibly. Moreover, I distinguish between feeling loved by God and truly soaking in His unconditional love. I discuss the significant role of psychological healing in experiencing God's love, highlighting techniques like inner child reparenting and the Internal Family Systems theory for deeper self-acceptance and love.
I conclude by inviting viewers to embrace living the questions of their spiritual journey, focusing less on the unhealed parts of themselves and more on remaining attentive and responsive to God's ongoing presence and invitations to healing in our lives.
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TRANSCRIPT
Available here.
REFLECTION PROMPT
Have you asked God to let you experience his unconditional love? Do you do so regularly? (It is perhaps the simplest and most important prayer for our healing and integration journey!)
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EPISODE 139 | HOW CAN I EXPERIENCE THE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE OF GOD?
[00:00:00] I think we often don't realize, but the image of God that many people have, and the image of God that I think forms a lot of even our experiences in church, with our church leaders, et cetera. Maybe one where it's all about following the rules and not breaking the rules and immediately showing that you're repentant and sorry you have broken the rules. There's no spaciousness there. How can we experience that God loves us unconditionally?
[00:00:26] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me.
[00:00:55] Hello, everyone. If you have been following me for a while, you'll know that I really enjoy receiving questions from my subscribers and followers, and I really enjoy responding to them through my content.
[00:01:19] EXPERIENCING GOD'S UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
So, this was the question that I was asked - how can I experience the unconditional love of God? I will share the fuller question in just a moment, okay.
[00:01:30] And I just want to highlight, though that this is such a fundamental question that I think we ask, that many of us ask because we don't know how to experience the unconditional love of God. We know it's there but perhaps we have come to realize that we don't feel it, we don't experience it, right. So, this is a great question because when we talk about interior integration and becoming able to embody our relationship with God and live from that love, we need to have been able to experience God's love and not just His love, but His unconditional love.
[00:02:06] So, this question came in via email in response to my latest personal reflection in my Begin Again newsletter. Okay, so, if this is the first time you've heard that, I have a newsletter and if you're interested, you can subscribe to it from my website. Okay, so, I'm just going to read the question that came in from the email.
[00:02:29] Dearest Ann, thank you very much for sharing this one and your past article after returning from your ecological retreat in Australia. You're tackling the central question of Christian beings. My own fundamental question revolves around how can I experience the love of God and what parts of self are still unhealed? I am optimistic that experiencing the unconditional love of God by itself is healing, which can be equated as my own resurrection. I also hope that after this experience I can love myself and others unconditionally. Then the hard task remains, which spiritual tool is most helpful for this purpose? Can the exercise of St. Ignatius' contemplation to attain the love of God be helpful? What is your practical experience in this issue?
[00:03:22] Okay, so, when I saw this email, I thought, well, that's a multi layered and very deep question or questions. These are deep questions, right? And I need to take a moment to pray about how I'm called to respond because there are many different ways I can possibly respond to this. And I decided to make a video to respond to this so that I have more leeway to be able to talk about this question or these questions and hopefully to the person who asked this question, you'll find this helpful and at the same time, I hope that my response will bless others as well.
[00:04:02] Okay, so, let's take a closer look at these questions. Okay, I'm going to be speaking to first of all, the central question I think, is how can I experience the love of God? There is a side question there, about what parts of self are still unhealed. How will I know what parts of self are still unhealed, which I will address at a later part of today's video. And of course, the other central question is, well, what spiritual tool is going to help me most in experiencing God's love? And what's my practical experience to this issue? And also, would that particular exercise that he mentions there, from St. Ignatius, be most helpful? I will also address that closer to the end of this video.
[00:04:46] SIMPLY ASKING GOD
So, first of all, first of all, before I go into any more detailed response, I think the most important thing that many of us forget to do is to simply ask God. Ask God, like just tell God, I can't feel or I can't experience Your love for me or I can't experience this unconditional love that I know you have for me. Please let me experience it. Help me to experience your love, right? Just ask. You don't need fancy words. You don't need fancy formulas. You just ask God. He said, Christ, Jesus promised, right? I mean, ask and you shall receive.
[00:05:31] And in my experience, it's true. Ask in a spirit of faith and trust, be open to it, but don't be too attached to some specific way you want to have the prayer answered, right? But just ask and keep on asking. Don't stop asking. Lord, let me experience your love because this is such a fundamental foundation to the whole interior journey. We always need more and more of an embodied experience of God's love. So, we just keep asking and asking and asking.
[00:06:08] EMBODIED SPIRITUALITY
Secondly, I want to say, and this is very important, that experiencing God's love is more than just a spiritual thing, all right? I need to say this because for many, many people, myself included, our initial understanding and approach to spirituality is one that doesn't quite involve the body because we have a mistaken assumption that matter and the body somehow, you know - evil or bad or holds us back. It's a very subtle assumption that creeps in practice for many of us, right? This is not really what our faith teaches as well, but in reality, in practice, and I think this is so important because our lived experience is what we experience, is the practical dimension of things.
[00:06:57] It doesn't matter what we know to be true intellectually. What informs the actual knowledge that is embodied in us, is our lived experience. And our lived experience for many of us is that we don't trust our bodies. We don't trust our emotions; we don't trust matter. We have this subtle belief or suspicion that these things are problematic. Our body and our emotions are what keep us from having a deeper relationship with God.
[00:07:28] So, first of all, we need to debunk that. We need to make explicit this point that good spirituality is always embodied. It involves the whole of us, right? All of us, our spirit, our embodied soul. So, as I'm going to be answering this question about what spiritual tool you know, is going to help us experience God's unconditional love. I want to emphasize that we need to come in touch with our bodies, okay. So, it must be embodied.
[00:08:00] And because of the lived experience of trauma for many of us, we are cut off from our bodies. Our lack of trust in our bodies and our emotions is often a result of our trauma. And so, we live in our heads. Many of us, we prefer to, you know, we prefer to study and dwell on intricate philosophies and theologies just in the intellectual realm, right?
[00:08:23] Even in terms of spirituality, we just want to understand it and maybe carry out some formula in a way that's not in touch with our bodies as well. So, we live in our heads or we don't feel anything anymore. That's a form of dissociation. And that makes it much more difficult for us to experience God's love for us. Because we experience God's love for us through our bodies, through our emotions and through our nervous system. Okay, which is why we can't just look at purely spiritual solutions that don't take into consideration our body.
[00:08:59] HEALING THROUGH SENSORY EXPERIENCES
So, my simple response to, you know, what kind of spiritual tool can best help us to experience God's love for us, I'll say, get back in our bodies, gently. Because this is a process of healing and integration. Because of past trauma, we do not feel safe in our bodies. So, this is something that we need to take our time and not force ourselves to go beyond what we cannot tolerate, right? So, it's a vicious cycle. When we are not in touch with our bodies, we may not even know what it is that we cannot tolerate until something really bad happens. Like we really break down or we fall sick.
[00:09:37] As we come back, I would say, come back in touch with our bodies, we will begin to be more sensitive to what our tolerance is. We become more attuned to what is okay with us. That is part of the spirituality that we need to experience God in our bodies because he gave us our bodies and our nervous system to be in this world, that He created and to see and encounter Him through all our senses right through our mind and our imagination, you know? And our emotions through everything that He has given us, all of these are channels for our experiences of His love and its presence so we need to use our five senses, okay?
[00:10:26] Our five physical senses and we need to heal our fear of sensuality. So many of us, like I said earlier, distrust our senses distrust our bodies. We distrust pleasure. It's almost like we feel guilty if we really enjoy something because deep down, we don't believe that we deserve pleasure, that we deserve joy. And maybe for many of us, especially those of us who have experienced spiritual religious guilting and manipulation as part of our complex trauma, we may have a very skewed and distorted idea of pleasure.
[00:11:00] We think that pleasure leads to sin or that sin is always pleasurable. You know, both of these are not always true, right. And so, we distrust pleasure and we forget that pleasure is God's gift to us. A wonderful, wonderful window for us to experience His delight for us. It's pleasure, sensual pleasure, pleasure through our five senses. So, that's another dimension that we need to heal by slowly, you know? Using our senses and discovering God in the pleasure of our senses.
[00:11:32] IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY AND SENSORY CONNECTION
Ignatian Spirituality, I mentioned this specifically because in the question that was posed, that was mentioned of St. Ignatius. Ignatian Spirituality connects us with our senses, both in our outer senses, the five physical senses, and also with our inner senses. This inner sense of imagination, Ignatian contemplation, the way of prayer, of praying the gospel that St. Ignatius teaches us, utilizes the imagination, right? And in our inner senses, we imagine how things, you know, how they look, how they taste, how they smell, how they feel.
[00:12:09] And often, if you go for Ignatian style retreats, you'll find that your spiritual director encourages you to spend time not just in the chapel, but out there, right, in the garden. Hopefully there's nature and plenty of nature around there for you. Go and be in nature. And feel what's beneath your feet, smell what's in the air. You know, listen. In my recent retreat in Brisbane, the sense of hearing was very healing for me because it was so silent, which is very different from where I live in Singapore, where almost every day, even at retreat centres, you will hear some traffic or maybe some construction sounds. It's hard to get far away enough from an urban life to have silence in nature in Singapore.
[00:12:57] So, when I went away for this retreat, it was so amazing that I had a whole week where I could hear the wind, I could hear the tree outside my room, the rustling of the leaves. I could hear the birds and all these different birds that were in Australia that I don't have here, that we don't have here in Singapore, and how different the bird songs were, right. Just listening to all those sounds helped me to feel loved. I felt God's love, that the grace of being able to be there and to enjoy the silence and to hear all these beautiful sounds of nature, right?
[00:13:34] And the sight, you know, of sunsets and sunrises, of the ocean, the greens, the verdant greens of the garden, all of this, and taste and smell. Even in nation retreats, I particularly enjoy because we get to eat in silence, because these are silent retreats. The taste of even simply cooked food. They just - the taste seems to be more vibrant like I can taste more, you know, coffee, even sometimes very simple coffee not like gourmet kind of coffee, they taste different, you know?
[00:14:10] I can enjoy them because of the silence. Like my taste is heightened. Of course, unless it's bad coffee, I still cannot enjoy bad coffee. It can be simple, but it can't be bad coffee, right. But the idea is these are some examples of how we can rediscover the pleasure of our senses. And we actually are experiencing God's love in our senses, in and through our senses, all right.
[00:14:35] So, get back in our bodies gently, feel again, bathe in the beauty of the senses, I guess there's are our sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. In my own healing journey, and there's a separate episode of this on both my YouTube channel as well as on my podcast, where I talked a bit more about this season of healing that I was in and how brewing coffee and contemplative photography were huge parts of my healing, and my ability to reconnect with how God loves me in my body again.
[00:15:09] Prior to that, I had spent, you know, about almost six years just full-time ministry in the parish. I was spending hours in prayer. I was frequenting the sacraments, but my life was just so busy and hectic and I wasn't even aware of my fragmentation that I never really could experience that embodied love of God, you know, like in me. And later on, that healing process, I just followed what my intuition led, you know, led me to.
[00:15:39] So, for example, I didn't even used to be a coffee drinker, but I decided to pick it up because my husband enjoys coffee, and then during my sabbatical, at some time, and I started learning how to brew coffee. And in order to know whether I was doing a good job, I needed to taste the coffee and I began to recognize what kinds of coffee I can drink and that I enjoy and the whole process, you know, the sight and the smell of the coffee beans, the sound of the coffee beans being ground. All of this, they became prayer when I was present to the process, and it was a very sensate process.
[00:16:14] Contemplative photography for me was about beauty, about seeing something within the frame, you know, through my lenses in a way that just frames a particular part of the larger picture that allows me to focus and enter. And I enjoy that beauty and the stillness in that beauty. So again, that senses. And swimming was also a part of that season of healing. And one big reason why I enjoy swimming is the feel of the water as I, you know, as I swim, right? And something about that process soothes me and helps me to be present, helps me to come back to my body.
[00:17:03] These are things that help me reconnect to God in a way that's very different from the usual prayer, right, that I was used to, that it's special set aside time that happens maybe in a chapel or in a corner of my home. Those are important you know, parts too, but that's just one, they're just one part, you know? That our whole life can be prayer if we know how to be in our bodies. And so, that's how we experience God's love. We don't just experience God's love when we are in prayer, we experience God's love constantly when we learn how to be in our bodies and to attune to how God loves us in our bodies.
[00:17:43] So, some examples that you may want to explore, depending on where you are and what kind of resources you have. Music. whether it's actually, you know, classical music or pop music, some kind of genre that you enjoy, or even like the example I used, the music of nature, the sounds of the wind in the trees, or the rain, the pitter patter of the rain, or the sound of waves coming in if you're close to an ocean, you know, anything. When we pay attention, we hear music, right?
[00:18:13] Art. Whether it's formal art, or you creating art, you know, enjoying something beautiful, the art that God is creating through like beautiful sunrise or sunset. Gardening, if you have green fingers, you know, to feel the soil and, you know - I have trouble describing this because I do not have green fingers and I do not enjoy gardening. But from what I see of friends that do enjoy gardening, gosh, they enjoy the nitty gritty process of bringing forth and nurturing life, right, in their garden.
[00:18:51] Or cooking and enjoying food. All these involve our senses, right? Enjoying the pleasure and the process of creating and enjoying others creation or God's creation. So, all these are part of embodied spirituality and they don't even need us to be explicitly praying, like I mentioned earlier, okay, to connect us with our body.
[00:19:11] Next I want to delve into this distinction because there's still a nuance, okay.
[00:19:16] THE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE OF GOD
Experiencing God's love is one thing. Now, experiencing God's unconditional love is another. And I didn't used to think there was a difference because well, I had experienced God's love quite a bit before I experienced or learned to really drink in His unconditional love. And I used to be confused. I thought I have experienced God's love for me. I know He loves me. I've already developed my, you know, an ability to notice how He's present in my life, right?
[00:19:45] So, another very powerful way of helping us to experience God's love is the prayer of the examen, right? The Ignatian examen. And there's also another whole episode that I did on this. That's on YouTube and on my podcast, about how the prayer of examen, right, in St. Ignatius' prayer of the examen can help us to actually get more attuned and experience how God loves us. So, I would direct you to that episode as well. I will put the link to these two other episodes that I've mentioned in the show notes so that it's easy for you to access.
[00:20:20] Okay, but I just want to remind you again, those of you who have watched my other videos as well, that there are multiple ways, okay? So, we can experience God's love. So, the examen, for example, is a wonderful way to grow in our sensitivity to how God is present to us in our life and how He loves us. But experiencing His unconditional love is another level higher. Okay, so, why do I say that?
[00:20:47] For many, many of us, because we feel so unworthy and because of our lived experience, right? The complex trauma that many of us have, come because we experienced maybe emotional neglect. We don't have the experience of caregivers or significant others being unconditionally loving to us. Our experience of love even when we can experience love is that It's conditional, right? It's that I have to be good enough somehow. I have to earn that love, right?
[00:21:17] So, maybe when I behave a certain way, maybe when I accomplish certain things, when I play a certain role well, I get some love from my caregivers or my significant other, you know, whatever that is. So, this is so ingrained in our experience that we bring this to our relationship with God as well. So, even when God's love for us is freely given it's unconditional in that sense that, you know, we don't need to do anything to earn it and even when we sin even when we betray Him, He still will give that love for us. That is the truth right, but we can't experience that truth of that, that is, that His love is unconditional because we are still stuck in that perspective that I need to become worthy of this love.
[00:22:03] So, that perspective narrows our experience of God. So, even though He may be giving His love unconditionally to us, we can't experience that. So, what is required for us to experience that unconditional love? I just want to say that I can't speak for everyone, but my experience is that one in my lowest moments, in my gravest failures, not in that moment. I mean, you know, I say like, but sometime after, especially in the earlier parts of my walk with God, when I experienced how God always knew that I would sin, and maybe even, you know, have that particular sin, no matter how grave I sinned, that He always knew everything I would ever do that would in my mind, disappoint him and betray him.
[00:22:56] And He still gave me all those graces that He did. He still gave me all that love and all that incredible encounters of consolations, let's say, with Him. If we talk about chronological time, we don't know how we will feel God, right, in the future. And sometimes in the present moment, maybe we experience a grace of God, we experience some consolation, we may experience His love. And we may subconsciously think that okay, it's because I have been doing my best to be a good disciple of Christ and so this is a reward. It's all very subconscious I think most of us we don't even know we are thinking that or that we're feeling that way, right, and then later on when we sin, and then we feel oh now we're not worthy of God's love anymore because now I'm a horrible sinner right?
[00:23:41] And until I bring myself, let's say, to confession, you know, and confess my sins and I'm truly repentant, only then will God love me again, or only then will I again be deserving of God's love. That's our experience. And that is what gets in the way of us experiencing God's unconditional love. But when we realize that God always knew we would fail Him, that God can't possibly be disappointed because He can't be surprised, right? He's God. He's God. He can't be surprised and He still blesses us. He still gives us all that love. His love was given regardless of what we will ever do or not do. That's one way that I've experienced God's unconditional love. And not just one off, but that ongoing forgiveness of my faults and even grave sins, both in the sacrament of reconciliation, which is a very powerful channel of grace. But there's a condition here, unfortunately, in the sense, in terms of our experiential capacity or our ability to experience God's love in the confession. It depends so much on the confessor.
[00:24:53] Okay, so, I always tell people, if you encounter a good confessor, someone that you feel safe with and someone whom you feel really cares for you and is able to open you up further to God's grace, see if you can in future, just make appointments with that particular confessor, right? Rather than just go to different confessors every time. It can help because then there's also some kind of a relationship there. Okay, so, that's something for consideration, but experiencing God's forgiveness is not just limited to the sacrament of reconciliation.
[00:25:32] The sacraments are themselves just outward signs of an inward grace, and we can already experience that inward grace even before we go for the sacrament. Okay, so this may become more of a reality only as we've deepened our walk with Christ and become a little bit more healed and more in touch with how God is present in our bodies. But then we begin to really experience that God is in all things. God's love for us is constant and always unconditional.
[00:25:58] PRACTICAL STEPS AND TOOLS FOR HEALING
Another very powerful channel for me of deepening my encounter with God's unconditional love for me is the experience of how much God allows. I think we often don't realize, but the image of God that many people have, and the image of God that I think forms a lot of even our experiences in church, with our church leaders, et cetera. Maybe one where God is quite petty and His love is quite conditional and He's very strict. And it's all about following the rules and not breaking the rules and immediately showing that you're repentant and sorry you have broken the rules.
[00:26:36] There's no spaciousness there. How can we experience that God loves us unconditionally when that's what we experience, right? Start looking out for where you do experience that. It could be with a spiritual director. It could be with a particular kind of community. It could be in therapy, it could be with a significant person in your life who just allows you to be you, doesn't try to control you and push you to grow, you know, a certain way, is open to loving you as you find your way, even as you stumble and fall.
[00:27:08] That kind of experience allows us to experience the allowingness and the spaciousness of God. And that is a very powerful way of experiencing the unconditional love of God, okay. What I experienced in the past was that I can be loved, but I have to stick with the program. I will have to stick with the program. And if I don't stick with the program, I will experience someone's displeasure, right? So, that's not what we want.
[00:27:35] We need to create some distance between ourselves and that kind of experience as much as we can. That's where boundaries come in, all right. And there's also this dimension, which in integration, interior integration is really important. And that is a dimension of our own relationship with ourself. I've said in other places that when I started in, you know, when I started my journey, I only thought about my relationship with God. I was completely oblivious that I should even have a relationship with myself.
[00:28:07] And it was actually God who revealed to me that I had no relationship with myself and that we needed to fix this problem, in the sense that we needed to heal this brokenness in me. Because if I didn't have a good relationship with myself, if I didn't know how to love myself, that would severely limit my ability to receive God's love for me. So, healing my inner relationship with myself, where I learned to offer myself unconditional acceptance and unconditional love, that I don't abandon myself and I don't make myself feel that like if I disappoint others or my parents or God in my mind, right, I disappoint myself. And then there's a part of me that rejects myself.
[00:28:46] When that keeps happening, I don't experience unconditional love from myself. So, I needed to learn how to heal that. And the modalities that have proved very helpful for me. So, this is an area where it's not really in the area of spirituality, but in the area of psychology. Okay, but I really believe that a full, good spirituality involves these psychological components because like I said earlier, spirituality includes the emotions, includes the body, our nervous system, and all that. And these are areas where the sciences, the social sciences, actually study and have discoveries much more than just the area of spirituality. But two modalities that I found very helpful in building and healing that relationship with myself is in a child reparenting and internal family systems theory, all right.
[00:29:37] You can find a lot of information about this on the worldwide web, on internet. So, just you know, google that and see if there are resources that you can find on inner child reparenting and internal family systems theory. Okay, so, on my podcast I do have actually, a series on inner child healing and inner child reparenting that you can check out.
[00:30:00] So, also again, I'll put the link to that playlist or the link to the first of those, of that series in the show notes of this episode okay.
[00:30:11] SPIRITUAL EXERCISES AND TOOLS
So, now as we come to the end of this video, I want to address this specific question about this the exercise of St. Ignatius contemplation to attain the love of God, right? So, I was asked if this particular exercise will be helpful. So, this exercise is actually part of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, which whether it's you do it in 30 days or in nine to ten months, which is stretched out in daily life - it's a retreat that you're guided through. So, this exercise, the contemplation on the love of God is actually like the capstone. It's the last exercise, it is the finale, all right. It's the concluding meditation of a much longer guided process.
[00:30:58] So, I just want to say, you can find the exercise online as well, or you can refer to the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius and just go to this particular exercise. But it's not going to be that effective if you do that, okay. Because it is the last and final, final meditation of the spiritual exercises for a reason. As someone who teaches regularly and who designs courses, I can tell you there's a lot of intentionality when we build the pieces of a course. In this case, the exercise of Saint Ignatius is, I think, a brilliant example of, he calls it, exercises, but they're structured. It's almost like a course that you go through and you have to start at the beginning and you have to progress at the speed, in the sense of where you are and where the Holy Spirit is meeting you.
[00:31:49] That's why you need a good spiritual director to guide you through. The spiritual director is there to discern, are you ready to move on to the next exercise or the next step in this exercise? Or do you need more time in the current step where you're at to reap the fruit of that exercise, right? Just giving an example from my own experience as someone who creates and designs courses. There's a course that I teach, an online course, called A Leader's Spirituality, and it's taught over four sessions. And the third session of these four session series is the one that has the most impact on people and I have received requests in the past can you just create a retreat around this third session or can you come and you know, come to my parish and give a talk to my parish leaders just on what you talked about in this third session, right?
[00:32:39] And I always say no. Why do I say no? I explain to them the reason why when you experience this third session of my series you experience it as such a powerful encounter. It's because you went through parts one and two, I have intentionally built up to session three. Session three is kind of like the climax of my four-session course right if people didn't go through sessions one and two, they will not experience session three in that powerful way.
[00:33:11] So, it's not about the material it's not even about the speaker, right. It's about the process. So, I just want to say regarding this specific question about this exercise and contemplation of the love of God, you can refer to it. But just bear in mind, it's not the exercise itself, okay. It's the process that is important.
[00:33:34] LIVING OUT THE QUESTIONS
So, there's also this question, that was asked, how do I know what parts of myself are still unhealed? This is very easy. I'll just say we don't know; you can't know. You can't know what parts of yourself are still unhealed. Like, we don't know and we don't need to know. Okay, you don't need to know what parts of yourself are not yet healed we just need to live in the present moment and continue to respond to what God brings into our consciousness. It's about paying attention to God. It's about responding to what he invites us to.
[00:34:09] We don't need to know what is lying ahead of us in the longer journey. We just need to know that God is the one who accompanies us, who leads us, who loves us, who is doing the transformative work in us. It is God who heals us and teaches us how to accompany ourselves and participate in this healing. So, rather than ask this question about how do I know what parts of myself are still unhealed?
[00:34:33] I think it is much more helpful to ask these questions. Okay, am I paying attention? Am I listening to God in my life, right? Am I a discerning person? Or am I just always living at the surface of my life and not paying attention to the deeper realities of my life? If I'm attentive and I'm listening? I will pick up the cues when God is surfacing some part of my brokenness for healing. There are so many invitations every day.
[00:35:05] It's just a question of if we lean into it and if we respond to it or not. These are the important questions to ask in the process of our healing and our integration journey, that are more granular, that are more concrete.
[00:35:19] So, that's what I have for today's session. I hope that you found it helpful to the person who actually asked these questions. I hope that answers some of the questions in your heart, but just remember that the particular reflection that you responded to in my newsletter, the heading was about living the questions rather than just seeking answers, right? So, it's not that we can't seek answers. In a way, I'm offering, I'm responding to your question by offering you some kind of answer, but they're not the answers.
[00:35:53] The more important thing is that we live these questions. We keep wondering and we step into it and then, you know, we try different things and then we pay attention to what is helping us to move forward. That's how we live our way into the answers. Okay, so, that is it for today's sharing. I hope this blesses you. Goodbye!
[00:36:15] CONCLUSION
Thank you for listening to Becoming Me. The most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive.
If you like what you hear on this podcast, would like to receive a monthly written reflection from me as well as be updated on my latest content and offers, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter Begin Again. You can find the link to do that in the show notes. Until the next episode, happy becoming!