25 Aug Simple Faith
Sometimes I like to wander to see what I’ll encounter. A nun I knew at one point in my life said she’d wake in the morning with the prayer to God, “How will you show yourself to me today?”
That was sort of my internal environment as I went wandering into a shop and meet Connie.
A woman of faith, strong, solid, simple faith that looked for signs of Mary and Jesus everywhere. A gentle spirit, she was worried she was cheating me when she added up what I was buying.
There’s a beautiful energy that pervades places of faith, where people believe that there is a way through, a way to be with what goes on.
I wandered away, holding that precious faith in my heart. How do we continue to cultivate the faith, the belief, that life gets better, that we can get through?
This week I got some emails from people who wrote telling me of their journey. One woman elected to enter the hospital as a way to help her ground, another wrote a word of thanks for all the free material on the websites, something that has helped this man in his journey.
Still another wrote (and with her permission I’m quoting her here) about how she’s been using the Becoming Safely Embodied Skills in her life:
For a long time I’ve been unable to progress beyond Skill set 6 of the BSE although 7 increasingly felt as if it could be an evolving step . Then today for the first time I found I was actually able to answer some of the questions in 7 which surprised me…as if something has shifted.
Something significant happened a few days ago which relates to a longstanding problem. It felt very traumatizing but I’ve slowly been able to stand back from it a little and there may be hopeful aspects to it which if I dared to allow myself a new narrative………..
In a way it could be that ‘a fresh perspective from an unusual source’ may have helped though I scarcely dare to believe this. I’m hoping meditation will slow me down enough to be able to know when, how or whether I should take any action.
It’s the simple faith of putting one foot in front of the other, daring to look beyond the blinders in life, the ones we’ve put there out of fear. That kind of faith, of linking up the longings of our needy heart with the hope that we can find our way through, and the skillful actions we take moment-to- moment that will lead us where we want to go.