Today, I’m elucidating the anatomy of Worry in contrast with Meditation using this handy dandy visual I made.
Notice the differences.
Worry and Meditation have commonalities.
• Both activities involve circling/cycling, repeated thoughts, but how they circle is very different and give us different outcomes.
(monotheistic)Meditation centers on the good supreme God, and often the One described in the Bible. The love and presence of God energizes the one meditating. Thoughts and cares are kept in close contact with God, not one’s self or self-interests. Prayer, worship, and centering are interrelated with meditation.
In Worry (in Christians or any one) thoughts are repetitive and ingrown, not centered on apart from self and move toward collapse, snuffing out our energy and health. Worry thoughts stay with the self, and do not move outward or around a stabilizing idea or deity. This causes degeneration into a Worry Spiral that undercuts growth, health, and well-being. Other problems may arise like illness, anxiety disorders, depression, paranoia, and much more.
In part 3, I’ll unpack how to move from Worry, which is negative, to Meditation which is peace and life-giving.
Did you read the previous Post? Please read Part 1 of this series where I discuss some common misunderstanding of Worry.
Do you think I got it right? What does Worry and Meditation look like for you?
Please, let me know.
• Recycling is when you take what appears to be garbage and you reform or reuse it again. But what’s this “up-cycle” stuff?
• Upcyclingis when one converts waste materials or useless items into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value.
The act and habit of worrying can be upcycled and in the next few posts I’ll unravel that.
First–
Stuff you might not know about WORRY:
1. Out-of -balance hormones can spike worry. A dip in progesterone in women or a drop in testosterone in men, for instance.
(This means that you can’t always get a handle on worry just by “thinking your way out of it”. There’s biological component.)
2. Anxiety (often seen as worry and other related problems) can be a genetic predisposition that runs in families, like heart disease can.
3. Changing habits can lessen worry, much like eating a good diet can help slim you down even if you come from a family that’s…um..big boned.
The Hopeful News… If you have a knack for worry (negative), then you may have a great capacity to meditate (positive). Prayer and mediation are almost synonyms, and overwhelming evidence shows that the use of prayer/meditation improves one’s level of anxiety, well-being, and health. Worry is a Soul issue. That means it’s more than mental or spiritual (the Soul is the whole of you and who you are). Soul Care address this. So, here we go!
Getting to a good place is NOT like throwing a switch, so I’ll start to tackle ways to move toward Upcycing worry more this week.
Here’s a little reminder that everyone gets tired.
Everyone gets unbalanced.
Maybe you’ll be touched deeply and start crying when you hear a rapper slinging rhymes, which is really weird, but I did that.
Maybe you’ll just feel a heaviness in your heart that you can’t pinpoint. A slow burning ache, like the weight of the broken world is pushing in and perched on your sternum.
Maybe you’ll see relationships so broken and confusing and full of turmoil that you’ll start to disconnect.
Maybe you’ll snap at your kids, or get angry at a stranger whose story you can’t possibily know.
And grace will leak away from you and your ideals will be shelved, and you’ll wonder if you’re really a person who still believes in goodness anymore.
Here’s a word for you…and for me….
It hurts to be alive.
There are mysteries we want to know but can’t unravel.
You. Will. Get. Tired.
In this sorrow we are not alone, because we are the same.
(If you’d like to share your worry today or your burden, please do. In the comment section or using the contact me tab. I’ll pray for you, and maybe you can pray for me.)
It’s been a rough few days with him. It’s a dicey combo mixing burgeoning adolescence and the Autistic experience.
His will is strong and he’s often unreasonable. He thinks he’s the rightful King of his world and ours; and I’ve felt discouraged about how poorly things have been going.
But…today, he built these glasses, and it got me to thinking about perspective.
And it gave me a new one.
What’s the bigger lesson here?
What if our windows of perspective are cloudy?
What if the shutters are closed?
How will an obstructed view hurt my ability to guide, lead, or learn?
Will I even be able to notice how poor my vision is?
And how can I get help seeing better?
It’s true that our perspective is limited.
The fact is easy to miss.
We flare with emotion in the dearth of comprehending how perspective works, or doesn’t work.
But, indeed, we can’t possibly see the full view, just the narrow vision our particular spectacles allow.
And with new lens our perspective changes.
Unwittingly, Nathan gave me the encouragement I needed.
This is actually an answer to my prayer for help.
Keep pushing on and Remember the lesson of the Lego Spectacles!
To you Leaders and Bloggers: Don’t forget to link-up with the SynchroBLOG on Leadership sponsored by Evangelical Seminary. Write something this week and contribute September 10-14.
In the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, actress Demi Moore replies to the question, “What scares you?” by saying,
“If I were to answer it just kind of bold-faced, I would say what scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being loved. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me … What scares me the most is not knowing and accepting that just about everything is not in my control. That makes me feel unsafe.”
Some people may claim the Hollywood starlet is speaking of a “God-shaped void” as Blaise Pascal once referred to it. But wait just a minute…
Not everybody will admit to this sort of thing. Some never gaze inward long enough to see it. But there it is. While many won’t realize what what the jilted Moore is talking about for themselves, I think this women has hit on a fundamentally human frailty fraught with universal relevancy. (And it has virtually nothing to do, in fact, with a certain shaggy-headed addition to the Two And A Half Man sitcom.) This frailty, I might add, is not actually negative, as we might first imagine, but rather part of the vulnerability that is the stuff of being human.
It’s these same underlying and exquisitely human fears that we mask, medicate, bury, avoid, deflect, or anesthetize, that cause all manner of destructive behaviors and coping mechanisms. For Demi, who was just hospitalized for stress-related health issues (namely exhaustion…and likely malnutrition), it can create potent consequences. It’s something wealth, influence, fame, accolades, and beauty doesn’t seem to ameliorate. Curious, no?
For many religion or spiritual practice helps to blunt the reality of our human predicament, but clearly that alone doesn’t seem to actually mend the situation. I refer not to just the situation of being mortal, but of being fundamentally impotent. Rarely is this gnawing sense placated for long. Demi, for one, is connected to the practice of Kabblah, but it hasn’t helped this core need.
Though her vulnerability and frailties are up for public scrutiny, many possess the same sorts of fears and maladies, and even despair, but go unnoticed.
To me, our condition seems unmendable…purposefully, that is.
Christians may argue they are the exception; they feel a great sense of hope because of belief in Jesus Christ, arriving to our world as the incarnation of God to make a pathway back to God. Alas, Redemption! Closure, right? Yet a cursory survey of believers (even 3 minutes scanning twitter feeds) show they too are rife with the same sorts of problems as Moore, and Jesus hasn’t seemed to fix that for them.
(The particulars of why are widely speculated and even hotly contested. Some call for more faith and prayer, while others osmotically move into greater embracing of “the mysteries”.)
The funny things is, I get Demi. I feel those things too. I wrestle with them, and I’ve taken up the journey to walk through all the rough patches, which are aplenty.
I think it’s high time to bring what it means to be human out it the open.
A kind of unlearning happens as we grow wiser, and the sort of acceptance of our weaknesses may take hold as we become more acquainted with our human condition. Maturity I think it’s called. The “Will we ever get there?” question lingers.
What do you think about Demi’s quote?
Do you relate to her, or do you see things differently?
