​       In our last blog on prayer, we focused on  a major issue that Apostle Paul highlights, namely that many humans struggle with “doing the very thing they hate and don’t want to do”  (Rom 7:15).   This is the purpose of what is often called “centering prayer”, to help us break this compulsive pattern.   In this blog, I plan to explore the psychological roots of this spiritual issue that Apostle Paul  describes and how centering prayer can help us regain our sense of will and choice.

       However, Jesus continues,  "when our eye is unhealthy, our whole body/soul will be full of darkness".   What does this mean?  
       Jesus is describing what happens when our sense of “I” has merged with an IFS part or ego structure.   When that happens, we are now in darkness, little to no self awareness.   While Jesus highlights the inner blindness that arises when we merge with our Flesh,  Apostle Paul emphasizes the loss of human choice and will that goes with this merge with our Flesh. 
      Both Jesus and Apostle Paul highlight the spiritual problem that arises when we merge with our Flesh parts.   Seen from this framework, it is clear what the spiritual solution is.  We must find way to break this psychospiritual merge.  ​

 This text highlights the importance of silence, that God is found in the stillness of our mind.

The scripture emphasizes that God's presence is found in the "sheer silence", not in the noisy or dramatic aspects of life.  

This verse focuses on how we become aware of God's spirit when we are weak and vulnerable.  The practice of centering prayer helps us enter that silent vulnerable place with an attitude of curiosity for it is during these times that we notice inner thoughts, voices, and experiences that may be God's Spirit responding to what is happening in our life.  

Centering prayer is a form of withdrawal like Jesus, withdrawal from the distractions of this world so that we can be alone in silence with our experiences.  

The scripture highlights how Presence of God can be found just as much within us as outside of us.  Centering prayer is a prayer form designed to notice what may be happening within us that could be signs of God's Spirit at work within us.   

       The practice of centering prayer was developed by Trappist monks Fr. William Meninger, Fr. Basil Pennington, and Fr. Thomas Keating.   In developing this prayer, they drew from the 14th-century contemplative text The Cloud of Unknowing and other early Christian traditions. 
The practice of centring prayer follows a simple four-step method:

1. Choose a Sacred Word as a symbol of your consent to God's presence.   Some example of words include “Jesus”, “Love”, “Let be”, “Peace”,  “Home”, or “Come, Holy Spirit”.
2. Settle silently, close your eyes, allow yourself to become aware of the bottom of your breath, and introduce the sacred word. Say it a few times and then slowly stop
3. When thoughts arise, gently return to repeating the sacred word and return to the bottom of your breath, and then slowly stop saying the word. 
4. Continue praying like this for 10 mins or longer.

        As you consider practicing centering prayer, I want you to see how it is different from mindfulness practice that is often practiced within counselling and other non-religious settings. 
       Centering Prayer aims to foster a deeper relationship with God through silent communion.  You are not talking to God or thinking about God in this prayer.   You are simply enjoying stillness with God just like when you are sitting or walking quietly together with your partner or friend.  The sacred word acts as an anchor and is used to gently redirect our attention when our mind gets distracted by the thoughts of our parts within our soul.   Fr. Keating referred to centring prayer as "Divine Therapy," believing the silent space aided spiritual healing.

      Below is a video where I lead you through a time of clearing your inner space first and them moving right into a time of centering prayer. ​

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor Educator (CASC)

        When people first hear about the conscious examen, they often think it is about examining our conscience, discerning whether some action is good or bad, but the conscious examen has a totally different purpose.  It is about exploring the different dynamics within our soul and discerning whether these spirits have their origins in God or not. 
        Before looking at the spiritual practice of the conscious examen, I want to unpack what it means to do spiritual discernment.  How do we know that a dynamic is an expression of God’s spirit? 
       When I asked the people of Shantz Mennonite Church how they know a dynamic is from God, they came up with the following list:

1. They look to Christian Scripture to see whether a certain behavior or experience is attributed to God’s spirit.   One of the most known scriptures that describes God’s spirit is found in the book of Galatians.  Here, Apostle Paul makes a list of some of the fruits of the Spirit.  They are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal 5: 22-23).   One can find many other examples of God’s spirit in the Bible in the stories of Jesus (healing, truth/insight, strength/anger, compassion, grace, humility, kenotic power (self-surrendering), sense of being God’s beloved, resilience, will, centred/grounded, etc.)
2. They look at the fruits of the experience and if they are positive, then that would suggest that the experience probably has been shaped by God's spirit, that it is part of God's will. 
3. They check with other Christians to see if their truth/experience resonates as truth for their peers.  

        When I went through training as a psychospiritual therapist (2001-2005), I was looking for help around how to connect with God's spirit within  a counselling session.   Surely there must be a way to do this discernment real time so that I can support this God dynamic arising in session.  Or if the dynamic is not connected to God's spirit, then I can become curious about what is causing it.  This information, from my perspective, seems like vital information to have…and so I have been on this journey to discern these spiritual insights. This was a key reason why I became certified as a psychospiritual therapist back in 2001-2006 but I came away from that training disappointed. 
        I remember back then having a time for theological reflection each week in my training, but spiritual discernment was based on the fruits or positive outcomes of our counselling.   However, there were no teachings that helped me discern the dynamics of God's spirit in the present moment as I counselled my clients.   
        Since the Bible is so important within the Christian Church, including my church, in preparation on this series on prayer, I  went looking deeper into what insights the Bible might have around discerning the dynamics found within the human soul. 
​        I discovered that in the New Testament book of Galatians  Apostle Paul categorized these internal dynamics into two groups, the fruits of the Spirit and the works of the Flesh.  When he talks about the works of the Flesh, he lists the following behaviors:  sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, etc. (Gal. 5: 17-21).   Apostle Paul’s list of spiritual fruits is very different.  It includes the list I noted earlier:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal 5: 22-23).  

      Due to this knowingness element of the soul, we are able discern certain qualities or fruits of the Spirit that arise when certain conditions are experienced in our soul or life.  Let me list the key qualities of Essence that the Diamond Approach highlights.

1.  Compassion:  This quality arises in response to pain/suffering.  This energy has a tender, soft, vulnerable, sad-like feel to it. 
2.  Strength:   This quality arises when truth is needed to be spoken (injustice has happened, a boundary crossed,  a “no” that needs to be honour, etc.).  The energy has a strength, possible anger-like feel to it.
3.  Joy:   This quality arises in response to wonder, gratitude, beauty, desire to play or be humorous, etc.  This energy has a light, playful, freedom feel to it.  
4.  Will:   This quality arises when determination/resilience is needed when the going gets tough.   This energy has a grounded, supported, rooted sense to it.  
5.  Love:   This quality manifests as a field of nonjudgementalism that is always present, unconditional.  It has an open, curious, connection feel to it that is mixed with feelings of grace.  
6.  Power:  This quality expresses as the power to be your authentic self.  When we are in touch with this selfless power, God is able to eexpress their God’s authentic self through us in our world.  This Power is not an overpowering power that seeks to make God’s will/nature happen; that is fallen power.   This quality co-exists with the quality of peacefulness.  This energy arises strongly in response to survival issues with a hatred edge and a self control aspect to it. 

      When I began using Internal Family System (IFS) 4 years ago, I discovered that its notion of Self energy (IFS word for Spirit) manifests in certain ways, what IFS calls the 8 C’s and the 5 P’s.

The 8 C’s of IFS Self energy include the following: 

• Calmness:   A sense of internal peace and serenity. It is the ability to stay grounded and focused even when dealing with times of anxiety, anger, or overwhelmness.
• Clarity:   The ability to see situations and people objectively without the distortion of past traumas or extreme emotions.
• Curiosity:   A genuine interest in understanding both internal dynamics within oneself and external dynamics of life rather than judging or suppressing them.
• Compassion:   Feeling an open-heartedness toward yourself and others. It is the desire to help yourself and others heal.
• Confidence:   A trust in your own ability to handle internal and external situations.
• Courage:  The strength to face difficult emotions that may be intimidating. It involves taking risks to protect yourself and others  in the world.
• Creativity:  The ability to find new ways of addressing your issues or issues in the world. When you aren't stuck in rigid patterns, you can imagine fresh solutions to old problems.
• Connectedness: The feeling of being linked to all parts of yourself, to other people, and to the world at large. It is the antithesis of isolation

©2026 Gord Alton (Gemini AI assisted in the compilation of these IFS 8 C’s)
 
The Self energy discovered in IFS also include the followings 5 P':

• Presence:  This is the state of being fully "in the room" with your experience. You aren't distracted by other thoughts or hijacked by other emotions. It feels like a focused, mindful witness.
• Patience:   It often takes time to work through the issues that life brings to us.  Patience is the ability to wait for change to happen without rushing the process.
• Persistence:   Persistence is the commitment to stay with an issue even when it is difficult or resistant to change.
• Perspective:  The ability to see the "big picture." Perspective allows you to recognize that our extreme behavior (like an addiction or an outburst) is actually a misguided attempt by a part of us to help cope with pain, rather than a fundamental flaw in your character.
• Playfulness:   A lightheartedness that can help de-escalate both intense internal and external situations.  Playfulness can help parts  of us relax and foster a sense of joy and creativity in the healing process.

©2026 Gord Alton (Gemini AI assisted in the compilation of these IFS 5 P’s)

​      With all of these insights from the Diamond Approach and IFS, many which confirm teachings in the Bible,  we now have knowledge that allows to see the dynamics of Spirit emerging within our life experience in the present moment.  Furthermore, IFS has brought a new perspective to see the Flesh/Sin dynamics within our human soul.   Normally, these Flesh dynamics are judged as “bad” and we believe that they should not be present within our soul. 

      IFS takes a very different approach for it teaches that there are “no bad parts” within our soul.   What IFS has discovered is that that these “sinful” parts are providing an important protective role within our soul. 
       Many sinful parts are called Protectors in IFS for they provide the important role  of protecting our soul from experiencing the often-overwhelming feelings of our Exiles, the parts within our soul that hold our traumatic memories and attachment wounds from our past.     Some protectors are Manager parts for their purpose is to manage our life so that our Exiles are not activated by certain settings we find ourselves in, certain people we meet, or things we say or do.   However, when our Manager parts fail to manage our lives well enough and our soul becomes overwhelmed by our painful Exiles, then our reactive Firefighter parts come to the rescue to distract us away from this extreme pain.  Unfortunately, these Firefighter behaviors are also problematic (addictions, cutting, rage, suicide ideation, sexual acting out, etc.).  Many of the sinful behaviors Paul include in his list of Flesh dynamics are IFS firefighters whose goal is to help us cope with the intense pain of our Exile parts.  
       When we understand Apostle Paul’s Flesh dynamics as IFS parts, and realize the important helpful coping roles they play in our  life, we realize that there are “no bad parts”.   Rather, our sinful issues are actual IFS parts that need help from God’s Spirit to help heal the pain within our soul. 
        Seeing how God’s spirit manifests within our soul, and how our Flesh parts need healing from God’s spirit, we can now appreciate how the spiritual practice of the Conscious Examen can help deepen our experience of God’s spirit and heal our soul.  
       It is important to realize that the Conscious Examen is not about measuring how good or bad we were today.  Instead, we are exploring the different spirits/dynamics that have been active in our soul today with a special focus on noticing the dynamics that arise from God, and inviting healing when we notice a sinful dynamic active in our daily conscious examen. 
       What follows is a step by step slideshow that leads you through the Conscious Examen.  In the first slide, you have the option to click on the link that will take you to a video where I lead you through the conscious examen.   Otherwise, you can go the Conscious Examen slide by slide at your own pace through following the instructions on each screen.   

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisior-Educator (CASC)

      When we look at doing Welcoming Prayer, it is important to consider what our image of God is that we are welcoming into our life experience.   When you consider praying, who are you praying to?   What is the image of the God you are praying to?  Your image of God really shapes how you experience praying, whether praying brings you comfort or makes you anxious.   
      If our image of God is that a judge who blesses that which is good within us and punishes that which is bad within us, then it will be very hard for us to bring all of our life experience to God in prayer.  We will only bring to God that which we believe God will accept and embrace, and hide and suppress all experiences that we see God judging as unholy.   I hate to say this but this image of God as some sort of judge is a common image that people have of God and why people struggle in their prayer life.         The Christian Church has done a good job of indoctrinated its members with this image of God for this is a common image of God taught in some of our churches.  Yes, churches often stress that God is a  God of unconditional love, but when issues of sin arise within a person's life, God's unconditional love suddenly becomes conditional for many Christians believes that God's sense of moral truth trumps God's unconditional gracious love. 
       Within the counselling office, it becomes evident quickly that  this teaching that moral judgement takes priority over the experience of unconditional love does not  lead people to spiritual healing and transformation.     When client feel judged by God directly or through their counsellor, clients quickly shut down, and eventually stop praying or coming to counselling.    ​

      There is lots written within psychology about how the Inner Critic works.  The Inner Critic is an ego structure or personality part that formed within our soul during our childhood due to our past experiences of pain caused by scolding, abuse, and neglect from parents, caregivers, teachers, etc.   It is important to realize that no parents, families, schools, etc are perfect and life often creates difficult situations  that are too much for families, parents, teachers to hold well.   This is why everybody, by the time they grow into an adult, has an Inner Critic of some form, although some Inner Critics are harsher than others.   
      Due to the harsh words of the Inner Critic in our mind, and the feelings of shame it creates, the Inner Critic seeks to protect us from saying or doing things that will cause us now to experience the same traumatic pain that we had in our past from our caregivers.  The Inner Critic is very skeptical of any divine experience like Jesus’s enlightening experience at his baptism.  It sees such sacred experiences as potentially dangerous.  This is why our Inner Critic is seen as a positive protector part within Internal Family System; this part is trying to keep us small so we don’t say or do things that will cause more harm to happen to us.   This is why Internal Family System teaches that there is no such thing as a "bad part".   
       Unfortunately, many people interpret this Inner Critic voice as a god-voice, for it reflects for them perfectly their image of God, a God who blesses good and punishes bad actions, feelings, thoughts, and urges.   Our Inner Critic only sees these negative feelings, thoughts, urges, and actions as "bad",  “bad parts” or dynamics that should not be happening. 
      In contrast, within IFS, it sees no part, including the Inner Critic, as bad.    Rather, it sees every part as having a positive protective intention…even though sometimes the consequences of these positive intentions create pain and harm.   For example, when a person’s rageful part arises to push people away who are making the person anxious so they can feel safe again, that rage often leads to broken relationships and trusts.   When a “self cutting part” causes a person to cut their arm or leg to break the internal pressure of overwhelm or cause them to see that they are alive despite feeling totally numb inside, that cutting causes physically harm to the body and freaks out friends and their loved ones around them.    While the protective intent of these negative parts are positive, the consequences they created are often destructive.   This positive intent of these negative parts is why IFS teaches that there are no such things as bad parts. ​

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

This opening is an act of consent.
We soften toward whatever is arising within us — emotions, thoughts, sensations.
Instead of resisting or suppressing, we adopt a posture of openness.
The repetition gently shifts the heart from fear or control into receptivity.
It is not welcoming the external situation as good,
but welcoming our inner experience of it.
 
I welcome everything that comes to me today, because I know it's for my healing.

This line invites trust that:
 Our emotional reactions, our triggers, and our discomfort are teachers about what is wounded or longing for God. This does not suggest the external event is good, but that our inner responses can lead to healing. Whatever arises is not an enemy — it is a messenger.
 
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.

A radical act of spiritual hospitality.
We welcome: Our fear, irritation, grief, envy, the people who stir us, the conditions that challenge us, etc..
Instead of clinging to the pleasant and resisting the painful, we practice non-resistance so grace can move freely.
 
I let go of my desire for power and control.

Letting go does not mean passivity — it means loosening our grip.
We acknowledge the limits of our control and trust a wisdom greater than our own.
 
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval, and pleasure

Letting go invites a shift:
from seeking approval → seeking to be authentic
from performance → to being present
from being a certain image → to being a true self in God
It is a release from the need for validation.
 
I let go of my desire for survival and security.

Our instinct toward fear and hypervigilance.
Letting go does not mean abandoning safety.
It means releasing inner anxiety and grounding ourselves in divine presence as our deepest security.
 
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person, or myself.

One of the most challenging lines.
It invites surrender of the compulsion to:  fix, manage, correct, force outcomes, etc..
This is not resignation, but temporary non-interference, creating space for clarity.
When we stop pushing, we can discern what is truly ours to do and become.
 
I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within.

The heart of the prayer, helping us become available to God’s quiet work.
This openness is gentle and spacious:
tension → openness
ego → Spirit
clinging → consenting
The soul becomes a place where God can act freely.
 
Amen.

”Amen” seals the intention with willingness, not certainty.  It means  “So be it.”
It expresses trust in God’s ongoing work in the places we have opened.
 
Original prayer by Fr. Thomas Keating
Guided commentary by Michael Kotsopoulos

Thanks to my brother-in-law Jamie Steckly, he has created two video versions of this prayer based on audios he was able to create from my time teaching this prayer to my church in January.  

The first video version contains just the words of the prayer develop by Fr. Thomas Keating with pausues between each set of phrases for a time of quiet contemplation.  (Click on link to pray this Welcoming Prayer)

The second video version contains both the words of the prayer and the words of commentary by Michael Kostopoulos 
(Click this link to pray with this video) (the link is coming soon)

Sorry for the delay in this blog being published.   These last 4 months have been very busy mainly due to moving my parents closer to where I live din Baden, Ontario so that I could support them better...but also because my Dad's health declined and then died in April, the week after Easter.   I hope over the next few months to get back into publishing monthly blogs again like I have in the past.  

​...Gord...

Gord Alton MDiv RP  Supervisor-Educator

      Before I dive into unpacking the new meaning of “begotten, not created," I want to go on a journey of how Christianity has struggled to describe how these two natures, Divine nature and human nature, both dwelled within Jesus.   The reason this is the case is because in the Bible we see gospel writers having different views of Jesus.  The earliest written gospel Mark saw Jesus as very human while the latest written gospel John saw Jesus as very Divine.  I plan to explore the different understandings of the interplay between Jesus’ divine and human nature first before I investigate how Internal Family Systems brings insights from psychology into this conversation.

The Jewish Interpretation:  Divine Anointing of Human Being
      In the Jewish tradition, this interaction between the Divine and human is clear.   All humans are human but the Divine nature arises in humans through God anointing them with God’s spirit.   We see this divine anointing happening many times in the Old Testament through Moses and his sister Miriam, through the judges Gideon and Deborah, through King David and other Jewish kings, and the prophets.   All of these humans are described as God’s anointing them with special gifts or talents.  Even the coming Messiah, that the Jewish prophets predicted, was seen in this way…as a human anointed with God’s spirit to liberate God’s people.   This is what the Jewish word “Messiah” literally means, “anointed one.”   So, when Jesus is called the Messiah or Christ in the gospels by the Jewish followers and people during Jesus' lifetime, they were thinking of a normal human being who was anointed by God’s spirit. ​

      Another Jewish term that carries a similar meaning to Messiah is the term “son of man” or “son of human”.   In the four gospels, Jesus himself uses the term “son of human” most often to describe himself.    This Jewish term translated “son of human” appears in the Old Testament 107 times, and each time it is referring to a human being.  There are a couple places in the book of Daniel where there are Messianic hopes tied to this “son on human” person. (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/jesus-christ-son-man/).    
      Since Jesus’ mother tongue was Aramaic, efforts have been made to discover the Aramaic word that Jesus used that was translated into the Greek phrase “son of human”.  In the Greek New Testament, the gospel writers describe Jesus as ho huios tou anthrōpou—literally, “the son of the man.”  The double use of the article “the” is unusual in Greek and is probably trying to give an emphasis to an expression that was an important self-designation for Jesus (https://www.thenivbible.com/blog/the-son-of-man/).  This suggests that Jesus probably saw himself as a special human due to the fact he was anointed by God’s spirit. 
      This Jewish framework of this divine/human interplay is what we see evident within the  gospel of Mark, the first gospel written, sometime most historical scholars believe before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD.   Within this gospel, the story of Jesus begins with his baptism.  There is no mention of his miraculous birth or his childhood.   Instead, we see a very human Jesus being baptized by John, the Baptist, and it is here that the gospel writer believes Jesus was anointed by God’s spirit, and that this anointing led to  his intimate relationship with God, his inspired teachings, his healing ministry, and eventually to his death and resurrection.  
      It is interesting to note that in Mark’s gospel, and Matthew’s and Luke’s gospel, right after Jesus is baptized, he is led by God’s spirit into the wilderness for forty days, a phrase that meant in those times "a long time", and Jesus experiences severe temptation from what the gospel writers call Satan.  It is important to realize that the Greek word behind Satan means “accuser” or “adversary” which is different than the  narrative of "evil" that Christians often connect to Satan in this story.   Throughout the gospel of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, we see Jesus’ human nature wrestling with the dynamic of temptation. 
      Based on these Jewish writings, it seems obvious how the divine aspects of God’s spirit interacted with the human physical body and nature of Jesus.  But the Christian tradition has not fully embraced this Jewish framework of the divine-human dance within Jesus.  Our Christian tradition has professed that Jesus is more Divine than that, that somehow God was more fully present in the human Jesus than just a human being anointed by God’s spirit like we see in the gospel of Mark, that there was a part of Jesus that was God that was separate from this human nature.  This is why the Christian tradition has stressed that Jesus was also the Son of God, not just the Son of Human.  The origins of this "Son of God " title for Jesus has its roots in the writings of Apostle Paul, the birth narratives of the gospel of Matthew and Luke, and the gospel of John.  

Apostle Paul’s Interpretation:  Indwelling Christ within Human Being
      It is important to note that before any of the four gospels were written, Apostle Paul wrote all his nine letters to the early Christian churches.  In his letters, he never uses the term “son of human”.  His preferred term is Christ, the Greek word for Messiah meaning “anointed one”, and he refers to Jesus as either Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ in his writings.  Apostle Paul is interesting in that he never mentions the miraculous birth of Jesus.  He also never mentions any of Jesus’ teachings or many miracles.   It seems Apostle Paul has no awareness of these aspects of Jesus’ earthly life.   As a result, Apostle Paul does not help us understand the human/divine interplay within the historical human Jesus. 
      Instead, Apostle Paul focuses on the death and resurrection of Jesus, and especially his own personal encounter with the risen Christ which began with his conversion experience on the road to Damascus.  Apostle Paul had a remarkable conversion from being a zealous Jewish rabbi who worked with the Roman authorities in arresting Jewish followers of the risen Jesus to becoming an Apostle of the resurrected Christ himself.  It seems that this conversion experience  was like a profound anointing experience that we see within Jewish thinking and the gospel of Mark.  However, this anointing led to a profound change in Apostle Paul and all other humans who are anointed in this way. 

      John begins with the words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1–3, NIV).  And then the gospel writer adds, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth”  (John 1:14, NIV). 
      In the King James Version of the Bible, the phrase “one and only Son” is translated as “only begotten Son”.  It is clear from this text that the gospel writer John believes that Christ is the Word that God begotten before Jesus was born as a human being. 
      Many conservative Christian theologians make a key distinction between “being made” by God and “being begotten” by God.  To understand this difference, they often turn to C.S. Lewis, a popular Christian theologian who was known for his ability to help people understand complex theological ideas.   He writes, “when you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers, and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set (Mere Christianity, 157). 

      In having these sacred experiences, not once did I have an arrogant sense that “I was God”, better or bigger than other people.  Instead, such sacred experiences did the very opposite.  They humbled me for I sensed clearly that I was part of someone or something vast, far larger than I was.    
      My sense is that same thing happens for my IFS clients when they experience these moments of Self.  This Self is very different than our egoic self that each of us experiences that is very structured and causes to feel very different and separate from others.   When clients touch into their Self, I believe they are connecting with what the Diamond Approach calls their Personal Essence, a Personal Essence that is connected to the deeper Universal Essence.  
      This brings our journey around exploring the Divine-human dynamic within Jesus and ourselves to an end.   It has been a long journey but also hopefully a fruitful one.   Hopefully, now this Christian theological doctrine of “begotten, not created” has new meaning for you, one that allows you to see that this “begotten, not created” divine nature not only existed in Jesus but also within you.  
      Blessings on your spiritual journey.  

Gord Alton MDiv RP  CASC Supervisor-Educator

      To help us unpack this merge reality that cause people to lose connection to God, I want to turn to a Bible story that I preached about on the second Sunday of Advent (Dec 7, 2025).  This Bible story (Exekiel 37:1-14) is about the prophet Ezekiel who found himself and his people in a place of profound despair and hopelessness.  In the vision, God shows Ezekiel a valley full of dry bones that represented Ezekiel and his Jewish people.   
      What causes a person to become reduced to a skeleton of dry bones?  It is easy to believe that dry bones are caused by external factors like financial issues, housing insecurities, relational conflicts, joblessness, and physical or mental health challenges.   There is no doubt  that these negative life circumstances make people's lives very stressful and often seemingful impossible to rectify.   However, through ministering  with palliative clients or with clients who find themselves in these difficult places, I find that that not all of these people experience themselves as dry bones.   Instead,  in the midst of dying or through living with what appears to be a hopelessness situation, some people are able experience joy, love, meaning in life, special moments with love ones, and a deep sense of the Presence of God.  How can this be?  
        There is a prayer in the Christian tradition that has taken on new meaning for me in my work with people who experience themselves as dry bones.  It is called the Prayer of Serenity.    You can see it below:      ​

      There many things in life that are hard or impossible to change, things that cause us to feel like dry bones.    However,  what Internal Family System (IFS) highlights is that we can change our relationship to these dry bones areas of our life.   
            IFS teaches that we experience ourselves as dry bones when our sense of “I” merges with our experience of dry bones, when our sense of "I" merges with our negative thoughts, emotions and behaviors that cause us to feel despair and hopeless, as is apparent in our Bible story today.   But this dynamic of merging also can happen with our anger, anxiety, grief, addictions, overthinking, judgmentalism, and the list goes on.   When our sense of “I” merges with any unhelpful thought pattern, emotional dynamic or behavior, our experience of ourselves is totally controlled by whatever we are blended with.  
      We become lost in our depression or lost in our anger or lost in our judgementalism or lost in our anxiety or lost in our working all the time or lost in our addictions or our judgementalism or pleasing people and avoiding conflict, etc.    However, there is big down side that comes with this issue of merging and becoming lost.  When we are merged with our dry bones and thus lost, IFS teaches that there is little to no space for us to experience what IFS calls Self energy, what we, as Christians, describe as God’s presence or any aspect or quality of God’s healing and caring spirit in that moment.   This is a profound observation.  ​

      As we know from the human life of Jesus, God feels the pain of our human suffering.     God is not an indifferent God who sits back and watches his/her people suffer.   No, God suffers with us and feels our pain with us.  So I am pretty sure that the dry bones within Ezekiel would have noticed God feeling their dryness with them as Ezekiel told their painful story of the destruction of their sacred city and their precious temple and their deportation.  These dry bones sensed God understood fully their struggle, understood fully their sense of being a very dry and lifeless people.    
      As Ezekiel shared their painful story with God, God most likely reflected back parts of their story to make sure the dry bones and Ezekiel realized that God understood correctly and fully their experience.  It is only then when the dry bones with Ezekiel felt truly heard and understood by God would they soften and be open to God speaking words of hope and guidance to them.   This is what we see happening as the vision continues to unfold. ​

      I am sure Ezekiel felt very awkward speaking what God wanted him to say.   I am sure one part of Ezekiel saw those lifeless, essentially dead bones and wondered what is the point.   But there was now enough space between Ezekiel’s sense of “I” and his dry bones that he was able to find enough courage and faith arising inside him to take the risk.  And so Ezekiel spoke to the dry bones as God instructed.   As Ezekiel talked to the bones, he noticed that the bones responded. 
      We read that suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together and flesh appeared on the bones, but the bodies which now appeared on the valley floor were still lifeless.   They were not breathing yet. Then we read that God said to Ezekiel to keep speaking, “Speak Ezekiel, speak. Speak to the breath and spirit of each body…invite them to come alive.”  Ezekiel, now seeing the change that came from his first spoken words, speaks again, as God instructed him, and the lifeless bodies become alive in his vision, a multitude of them. 

      Each year at this time, we enter the Advent season of the Christian calendar.   For me, it is one of my favourite times of the Christian church.  It is a time when each of us are invited to connect to our deeper longings for a deeper connection with God and hope for change in our world.   
      It is easy within our culture to get spiritually lost through the different merges that can happen in our life due to the stresses of life, our world, our work, our family, and our personal  health.  When we merge with our fears, worries, intense emotions, powerful thoughts, and oppressive behaviors, we often find ourselves in a place where God feels far away, or we wonder if God is even real.   This is what naturally happens when our sense of “I” merges with one of our dry bones parts.  
      However, what often remains when we merge with our dry bones is a deep longing within us, a longing for what is missing in our life, a longing for more hope, more life, more peace, more joy, more love, a longing for the presence of Christ/God to again be more fully experienced in our lives.   As we honour these longings, they will help us find our way back to a fuller relationship with God which is symbolized each year at Christmas time with the celebration of the Christ Child, Emmanuel, which means, "God is with us". 

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator

      Instead, this study found “that human DNA cannot predict who is gay or heterosexual. Sexuality cannot be pinned down by biology, psychology or life experiences, … because human sexual attraction is decided by all these factors” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/there-is-no-gay-gene-there-is-no-straight-gene-sexuality-is-just-complex-study-confirms).
      This means that based on medical evidence, a binary male/female framework does not fit perfectly the realities that all people experience around their biological sex.
There are other factors that need to be consider, beyond one’s biology.   This is evident by the separation that has occurred between biological sex, the sex we are born with, and gender, the gender that people identify with.  
      Based in Statistics Canada (2023), “1.3 million people identify as Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or who use other terms related to gender or sexual diversity (2SLGBTQ+). This represents 4.4% of the Canadian population aged 15 years and older” (https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/12-581-x/2023001/sec6-eng.htm). This is more than 2.5 times higher than the estimated number of people who are intersex.   This suggest that psychology plays an important role in what gender a person identifies with whether it be male, female, bisexual, nonbinary, queer, etc.  It is clear that gender is no longer just determined by one’s biological sex at birth.
      This psychological dynamic of gender became very real for me as a psychospiritual therapist when a trans male came to me for spiritual direction and healing over 3 years ago. They were already seeing a counsellor and medical help for suicide ideation.   As I explored the inner dynamics of their soul, I became aware that they had some internal parts of their personality which identified as male and other internal parts that identified as female.  This idea that gender could be attached to different personality parts was fairly new to me although now, through my training in Internal Family System (IFS) counselling, this is common knowledge. However, what was problematic for my client was that these male and female parts were at war within themselves.  These opposite-gendered parts hated each other which was causing the person to wrestle with suicide.   Sadly, my client in the end took his life, but I have never forgotten their experience of having gendered parts. 

      Seeing how children, teenagers, and people developed internal burdened Parts within their personality, it is important these people can find safe families, school and faith communities where they can be supported on their journeys of discovering and claiming their sexuality, a key aspect of their identity.   I have found that many parents and religious communities wrestle with how to support children, teens, and adults on this journey of discovering and claiming their sexual identity.   
      I want to conclude this blog by exploring briefly how to make sense of this shift in understanding sexuality biblically.   There is no doubt that the Bible is binary in how it views sexuality.   However, as I learned from Dr.  Dan Epp Thiessen, Old Testament Professsor, who led a retreat at my church (Sept 27-28, 2025) on the Bible and Sexuality, the Bible is also clearly pro-slavery and highly patriarchal and yet over the last century, Bible scholars has helped us realize that these teachings of slavery and patriarchy in the Bible are a reflection of the culture that the Bible was written in, and not a reflection of God’s will for humanity.    Dan made a similar argument about the binary teaching of sexuality in the Bible.  It reflected the culture then when those Biblical verses were written, and not necessarily the intention of God around sexuality. 
      However, the well-known Biblical teachings in Genesis 1 and 2 may actually support what science is revealing about sexuality.  Wikipedia notes that ancient Judaism has two distinct accounts for the creation of humanity.  “The first account <found in Genesis 1> says "male and female [God] created them", implying simultaneous creation, whereas the second account <found in Genesis 2> states that God created Eve subsequent to the creation of Adam” (Retrieved Oct 23, 2025:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve).  To reconcile these two human creation stories,  “the Jewish Midrash Rabbah indicates that God originally created Adam as a hermaphrodite, bodily and spiritually both male and female, before creating the separate beings of Adam and Eve"   (Retrieved Oct 23, 2025:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve).  This means, based on this Jewish interpretation, the Torah describes the creation of humanity as involving a two-step incarnation process.  First, God created a hermaphrodite, a human that embodied both male and female sexuality.  Then from this hermaphrodite, God created male and female human beings. 

​       Another way I have come to understand Genesis 1 and 2 is through an IFS lens.
In Genesis 1, we read the following: “Let us make humans in our image” (Gen 1:26a) … “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1: 27).  While the original Hebrew text uses the word “his” and “he” as pronouns for God, the Hebrew word translated “God” is “Elohim” which means “gods or godhood.”  So, a more appropriate translation would be ““Let us make humans in our image … so God (Elohim) created humans in their image, in the image of God (Elohim), they  created them (humans), male and female they created them (humans). 
      I have come to understand these verses as describing God creating the human soul, that our human soul is genderless in the sense that it contains both male and female energies.   In my August 2025 blog where I summarized Dr. Newton’s hypnotic regression research on the human soul after death, he discovered a similar androgynous soul (a soul beyond gender) that disconnected from the earthly human body and entered the Afterlife (Journey of Souls 36).
      In Genesis 2, we read how the energies of human soul become physically incarnated in biological form of Adam and Eve since the ancient world, when Genesis 2 was written, only saw sexuality as binary, male and female.   If the words of Genesis 2 were written today, we would express how a community of humans was created by God, many who were male and female, but we would also see other expressions of gender and sexuality present, all reflections of the image of God.   

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator

      These people often believe this truth very strongly for it aligns with their experience. When these Christians and Christian leaders turn to their Bibles, they often find lots of scripture that show God judging people for their sins, especially within the Old Testament.  They also find aspects of God’s judgemental nature in different places in the New Testament, even though the dominant view of God found in Jesus and the early church is quite different.   They find lots of verses that support the existence of the judgmental God they experience internally in their soul.   
      However, the Christian Church is not just shaped by the Bible.  There are major theological doctrines around the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, and the dominant interpretations of these church doctrine are often centred around a judgmental God.  This suggests to me that these historical theologians also primarily experienced God personally as judgmental.  I think that this is still true for many leaders in our churches and seminaries today.   Our personal experience of the inner critic really shapes how we conceive and experience God. 
      It is hard to imagine experiencing God in any other way until you begin to understand the origins of the inner critic dynamic differently.   For me,  I had to go outside the Christian church to discover this truth. 
      The Diamond Approach and Internal Family System (IFS), both psychospiritual frameworks that I use, teach that this inner critic dynamic is an ego structure that develops during our childhood within our home and school environment.  It arises from us having painful or traumatic experiences that leave ego structures in our psyche to help us avoid encountering these painful experiences again in our life.  This is why, within IFS, our inner critic is seen as a protector ego structure whose purpose is to protect us, to keep us small by criticizes us or have us perform in different ways so that we don’t do or say anything that may cause us to relive the trauma we experienced when we were young.    In the picture blow, we see different forms our inner critic can take to protect us.  When we don't do what it wants us to do, it critiques us harshly.  ​

      For the next couple of moments in silence, I want you to focus on a memory of a time when you felt good about something you did or said.   See if you can connect with the experience of Divine Pride in that memory, and allow it to deepen.  (pause)   As you remember and re-experience that sense of pride, I want you to protect that experience of Divine Pride.  Don’t let your inner critic within you judge it, doubt it, or be suspicious of it.   Just allow the experience of Divine Pride to be there without judgement or manipulation. Enjoy this experience of Essential Pride for a couple minutes and notice its various qualities. (Pause)
      I have found that many people struggle to experience this Divine Pride for the church, and even our culture, is very suspicious of any expression of pride.  Even parents and grandparents struggle to validate their children’s accomplishments, actions, and positive expressions of themselves for fear that these words of affirmation could lead to issues of false pride within their children.   
      The truth is that the very opposite is true.  Every child has a need to be seen and validated, affirmed for who they are.   As children experience these times of being seen and validated, they begin to experience True Pride arising inside themselves from God.  However, when children don’t get these attachment needs met well enough of being seen and validated, they develop painful attachment wounds that often lead to them developing inner critics to stop them from saying or doing things that may draw negative attention to themselves, and thus cause them to re-experience their attachment wounds.   
      However, something else also happens to make up for this lack of Divine Pride arising inside us.  Due to this missing Divine Pride inside, children, adults too,  say or do things with the hope that they can get these feelings of pride from outside themselves…from other people.   They become super achievers so people can see how good they are.  They become super pleasers of others with the hope that others will see their goodness.   They brag or do things that draw attention to themselves with the hope that people will see and say how good they are.   They are trying to get this Divine Pride experience from outside themselves, but this is not possible.  This is a false pride compared to the Divine Pride that always emerges from inside themselves from God.   
      This means that families, religious communities, and friendship circles need to strive to be a place where everyone is seen and validated for who they are, and the gifts they are able to share with each other.   As people experience these moments of being seen and validated by us, these moments of blessings, they will touch into times of Divine Pride inside themselves, a true pride that comes only from God. 
      In this blog, we explored what it means to experience God's spirit and voice in our lives.   Often people confuse their inner critic dynamic with God's voice,  but as we have seen in this blog, this inner judgmental voice has no connection to God.   Rather, all qualities of God are experienced as a blesssing to our soul and body,  something our soul and body long for, and when it happens, they relish.  

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator

B.  The Afterlife is a Place of Healing and Growth
      Many religious people associate judgement with the Afterlife.  Some of us are judged and then assigned to Heaven, a place of no punishment; some are assigned Purgatory, a place of punishment until our soul is purified of any sin; some are assigned Hell which is often connected with eternal punishment. 
      While some form of judgement paradigm is often what the Church and other major religions have historically taught, this is not what hypnotic regression clients share about the in-between life.   Yes, all of us experience a time of reflection with our spiritual guides and other spiritual entities, but the whole purpose of this assessment is to determine what growth happened during one’s life on Earth, and what further growth needs to happen for the soul to continue maturing spiritually.
     Let me first share what Newton discovered happens to damaged souls.  Then I will explore what occurs with the rest of human souls around healing. 

1. Healing of damaged souls

      Newton learned that there are two types of damaged souls.  One form of damaged soul are those who “do not accept the fact that their physical body is dead and fight returning to the spirit world for reasons of personal anguish” (45).   In these abnormal cases, the soul’s spiritual guides and others come to assist the adjustment process from the other side (15).  If the soul is traumatized by unfinished business, usually the first entity it sees right after death is its spiritual guide (25). “These highly developed spiritual teachers are prepared to take the initial brunt of a soul’s frustration following an untimely death” (25).   If the damaged soul refuses to go home after death, they often have unpleasant influences on those of us who would like to finish out our own human lives in peace (45).  These damage souls are often called ghosts. 

Nurturing the maturing of souls
      For most souls that are not severely damaged, “we are taken to a place of healing” (53).  Here, we experience a shower, not with water, but with energy and a light that washing out most of the negative viruses allowing us to let go of the negative bonds of our past life (55).  In one case study, Newton learned how “the ravages of the physical body and the human mind leaves an emotional mark on the soul after death” (54). After that shower, we experience a type of counseling by our guides that is gentle but probing (55). 
      Newton discovered that “those who escape from chronic physical pain or almost total incapability on Earth by killing themselves feel no remorse as souls.  Their guides and soul friends also have a more accepting view” (58).  For those souls who commit suicide, they feel sadness or regret for they realized that they have failed to work at their growth goals as a soul as was predetermined by their guide before this earthly life (58-59).   Newton also notes that “a soul grows by trying to overcome all negative emotions connected to fear through perseverance in many lifetimes, often returning to the spirit world bruised, or hurt” (69).  “The feedback and past life analysis we receive in terms of judgement is based upon the original intent of our choices as much as the actions of a lifetime” (70). 
      The other key discovery which surprises some people is that our souls, upon death, are far from perfect (41), as is commonly understood in the Western religious traditions.  We don’t magically become perfectly spiritual matured people upon our death.   Instead, we often have conversations with our spiritual guide about the fact that little spiritual growth happened during our earthly life…which is the essential purpose of our re-incarnation on Earth.   
      Newton notes that the spiritual masters, throughout history, “constantly remind us that because the human brain does not have an innate moral choice of ethics, conscience is the soul’s responsibility” (71).  This means that there is  “overwhelming forgiveness in the spiritual world” (71) which allows to let go of our past earthly incarnation so that we can learn and grow into a more mature soul. ​

Looking back on this history now, we know that this theological decision was more a political decision then a decision based on discerning truth.   
      Furthermore, beyond Origen's doctrine that the human soul was pre-existent,  how the current Church understands the doctrine of resurrection and the crucifixion of Christ is very different now than it was in 553 AD.  For example, in 553 AD, the resurrection was seen as a bodily resurrection, a body that would be physically resurrected when Christ came again to establish God’s reign on earth.   This same theology was why the Church was originally against cremation, but for many Christian denominations today, this is no longer the case.   A similar case can made about the church’s atonement theology connected to Jesus’ death on the cross.   There is far more diversity within the Christian Church now around how Jesus’ death on the cross is tied to what happens when we die and our understanding of God's judgement.    
      As a result, from my perspective, it is possible for a Christian theology to openly consider and embrace the re-incarnational nature of Dr. Newton’s research.   It is my hope that his research may also help many of my readers see death not as a time of judgement but rather as a time of healing, for that is exactly how I have come to view death.   We have nothing to fear when we face death’s door.   God is more loving and gracious then we can ever imagine.  
       Let me conclude by including a blessing prayer that I share with my clients near their time of death, if they wish it. 

Final Blessing Prayer
God, our Creator,
we gather here around ____________, so thankful for their life.
You created them in their mother’s womb. You saw them take their first breath. Your love surrounded them every single day of their life. You have been with them through hardship and joy, through sickness and health, through times of plenty and times of want.
We thank you God for the goodness in _______’s life, for the many ways that they were a blessing to us and others in the world.
You know that they tried to love deeply and that they were deeply loved. Yet none of us loves perfectly. 
Forgive ________ for those times when they loved imperfectly and led them to hurt others, including ourselves. (pause)
(if others present) Forgive us for those times when our love was imperfect and led us to hurting them. (pause)
(if others not present)  Help ______ to forgive those who have love them imperfectly and hurt them.  (pause)
And now as this beautiful earthly life of _______’s is coming to an end, we say good-bye.
We trust that you, Comforting Spirit, will give _____ courage as they take this step into death.  And that you will comfort those gathered around them as they support them. 
Sacred One, fill all of us here with your peace for we know nothing can separate us from your love. Thank you that death is just a door, and that you are the mystery behind it.  We trust that you will walk with _______ through the doorway of death, and welcome them into your eternal rest.
And now, ________, may God bless you and keep you, may the very face of God shine upon you, may God’s Spirit embrace you, and give you peace, eternal peace.  Amen.

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator   

The Body-Soul Merge.
      One truth that has become evident to me is the body/soul merge.   When we physically die, this body/soul merge must break.   I have seen people hang onto life for a long time beyond what should be physically possible due to this body/soul merge not breaking.   This hanging on is often due to another merge reality.  When I see people unable to surrender in the dying process, I start looking for the reason why they are holding on.   They may be waiting for a family member to come and say goodbye.   I remember a dying mother hanging on for months due to her son who took constant care of her, even though her nutrition intake was way below what was necessary (no fault of the son).   She was not willing to let go of him. and he was not willing to let go her.  Eventually, the body/soul breaks because the physical body is no longer able to sustain itself due to lack of food and water. 
      To help understand this body/soul merge, I want to turn to transpersonal psychologist Kathleen Singh who wrote a book in 1998 titled “The Grace of Dying". Based on her research of human psychological development, she saw humans passing through 4 stages or dualisms.   Each stage of dualism is really a psychospiritual merge. 
      When we are born as babies, our soul already lives within our physical body.   Sometime during the stage of pregnancy, our soul enters our biological body and makes its home there.  Research has shown that young souls experience all reality as one unified experience.   There is no “me” or “other”, no sense of inside me and outside me, no sense of physical reality being different from spiritual reality, no sense of heaven and earth being separate and distinct places or planes of reality, no sense of life and death for everything from the soul’s experience is simply part of the ongoing eternal experience of life. ​

      From research, Singh notes certain qualities can be connected to this nearing death experience:  relaxation, the body no longer fighting (7), withdrawal from our world (7), radiance, a lightening of the burden of life (8), interiority, internal more important than external (8), silence, little need for words (8), sense of connection to sacred love (9), transcendence, sense of being connected to the beyond (9), sense of deep knowing (10), sense of presence intensifies (10) , sense of merging into the Sacred (11), and the quality of perfection, the sense that everything is fitting and just (11). 
      With my brother Jamie,  I  remember the last aspects of this breaking of the body-soul merge happening when I witnessed my  brother Jamie dying.  About 30 minutes before he died in a hospital room, my family witnessed a remarkable transition in Jamie.  He went from being the unconscious Jamie lying in the bed to a mechanical breathing machine that sputtered, stopped breathing momentarily, started up again, sputter again, and eventually the breathing stopped.   People who have shared with me this experience talk about how the temperature in the room dropped, and a sacred silence fell over the room.  
      I have sometimes wondered when the Cheyne-Strokes breathing kicks in for many people in their dying pocess whether this breathing pattern is evidence that the soul is already free from the merge with the physial body.   When this merge breaks, the soul is no longer dwelling in the body or connected to the body but is now outside it, potentially watching what is happening in the room, similar to what we hear shared in out-of-body experiences. The soul will eventually transition into the afterlife. ​

      This body-soul merge also provides a framework to understand Near Death Experiences (NDEs).  When we have a NDE or any out of body experience, the merge between our body and soul has been broken.  People who have NDEs often talk about experiencing themselves above their bodies and watching medical staff trying to revive them.   They also note that there is a strand of energy that ties their soul to their body which makes it possible for them to return to their physical bodies. 
      Death visions are another common experience around dying.  Dying loved ones often begin seeing deceased loved in dreams or in vision days before they die.  I have a resident now who is seeing her deceased parents and her deceased brother and sister.   She is also seeing what she describes as Jesus and also a person dressed in priestly clothes, someone I suspect is her spiritual guide.  She also talks about how she went for a walk…and then she becomes confused when she can’t walk and finds herself in a hospice bed which she has been in for a few months.   I am suspicious her experience of walking is due to her having an out-of-body experience where she can walk for her soul is no longer fully constricted to her earthly body.  ​

      Throughout this blog, I have explored how the body-soul merge helps us understand many of the mysterious experiences that occued around death.   I think this body-soul merge framework is also significant in understanding the out-of-body and dissociation experiences that trauma victims have as a way to cope with the reality of living through physical trauma.  I think this framework also helps us understand people who are more mystic or psychic in nature and have the ability to leave their body or connect with other spirits or psychic entities beyond themselves.
      Up to now, I have not considered the Bible in these reflections around the body-soul merge dynamics that happen at death.  The most obvious connection are Jesus' resurrection appearances where  his female friends  and disciples see many times Jesus in resurrected soul form free of his physical body.  
      Apostle Paul, in his writings to the Christians in Corinth, also believed that what happened to Jesus upon death will occur to us.    Just as Jesus was raised from the dead, that is, Jesus' soul was freed from its earthly body, so we will also be raised from the dead (2 Cor. 4: 14).  Therefore, he writes,  "do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day... For we know that if the earthly tent (our biological body) we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands... . (2 Cor. 4: 16; 5: 1).     In these writings, it is apparent that Apostle Paul believed, that upon death, we will release our earthly body and discover our soul, which he describes as as "a building from God not made with human hands."  

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator
      

​      Within the Christian Church, we have not done a good job of helping people understand and experience the indwelling Christ within their soul and life.  From my Christian perspective, I see the many fruits of the God’s Holy Spirit as aspects of the character of the Indwelling Christ.  When we are experiencing the spiritual fruit of compassion, we are embodying the compassionate nature of the Indwelling Christ.   The same is true when we experience the spiritual fruits of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,  gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5: 22-23).  These spiritual fruits are aspects of the character of the Indwelling Christ that dwells within each person’s soul.  From an Internal Family System perspective, this Indwelling Christ is what it calls the dynamics of Self energy that every person has access to at the core of their soul.  When I explore the different ACT strategies, I see how some of the dynamics that arise in ACT are similar to the dynamics of God’s Spirit that Christians seek to nurture.

The Choice Point
       Russ Harris, one of the key developers of ACT, has found the concept of “choice point” as central to his use of ACT (Russ Harris, ACT Made Simple, 2019).  When we find ourselves at the choice point, we have a decision to make.  Do we intentionally move toward the person we want to be by acting in that way or not?  Are we making choices around our thinking activities and doing activities that is moving us toward who we want to be? Or do we find ourselves behaving in ways that takes us away from the person we want to be?   
      The ACT modality helps clients focus on their actions and behaviors, and what interferes with these behavior choices, rather than just their thoughts, feelings, experiences, etc. Hence the acronym  ACT for Acceptance Commitment Therapy is very appropriate for this model of psychotherapy.    
      This choice point within ACT is very important for it reveals the key challenge that people struggle with.  We struggle with being “hooked” by our thoughts, feelings, body sensations, experiences, and internal stories about ourselves or other people.  (This notion of hooked in ACT is identical to the notion of blending in Internal Family Systems).  When we are hooked by our experiences, this means that our sense of “I” has merged with our thoughts, feelings, and experiences and thus, there is little to no separation or space between our self and what we are merged with.

      Each of these practices address common behaviors that arise when we are hooked or merged with our experience.  Instead of pursuing our values, we find ourselves having no guiding values that shape our life.  Instead of living in the Present Moment, we find ourselves living in the past or in the future.  Instead of practicing acceptance of our life experience, we find ourselves avoiding any sensations of discomfort.  Instead of seeking defusion, that is, seeking to maintain our sense of Self separate from our experience, we find ourselves stuck in our merges, often  stuck in our heads disconnected from our experience.  Instead of seeing our sense of Self as separate from our experience (Self in context), we often become identified with key aspects of our experience and believe this is who we are. Finally, instead of living out our commitment to our values, we find ourselves behaving aimlessly. 
      Lets look in more detail at each of these six ACT spiritual practices.

1. Values:         There are many ACT exercises that help people clarify their core values.  These values are not things that we “should” do for shoulds are often based on expectations from outside us.   Instead, these values arise from  our wants or deeper still, our longings of who we long to be, or longings for the behaviors that bring us enjoyment.   It is clear that these values come from the deeper places of our soul.    Here are some examples of ACT exercises that help us connect with our core values.

1. Make a list of the times when you were at your best.
2. What people might say about you on your 80th birthday?
3. If you could wave a magic wand, and everybody approved of you and had no negativity, what would they say about you?
4. Explore the times you were hurt for these hurts arise from your values that were betrayed.
5. Pretend you are mindreading someone important to you.  What would they say about you?  

     
      When people are aware of their values, that awareness triggers a longing to move toward those values.  That longing is a sign of our essential Will being activated.  Now, as counsellors, we want to support this arising Will within our client and help them move from their choice point toward what they value.  
​
2.   Being present.    When we are merged with our experience, we are no longer present to our current experience.  There is no self awareness.  Instead, we are lost in our experience.    To help people become present to the present moment, we have to break this merge.  
      There are many ACT exercises designed to break this merge so we become self aware again.  Here are some examples of practices to break this tight merge.

1. Using your five senses (name 5 things you see, 4 things you sense in your body, 3 things you hear, 2 things you smell, 1 thing you taste)
2. Mindful walking where you count each step.
3. Dropping Anchor (acknowledge emotion you are feeling, come back into body by noticing breathing, and then engage your senses)
4. Doing a body scan moving from head to toes noticing what you feel in body along the way.
5. Trace around your fingers in your hand, tracing outward on finger when you breathe out and tracing inward on finger when you breathe in. 

      The goal of these exercises is to break the merge so that we become self aware and are able to notice the spaciousness that goes with this awareness.  This spacious awareness allows us to begin to access the spiritual resources deep within our soul that arise in response to what we are noticing in our experience.   When this happens, we have access to our choice point.

3.  Accepting our experience:    A very common coping pattern is to reject any experience that we find hard to be with.  For some, it is tears and sadness.  For many, it is the experience of anger or hatred.  For others, it is anxiety, guilt, or shame.  When those unwanted experiences arise, we have many coping strategies designed to numb, avoid, bury, or distract us from feeling those rejected feelings.  However, these rejected emotions don’t go away.  Rather these negative energies build up in our body and soul affecting our thoughts, feelings, body and behaviors.  Eventually these pent up energies will erupt leading to all sorts of negative repercussions or lead to chronic emotional conditions or chronic pain in our bodies.  One could see these chronic conditions as an example of a chronic merge for people no longer feel they have a choice around any aspect of this condition. 

      To avoid these merges that arise from rejecting our uncomfortable experiences, ACT has practices that are designed to help us accept our experience. 

1. Explore the cost of avoiding an emotion.
2. Explore the finger trap exercise.  (The tighter you pull a finger trap, the tighter it becomes on your finger.  You must relax the finger trap for it to slip off your finger)
3. Tug of war with Monster (the more you pull the rope against a monster, the angrier it gets)
4. Creative hopelessness (the more you seek to control, the worst your situation gets.  As you embrace the hopelessness of trying to control, choice opens up.  (Russ Harris explains creative hopelessness.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k43LH7GVegY))
5. Become aware of your experience as you look at the person who makes you uncomfortable.  (What arises in that awareness begins to change your experience)
6. Unwanted guest metaphor (watch this video to help you understand how this works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYht-guymF4 )
7. Notice how when we walk blindly in life and keep falling into a hole, we don’t learn from that.

       When we follow the pattern of always avoiding our uncomfortable feelings, we are essentially merged with this avoiding pattern. We have no access to our choice point.   When that happens, we are in a place of little awareness of our experience and thus we have little access to the spiritual resources that can arise in response to these uncomfortable feelings.  These spiritual resources include Insight and Truth that can help us make sense of our experience.  Compassion and Resilience may arise that can help us live with these difficult moments.   Furthermore, essential Will including determination and courage can help us live toward our values that take us away from these difficult experiences in the future. 

4.  Defusion (observing our thoughts without getting lost in them):  This ACT spiritual practice gets at the common issue of how we often merge with the thinking of our mind.  To break this mental merge, ACT has designed some helpful exercises. 

1. Imagine that your thoughts are like a stream of water.  You sit on the bottom of the stream and watch your thoughts go by. 
2. The more you feed your tiger, the bigger it gets.  You learn not to feed your tiger by letting your thoughts go.
3. Our continuous worrying is a primitive coping style from our prehistoric cavemen times where everything was dangerous.   With each thought, we say, “I think this because….” and provide the reasoning for it. 
4. When you find yourself ruminating, you say “milk. milk. milk” for 45 seconds to break the mental merge. 
5. You playfully thank your mind for sharing that information and then move on.   The act of playfulness can be helpful in breaking a merge.

     
      Like all the other ACTS spiritual practices, this one too is designed to break the merge, in this case, the merge with our thinking, stewing or ruminating mind.   With this merge temporarily broken, we return to a place of awareness which allows us to access our choice point. 

5.  Self as context:  Due to the dynamic of the merge, ACT highlights how our sense of Self gets lost in the merge.  Our sense of identity becomes totally identified with what we have merged with and when that happens, we believe change is not possible, and thus there is no choice point. 
       However, our sense of Self is never reduced to the experience we are hooked to.  Our sense of “I” is always beyond that.   This is the purpose of these ACT exercises, to help us rediscover our Self that is beyond our merged identity that often takes over and shapes our life. 

1. Perspective taking.  Here we go up to the balcony and look down upon our life.   We notice what is my dynamic and what are the dynamics of others.  We notice what is the present moment and what is coming from our history. 
2. Chess game metaphor (game between good thoughts/experiences and bad thoughts/experiences and we often get pulled in and invested on one side or the other)
3. Continuous You exercise.  Explore how your sense of "I"  changes from one moment to the next.
4. Internal Family  System framework (we are all made up of many parts: proactive Manager parts, reactive Firefighter parts, traumatized Exile parts, and a sense of Self that is beyond these parts)

      All of these exercises or frameworks are designed to help us see that our sense of Self is beyond the issues we are wrestling with.   When we lose this sense of separate “I”,  we are trapped in a powerful merge where there is little internal space for us to access the deeper spiritual resources located within our soul.
 
6.  Commitment:   The focus of these ACT exercises is designed to help us live into our values of who we are.  When I say “living into who we are”, I don’t see this as a shallow selfish goal where we do whatever we want.   Within ACT, this sense of “who we are” comes from the depths of our soul and thus “who we are” is really an expression of what Christians call our Divine Image or who God has created us to be. 
The first five ACT group of exercises are really about helping us break the merge that is keeping us from accessing our choice point.   These ACT exercises around commitment are designed to help us live from our choice point into the values of who we long to be.

 ​

1. Flavour and savour exercise.   Once we sense ourselves living into one of our values (flavour), ACT encourages us to savour this experience, to allow it to deepen so we can fully experience all the spiritual resources that arise from this time (satisfaction, fulfillment, joy, gratitude, etc.) so this value becomes more internalized.
2. There is no trying.  Either you do it or you don’t. (Yoda quote from Star Wars)  Nurturing this belief helps us move toward action.
3. Pick up a pen while saying the word “can’t”.  This exercise breaks the power of the thought “can’t” 
4. Setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based)
5. Passenger on the Bus metaphor.  We learn to expect there are parts within us who disagree with our desire to follow our values, and we learn to honour our Self over these other conflicting voices.  (video that illustrates this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z29ptSuoWRc)

      These ACT Exercises are designed to address the merge issues that arise as we move toward living out our values.   As these merge issues are addressed, we are able to access more directly the spiritual resources connected to our essential will, namely determination, being more centred or grounded in Self, perseverance, courage, strength, and power.   Accessing more fully these spiritual resources allows us to live a more unhooked life where we are more able to live out  who we want to be, who God created us to be. 

Conclusion
      Throughout this brief summary of ACT, I try to show how these ACT spiritual practices help us break the merge where we experience little to no sense of choice.   Apostle Paul, in the Bible, describes this place of “no choice point” as the “place of death”.  Once this merge breaks, we are able to access the spiritual resources within our soul that arise in response to what we are experiencing in that moment.  I see these spiritual resources arising within ACT as the dynamics of the Indwelling Christ that I believe lives within each human’s soul.  
      So when Apostle Paul writes, “who will rescue me from this place of death”, I echo with Apostle Paul words of thanksgiving for the presence of God and the dynamics of the  Indwelling Christ.  

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator

      Lets begin with the Tower of Babel story.   This story appears in Genesis 11, the last chapter of what scholars call prehistory.   All the stories in the first 11 chapters of Genesis are not considered actual history by most Bible scholars. They are more mythological in nature and seek to bring understanding to our prehistoric times.     The last chapter of this prehistory includes the story of the Tower of Babel.   Following this myth, we move from prehistory to the historical record that begins with life of Abraham and Sarah which is often placed sometime around 1500-1800 BCE.  ​

      Now how does God respond when God witnesses a dominant common language?   The Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”
       I hope it is apparent that the values embedded within this dominant common language often go against the values found at the core of the Kingdom of God.  
      The most obvious  expression of these values is found at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry when he opens the Torah and reads these words from the book of Isaiah.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to set free those who are oppressed,
       to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor" (Luke 4:   18-19)
It is clear that everyone is included in God’s community, especially those who are marginalized.  
      So what does God do when God see this dominant common language?  We read in the Babel Tower story the following:   "'Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.'  So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city."
      It is very apparent that God does not support a dominant common language.   God sees such a dominant common language as leading to leaders and a people who will value greatness and power, building huge towers into the skies, seeking after the impossible, but will have little interest in the needs and wants of all people, especially those they see dragging them down or holding them back.    
      It is clear that a core teaching of this Tower of Babel story is that when a common dominant language loses touch with the common humanity of the people involved in an empire, country, organization or a faith community, conflict and chaos will eventually arise due to multiple voices/interests not being taken seriously.   And the marginalized people will scatter and go their separate ways in hope of finding more freedom, understanding, and autonomy.      
      This Genesis text is often used to highlight how God values pluralism, different expressions of Christianity, different expressions of faith, different expressions of culture, etc.  But I don’t think the Tower of Babel story is the final word around God’s vision when conflict arises.
      This is why we need to hear this Tower of Babel story with another core story in the Bible, namely, the story of Pentecost which has a very different ending. ​

         It is important to see that this Pentecost event was not your typical Jewish community gathering.   Most of the witnesses  listed are foreigners to Jerusalem, similar to the immigrant and refugee foreigners in our times who are often judged by the dominant common language.  
      Within this setting of immigrant Jews and other foreigners, the mysterious Pentecost event happens.   Now it is important to realize that the lingua franca of Israel and the Middle East at that time in history was Aramaic.   This was the language that Jesus and his followers spoke...but few of the immigrant Jews and foreigners would have understood Aramaic.   Instead, since these Jewish visitors and foreigns came from different parts of the Roman Empire, there is a lingua franca that many of them would have understood.  
      At that time in history, the Roman Empire controlled Europe and areas beyond...like Israel, although Israel was on the edge of the Roman Empire where Aramaic still was the dominant language spoken.    The common dominate languages in the Roman Empire were Latin and Greek, Latin within the Western Roman Empire, and Greek within the Eastern Roman Empire. 
       It is very possible that the listeners of the Pentecost experience heard the Jesus followers speaking in Greek that day, a language they would understand for Greek was their lingua franca.  However, these witnesses would have been shocked by what they heard.   "How can this be, these Galileans speaking in our language?"   For the first time, these immigrant Jews and foreigners were hearing the good news of God in their own language.   
​      However, the purpose of using this dominant common language was not to dominate or manipulate people for the purposes of the Roman Empire.     Rather, each person present heard the good news of God in a way that made sense to them within their life experience and personal context.  Each person present felt blessed by these followers of Jesus sharing God's mighty works in their language. 
      I learned this lesson about learning to speak the faith language of my clients early on in my spiritual care work. 
      In 1996 when I began visiting community clients in their home for the CCAC of York Region, I met a woman dying of cancer.  At the end of my first visit, she asked me if I could teach her how to pray. 
      I was not prepared for this question for seminary had taught me about Christian theology, what the Christian good news was that people should learn about, one could say a Christian lingua franca, and even how to pray for people.  But she didn’t want to hear from me my version of the Christian good news. That was my faith language.  That was not what she needed.
      She wanted me to teach her how to pray so that God could directly provide her the good news that she needed to hear and experience.  For this to happen, I had to learn her language of faith, how she experienced and understood God, so that I could help her discover the good news that God wanted her to experience.   Her question caused me to get spiritual direction training so that I could learn how to speak the many faith languages of other people have.
      I came to realize that there is not just one Christian faith language.   There is Catholic, Evangelical, Protestant, Orthodox, Reformed, Mennonite, Charismatic, Contemplative faith languages, and that is just the Christian languages of faith.  Plus the many faith languages of people from different religions.  Plus the faith language of all those who are spiritual and don’t identified as religious, plus Atheists who have their anti-faith faith language.
      I discovered from this palliative client what it meant for me to become a Pentecost person.   I learn how to understand and speak the faith languages of many people so that I can help them discover the good news that God wanted them to hear or experience. ​      

      This Pentecost approach was very different then the Christian missionaries who came to North America with the goal of evangelizing the indigenous people here.   These Christian missionaries came with a common dominant language whose goal was to remove the faith of the Indigenous people and assimilate them into the common dominant culture, a Tower of Babel approach.   The Pentecost approach would have had these Christian missionaries come to North America with the belief that all indigenous people are beloved children of God.   As a result, these spirit-filled missionary would have learned the language, culture, and values of the indigenous people.   Then, and only then, would these missionaries have an understanding of how God’s good news might be relevant to the Indigenous people. ​

​      The church, now realizing the error of its past ways, is working at repairing the harm it has created…as is witnessed in this picture of Pope Francis apologizing to the indigenous people of Canada in 2022.   This is also why we, at my church, Shantz Mennonite Church, recognized Red Dress Sunday four weeks ago in our worship service. 
      How many of you remember September 11, 2001 when two jetliners slammed into New York City's World Trade Center while another crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia?  Al-Qaeda, an extremist Muslim group, a terrorist group from the Middle East, was behind these attacks.   
      Because of the Muslim connection, a dominant common language quickly arose in North American, including Canada, that saw all Muslims as suspicious and potentially dangerous back then.  Muslims no longer felt safe in our country.  Very few people believed that Muslims were beloved children of God. 
      As a pastor, I was quite troubled by this and so I reached out to the local Imam, a leader of a Muslim community in Whitchurch-Stouffville, with the goal of developing a friendship between my congregation and his Muslim community.    My goal in reaching out to this Muslim community was not to evangelize them with the goal of them becoming Christian.  I don’t see this as the goal of the teaching found in the Pentecost experience.   

      This picture was connected to a CBC News article that highlighted how the Region of Waterloo had passed a bylaw that made it illegal to have tents in this encampment.  This is the Tower of Babel approach to this issue. 
      What would it look like to apply the Pentecost framework to the issue of homeless people?    Would it not involve becoming friends to these homeless people and learning their language, their culture, and their experience of homelessness…understanding their context well enough so that we would begin to understand what God’s good news might look like for them, good news that they would experience as truly a blessing to them, rather than another form of judgement?
       In this blog, I have explored two different core Bible stories that show the power of language.  Within the Tower of Babel story, we see how a common language can be used to manipulate or dominate people.    However, within the Pentecost story, we see how we can use the common language to help us understand the faith language of people whose faith language is very different than ours.   In doing so, we can truly become a blessing to these people and help them discover and experience the good news that God wants to encounter.   
      In our world right now,  we are seeing the many issues attached to leaders using a common dominant language for their manipulative purposes.    May God help us become religious communities and people that embody the spirit of Pentecost so that we can be a blessing to all people through learning how to speak and understand their language.

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator  
​(I preached this sermon on June 1, 2025 at Shantz Mennonite Church)

   

2.  Peter:   Peter’s anguish around the traumatic death was tied to his profound relationship he also had with Jesus.   Peter, a fisherman, was the first follower that Jesus called to be part of inner circle of 12 male disciples.  He was seen as a key leader within this group.  Throughout the three year ministry of Jesus, we see many interactions between Jesus and Peter.  We read about Jesus telling Peter that he would be essential to the formation of the future church (Matt. 16:18).  When Jesus offered to wash Peter’s feet at the last supper, Peter at first refused, but when Jesus explained the meaning of this foot washing, Peter exclaimed, ”wash all of me.”  However, the core experience that shaped profoundly Peter’s experience of Jesus’ traumatic death was his denial of Jesus three times on the day that Jesus was convicted to be killed.

3.    Judas:    Judas, like Peter, also found himself in deep emotional pain around Jesus’ crucifixion.  Judas was also a member of Jesus’ inner circle.   Jesus trusted him with managing the monies needed to support their public ministry.   What intensified the trauma that Judas bore around Jesus’ killing was that he had betrayed Jesus into the hands of the religious and civil authorities for the price of 30 pieces of silver, an arrest that led to the eventual crucifixion of Jesus.

4.   Thomas:   We know little of Thomas except he was also part of Jesus’ inner circle of 12 men.   Along with the other disciples, he was with Jesus at the Last Supper and followed Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane where he, like the other disciples, couldn’t stay awake and pray with Jesus.  And he, along with all the other disciples, are not mentioned as being near Jesus with some women at the foot of Jesus’ cross, except for John, who was close to Jesus.
5.  Jesus:    Since the trauma happened directly to Jesus, we should pay attention to his experience.   From the emotional stories leading up his death, it is apparent that Jesus perceived that he was going to be arrested and probably killed.   He purposely had a last supper with his inner circle that was very symbolic and where he expressed that he would probably die soon.   We read about Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane and his disciples are unable to stay awake and pray with him.  We learn of his arrest through his disciple Judas betraying him to the authorities.  We learn of him seeing his faithful disciple Peter denying him before the rooster crows.   We learn of all the trial proceedings where he was falsely accused and tortured, and Jesus, knowing that it would not help, essentially remained quiet and said little.  And then we hear the verdict of guilty, then we read that he was beaten, and  then sent off to the cross to die.  The gospel of John records Jesus having to carry his cross to Golgotha where he was killed, although in the end, someone else had to carry the cross for Jesus was too weak from being beaten.   It is very apparent that Jesus was traumatized many times on his way to this death on the cross, the ultimate trauma.

      But Judas was not alone in his suffering of hell.   Peter, Mary Magdalene, and Thomas also found themselves in hell due to the tears in their relationships with the Sacred.  Peter was wrestling acutely around his guilt due to denying his friendship with Jesus three times.    Magdalene, an intimate female friend of Jesus, was grappling with her overwhelming abandonment and grief around losing the love of her life, a man who had saved and heal her of her serious mental health issues.  Thomas was struggling with doubt and confusion for I suspect he was questioning everything about Jesus, who Jesus was and everything Jesus taught.  
      When severe trauma happens, like we see in the stories around Jesus’ crucifixion, we find ourselves falling into the experience of Hell.  While Peter, Mary Magdalene and Thomas agonized with guilt, grief, and doubt, they also felt abandoned by God and the profound shame that often goes with this disconnection.   
      Internal Family System teaches that when we find ourselves suffering in hell-like experiences, our soul develops many coping mechanism or Protector parts to deal with this overwhelming pain like addictions, numbing, overthinking, pleasing, performing, withdrawal, anger, depression, distracting activities, and many, many more.  The purpose of these Protectors is to help us cope with our traumatic pain and hellish experiences of shame until healing can happen, until Easter comes.     

      In the Easter story where Peter meets the risen Jesus (John 21: 15-17), Jesus invites Peter to confront his shame and guilt head on.   Instead of avoiding the painful topic with Peter, Jesus asks Peter three times if he truly loved Jesus.   As soon as Jesus asked him a third time, we see in Peter’s response that this third query touched his shame and guilt directly.   He responds, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.”  With these words of confession and love, the tear in his relationship with God/Christ is healed along with the release of shame/guilt, and Peter is able to move into this future with hope and faith. 
      For Thomas, the risen Jesus appeared to him to help him face his demon of doubt caused by the hole in his soul (John 20: 24-29).    Even though his friends had seen the risen Jesus, Thomas still was attached to his doubt.   So, when the risen Jesus met in person with Thomas, he knew he had to help Thomas face his doubt straight on.  Jesus invited Thomas to touch his side where he had been pierced with a spear and he showed Thomas the wounds on his hands where the spikes had gone through.   With these clear physical signs, Thomas’s doubt and shame lifted and he was finally able to exclaim,  “My Lord and my God!”.  The tear in his relationship with God/Jesus was now mended. 

Conclusion: 
When we view the Good Friday and Easter story through a trauma lens, it provides fresh insights into the spiritual and psychological dynamics present in these Biblical stories.   We see how the experience of overwhelming trauma is at the centre of the Good Friday story and how the events of Easter are really healing stories of how God worked at the healing the holes of abandonment, guilt, and doubt, and the associated shame, within the key female and male followers of Jesus.   As these traumatized followers experienced the resurrected Jesus within their respective empty tombs (abandonment, guilt, and doubt), the tears within their God-relationships were healed.  

Gord Alton MDiv RP  Supervisor-Educator

      Another aspect of this emergency protective system is that the coping parts within it are often hypervigilant, always on the lookout for situations of future potential trauma.   When it fears traumatic pain coming, certain parts are triggered, and jump into action hoping to protect us from experiencing that trauma again.    
Sometimes, if the overwhelm feeling is too much for our soul to regulate, something similar happens to what occurs when electric current exceeds the capacity of an appliance in our house.   We blow a fuse.   Our soul may dissociate or a psychotic break may transpire where our soul splits in two, and we find ourselves no longer connected to our experience.  These dissociations and psychotic breaks lead to other more structured parts in our emergency protective system. ​

​      Within my Christian tradition, these behaviors are seen as bad, something that should be avoided at all costs and managed.   But I also know from my psychospiritual counselling ministry that each of these behaviors are pain coping strategies that are found within many emergency protective systems in people’s souls.   Lust protects us from feeling deeply our intimacy struggles and desire for connection.  Gluttony covers up our feelings of emptiness or fears of being seen.  Greed hides our fears of scarcity and not enough.  Sloth protects us from the fear of failure.  Wrath and anger are wonderful protector emotions for they keep us from any feelings of vulnerability.  Envy emerges to get us to look outside ourselves rather than feel our insecurity.   Pride arises to replace our lack of self-love and self-appreciation.  Many more protective impulses could be shared that explain how these deadly sins seek to help us cope with our internal pain.  
       What is important to our discussion here is that these deadly sins are also trying to protect people from feeling very painful experiences within their soul.   That should cause us to pause and be hesitant to judged such coping mechanism as just "deadly sins".   However, this view I have described above is not how my Christian tradition understands this paradox found within our emergency protective system between good intentions and unhelpful outcomes.  Instead, these protective parts are often seen as sin and evil.
      There is one more key emotional aspect that is tied to these times when our emergency protective system gets triggered, namely the experience of shame. ​

        When our animal instincts are burdened with past trauma and pain, they often react before our cognitive mind can step in and manage them.   This is often what happens when our emergency protective system is triggered by a situation or person it judges as potential dangerous.  
      This is the situation that Apostle Paul is describing in Romans 7 in the Bible when he says,  “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… In fact, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.  .... For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me" (Rom 7: 15, 16-20).
      Such Biblical teachings like this one drive home the point that all the coping parts within our emergency protective system are sinful.  Furthermore, every time our animal instincts function in ways beyond our mental control that our egoic mind judges as wrong, we experience a deep shame.   This shame is often profound after we find ourselves triggered and doing things we find that we are not able to control.
      At my last Diamond Approach retreat in February, 2025, my Diamond Approach teacher, Dr. Thomas Weinberg, described shame as a human experience that does not have an essential root.  This caught my attention for up to now, I had been taught that every human emotion, from a Diamond Approach perspective, has an essential source.    
      This is the basis of the Theory of Holes within the Diamond Approach.   Sadness has at its root Divine Compassion.  Anger has at its source Divine Strength before it becomes distorted into anger, rage, or weakness.  Hatred has at its core Divine Power before it become corrupted into hatred or powerlessness.   Below is a chart I share with my counselling students about the theory of holes.    It shows how the common emotions have at their origin an expression of the Divine.    

      However,  my Diamond teacher taught that the experience of shame was different from all these common human emotions.    Rather then from our Divine or Essential nature,  shame has it root in how our egoic personality functions.   
       This Diamond Approach insight echoes of the core story found in the Bible that describes in mythical language the story of the fall of humanity (Gen 3: 1- 11). From a depth psychology point of view, the snake in the Tree of Good and Knowledge represents the emergence of the human egoic self that happens early in the development of a human person.   In the Biblical story, as soon as the two humans listened to the snake (ego) and ate the forbidden fruit, the story teaches that the experience of shame entered into the lives of Adam and Eve.  We read in the Bible that upon eating the fruit, “their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”   Due to the experience of shame, they could no longer live with their nakedness and vulnerability.   This egoic shame caused them to hide themselves. 
      But the impact of shame goes deeper in this Bible story.   We read that upon hearing God walking in the Garden, Adam and Eve now felt unworthy to be in the presence of God.  Due to shame, they had to hide from God.     Due to shame, they had to keep themselves from entering the vulnerable place of Being, that place of being with our experience of the Present Moment where we can notice fully our own experience, and in doing so, notice the Spirit of God emerging in our lives in response to what we are experiencing.    It is in our experience of the Present Moment where we notice God's spirit of compassion emerging in response to our pain, where we notice God's spirit of anger-like strength arising when our boundaries are crossed or our truth is dismissed by others, etc.   When our egoic self causes us to experience shame due to our primal emerrgency protective system being triggered, this shame causes us to hide from others and God, and it makes it very hard for us to enter the Present Moment where God's spirit can minister to us directly or through others.   ​

      The Diamond Approach teaches that vulnerability cannot co-exist with shame.  The reason for this is that “ shame is a specific painful feeling of deficiency, exposure and judgment, all related to a sense of inadequacy in being oneself. What makes this specifically a narcissistic manifestation is that one feels inadequate in being oneself, or judges oneself as such. We judge ourselves as unable to be real. We feel also the emotions associated with the 'great betrayal': We are a traitor to ourseles, we have sold out; we have been too weak and dependent to stand our ground. Narcissistic shame is an intense pain related to social failure, failure to be a true human being. It is a sense of being an inferior human being, exposed to social judgment in the midst of severe disintegration of the self. When experienced fully, the affect is very painful. The affect itself has a disintegrating effect on the self” (The Point of Existence, pg. 334).  
        When we understand shame in this way, you realize that it is unhelpful to contemplate on the experience of shame.  It just leads to us experiencing more shame toward self.   During my 19 years of doing spiritual work within my Diamond Approach school, not once have I been asked to explore my experience of shame.  I have inquired into my anger, sadness, anxiety, worthlessness, despair, judgementalism, wilfulness, lack of inner support, need for control, hatred, etc.  but not once into my experience of shame.    Furthermore,  these Diamond Approach teachings help us realize that shame has nothing to do with the Sacred.   Shame is totally a creation of our egoic self to keep us from becoming vulnerable and drawing near to God or the experience of the Present Moment where the Sacred is encountered.   
       Seeing how the experience of shame has nothing do with God, this should cause us to wonder why the church and our culture often use shame as a way to get people to follow the teachings of the church or the cultural rules of being an upright citizen.  The church often uses shame tactics with people who struggle with the deadly sins.    Our culture often use similar shame tactics with those who are homeless, struggle with addictions or mental health conditions, have issues with the law or finances, etc.   
       When the church or our culture touches our internal shame buttons like this, they are really triggering parts within our emergency protection system which cause us to  feel even more shameful.   In the end, such religous and cultural practices that trigger shame within us push us even further from the presence of God or from the sources of love and grace that people need to discover healing, just like in the Garden of Eden story.     People hide instead and struggle alone due to this shame.  
       Through this blog, I am hoping to help people see the gifts of our animal instincts, and how God uses these animal instincts to help us regulate our emotions, body, and soul.     However, due to trauma and painful attachment wounds, an emergency protective system develops in our soul building on these animal instincts to help us regulate our life and emotions so that we can function in the world.     While the parts within our protective emotional system have a protective role, some of these coping patterns are many times unhelpful and are judged by churches and culture as bad or sinful.     The other powerful experience that arises when our primal emergency protective system is triggered is that shame.   We have explored how shame is an experience created by our egoic self and has no connection to how God's spirit works within our world.    And yet, shame is often used as a motivating factor by the church and our culture to  get people to change, when in reality the nature of shame causes the opposite to happen, to become more stuck in their issues.   
       Rather than shame, may we explore how love is the secret to healing our emergency protective systems and the animal instinct coping parts within them. 

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator
      

      This blog is based on a sermon I did at Erb St. Mennonite Church last month.  In this blog, I wll be exploring the gifts that come from the "wake-up call" with death that we will all experience someday.  A key gift is the gift of vulnerability and the many spiritual resources that arise from being with this vulnerability. ​

      Some people, when they get their wakeup call with death, cannot go enter this place of vulnerability.  It is too scary, too painful to contemplate and they want nothing to do with receiving spiritual care.     I am rarely invited into these clients’ home.   Their focus is only on fighting death and working with the medical profession in finding a way to beat death.   I feel sad for these people for there are so many spiritual resources within our soul that they are not able to access without entering this place of vulnerability. 
       Becoming vulnerable is hard.   It means allowing ourself to notice the many dynamics happening within our soul and physical body including our pain and negative experiences.   When we are vulnerable, we allow ourselves to feel our emotions, to observe our thoughts, and be aware of our body sensations as best we can.  We may notice our fear, anxiety, anger, grief and sadness, doubts, loneliness, guilt, shame, etc.  But if we are able to sit in our vulnerability with these difficult experiences, we will notice something else.   We will notice different aspects of God’s spiriting arising in response to these struggles.
      I have already noted that we will notice God’s compassion and tenderness arise from the depth of our soul in response to our pain.  We will notice an anger-like strength arising in response to times when our truth is not taken seriously or when our safety is at risk.  This is the spirit of God’s strength arising.  We will find gracious love arising in response to when we own our misjudgments or mistakes in life and feel regret, guilt, or shame.   That is God’s grace at work within us.  We will find a resilience arising that we didn’t know exist that allows us to be with almost impossible situations. 
      This is what Apostle Paul was writing about when he wrote “we are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed. So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4: 7-8, 16)
      When people enter this place of vulnerability with me as their spiritual care provider, people become very real.   No longer do they play the game of pleasing people or spouting theological truths they have heard at church.  Instead, people become authentic and begin to share their experience of faith along with their struggles, their many distressing thoughts and feelings and faith questions.  Through their questions, their authentic emotions, their sense of their I-ness, and their sense of openness, I see changes slowly happening to their experience from being with their vulnerability.  I see these inner arisings in my clients as signs that my clients are tapping into their inner spiritual treasure, signs of their inner nature being renewed, signs of them connecting with God’s holy spirit.  
         These inner spirirtual resources function like an oasis in dry arid land.  These spiritual energies soften the hard dry areas of our heart, mind, and body like water and allow new insights and new experiences to grow within us and  allow us to have more life-giving moments both within our soul but also in the world around us through our relationships and activities. 

       But for many other people, they discover to their surprise that death is not their enemy.  Instead, it becomes their friend.  In fact, this is one of my goals as a spiritual care provider: to help my palliative care clients make this transition from fighting death to seeing death as a potential friend.   
      When we accept that death may happen, suddenly a different set of conversations can happen due to a new form of vulnerability that arises.  We can share how much we mean to each other, how special each person is in our lives.  We can work at forgiveness and reconciliation with those who have hurt us or we have hurt them.  We also start looking forward to leave this world of suffering so we can experience an afterlife when this suffering will stop.  We begin to anticipate meeting our loved ones who have gone on before us and there is lots of scientific evidence (Near Death Experiences, Death Visions, After-death Communication, Hypnotic Regression experiences involving the In-between Life (Dr. MIchael Newton's work), etc.) to suggest there is a positive afterlife that supports our Christian faith.
         Apostle Paul writes, “So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For our slight, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure,  because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal”  (2 Cor 4:16-18).
        Thanks be to God. 

Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisior-Educator

Jesus Never Talked about Homosexuality
        For me as a Christian, the first place I look for guidance around any theological issue is to the stories and teachings of Jesus.  I find it very interesting that Jesus said nothing about same-sex relationships.   While churches have often become divided on the question of same-sex relationships, all four gospels are silent on this issue.  There is not one reference to homosexuality.  That should cause all of us who see this issue as important to the church to pause.  It was not on Jesus’ radar.  
       What Jesus did focus on is summed up beautifully by the gospel writer Luke when he has Jesus read these words at the beginning of his public ministry: 

   “Jesus unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
    'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,  because he has anointed me
          to bring good news to the poor.
     God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
          and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed,
          to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.' 
     And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of
         all in the synagogue were fixed on him.   Then he began to say to them, 'Today
         this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'" (Luke 4: 17-21)

      These themes of bringing good news to the poor, release to the captive, healing the blind, and setting free the oppressed appears everywhere is Jesus' teachings and ministry.   In living out this mandate, Jesus found himself often in conflict with the religious leaders who viewed the Jewish religious law as foundational to being a people of God.    Many of the people Jesus befriended were judged by the religious leaders as outside the people of God…including those who were poor, sick, blind, and oppressed.  Poverty, sickness, blindness, and oppression was seen by most religious people then as a sign of God’s judgement, a sign that you were living in sin. 
     Furthermore, all Gentiles, all non-Jewish people, were not seen as part of God’s people, yet we read Jesus relating to and befriending Gentiles.  Given this religious context, you can begin to see why there was so much conflict between the religious leaders and Jesus.   The religious leaders accused Jesus of blasphemy (Luke 5:21), in league with the devil (Matthew 9:34), and of breaking the religious law (Matthew 12:2) which prompted them to seek to crucify him (Matthew 12:14).
     Based on what we know of Jesus in the gospels, if Jesus was living, preaching, and ministering in our times, who would Jesus be befriending?  Would Jesus befriend the Christian leaders and churches who judge severely gay/lesbian/trans people or would Jesus befriend them?  I think the answer is self-evident, that Jesus would be including gay/lesbians/trans people within his circles, but I know that for many Christians, they would struggle in understanding Jesus in this way.   The reason they would struggle is because they believe God sees homosexual practice as sin. 

      A major argument these Christians make is that the Bible clearly says homosexual practice is sin.  Lets look more closely at the two core Biblical texts that are often  used to defend the notion that same-sex sexual practice is sin.  I also take seriously what the Bible teaches, but there are many conflicting teachings within the Bible, and so we have to look at the historical context to determine what the essential truth is that the Bible is bearing witness to.   Lets turn first to the Jewish Purity Code. 

The Jewish Purity Code
       The Jewish purity code is found in the Old Testament (Lev. 18:22, Lev. 20:13), a religious code that was develop some 2500 plus years ago.  It is important to realize that religious purity codes practiced then are very different from the modern day morality codes often tied to sin that get frequently preached now in the Christian Church.  
      Since God then was believed to be pure and holy, totally separate from the profane including humanity, then the only way Jewish people could become holy was through rituals of purification.    The status of holiness was imputed onto a person through the act of purification rituals, like a purification bath setting you see below in the picture.   Once purified through ritual, this holiness before God could easily be lost again through menstruation, sickness, touching blood or people who were sick or dead, associating with non-Jewish people, etc, many times due to circumstances beyond a person’s control.   When this happened, people became impure and their purity was restored only when they redid the purification ritual.   Within this Jewish purity code system, homosexual practice was seen as making a person impure, and no longer holy.  (to learn more about religious purity codes, please click here to see book chapter.   Augsburg Press:  Part 3:  The Religion of the Hebrew Bible, The Centrality of Torah, “Purity Codes”).  

      This Jewish purity code is similar in nature to other purity codes we see in other primitive religions and so this purity code makes sense within that historical context.   But to treat one such purity code around homosexual practice as a moral sin in the 21 century makes little sense for we don’t treat women menstruating as sinful or eating pork as sinful or marrying someone from another race as sinful.   This Jewish purity code in conjunction with their ceremonies and rituals of purification were viewed in a totally different way than how we view moral sin today within the Christian Church.  
      I also think it is important to realize that the Jewish purity code continue to develop beyond what we find in the Old Testament.  It was known as the Jewish Law in the time of Jesus and the early Christian Church.   The religious leaders (Pharisees and Scribes) were teachers of this religious law in Jesus’ time.  However, this Law was a major cause of the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders.   Jesus and the religious leaders were both concerned by purity and defilement, but the reason for why defilement happened was  very different.   For Jesus, it was not a matter of foods, bodily emissions, or touching dead bodies, all dictated by the religious Law. Instead,  purity for Jesus was about what flowed out of a person‘s heart (Matt. 15:17–20) (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/purity-laws/).  Jesus wanted people to react with revulsion toward poverty, sickness, oppression, injustice, murder, slander, adultery, and judgementalism, in the same way that a religious leader would react around a person who had a flow of blood or a skin disease.    If you’re defiled by what comes from your heart, you do need cleansing—not by washing your hands, but with confession and healing of your heart by God’s spirit.

     The Bible also teaches that Apostle Paul taught that the religious law had limits:  it cannot save anyone, that eventually the Law will be replaced by the Spirit of Christ living within our heart (Rom 7: 13-24) that can heal us.  Furthermore, the gospel of Matthew taught that Jesus came to help people fulfill the Law and Prophets.   Through following the spirit of Jesus’ teachings, we would eventually obey the essence of God’s Law, an essence which had been lost by the religious leaders in their obsession with obeying the details of the law (Matt 5: 17-20).
      In looking at the Jewish purity code, I have come to understand that we cannot simply attach sin to any Jewish purity code.   Both Jesus in the Gospels and Apostle Paul in the New Testament Epistles challenge how religious leaders during their time were using the Jewish Law as a basis for keeping people out of God’s Kingdom.    I have come to believe what Apostle Paul stressed in his letter to that Romans..."that there is nothing <that> can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.  No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God" (Rom 8: 38-39)
 
Romans 1:  The Roman Culture’s View of Sexuality
      There are actually two places that homosexuality is spoken about directly in the New Testament.  As we noted earlier, none of the four gospels speak to this question.   However, Apostle Paul does speak about same-sex relationships, once in some detail in Romans 1:24-27, and again in 1 Cor 6: 9 where homosexuality is included in a list of sins that keep people from inheriting God’s Kingdom.  I want to focus particularly on the Romans text for this Biblical text is often quoted by Christian theologians as God being against same-sex practice.   
      Romans 1:24-27 says the following:
“Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.  For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”

      To understand this Biblical text, it is important that we interpret this text within the Roman culture that Apostle Paul is writing within and against.   In this text, Apostle Paul describes homosexual love as a love that serves the desires of the creature, not as an expression of God’s Spirit.   It turns out that within Roman culture then all forms of sexual love, both homosexual and heterosexual, were driven by human passions, and had little to do with God or intimate love.  To understand better the sexual practices of Roman culture, I want to turn to the research work of  Graham Codrington (https://www.futurechurchnow.com/2015/08/22/the-bible-and-same-sex-relationships-part-7-graeco-roman-culture-and-homosexuality/). 
       Within our modern day, we tend to understand sex as sexual intimacy, but I have learned that this was not true in Roman culture in the 1st century.   Codrington has discover the following:   

• Homosexuality was legal, commonplace and considered normal.
• In fact, male-male love was considered the highest form of human love.
• Pederasty (an adult man taking a young boy as a lover) was the most common expression of male sexuality in Graeco-Roman culture.
• The opposition to homosexual activity at the time was almost exclusively an opposition to exploitation of young boys in pederastic relationships.

      Another scholar, Michael Younce, discovered that sex in Roman culture in Jesus’ time had little to do intimacy; it was all about power and domination.  He found that “‘sexing’ did not take place according to anatomical difference, but was constituted by the power of the penetrating phallus.”  He learned that there were “two general ‘rules’ Roman men were meant to follow regarding sex with either men or women. The first concerned the position men were to take.  In any sexual act, men were required to take the penetrative role.  If an adult man opted to take the receptive role, he would be forfeiting his manhood"  (https://collected.jcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=mastersessays, 2017).    This explains why young boys were the perfect sex-mate; they were not man yet.  

       I think Apostle Paul might have thought about “working out his salvation” in a similar way, like we see in this image.  Working out our salvation, our spiritual fitness,  takes the same dedication as working on our physical fitness at the gym.    However, Apostle Paul, like many Christians, thought working out his salvation meant managing his sinful tendencies...until he had this profound spiritual experience. 
       In his second letter to the church of Corinth, one of Apostle Paul’s later writings, he shares this story.   
      He was wrestling with what he called a thorn…but it was more than a mere thorn or character defect.  Apostle Paul saw his issue as caused by Satan.  Clearly, Paul, due to Pharisaic background, saw his thorn as a terrible sin, a sin he should not be struggling with, but a sin he could not get rid of.   It was beyond his control.   (I suspect Apostle Paul is talking about this same thorn in Romans 7 when he laments about how he does the very thing he does not want to do.)    We read that Paul pleaded with God many times to take his sinful problem away.   But then Paul experienced a profound vision, one that he describes in a similar way to what people now might call an out-of-body experience.   During that vision, Paul received a message from God that shocked him.  He heard God tell him, “my grace is sufficient for you, because my power is made perfect in weakness"  (2 Cor 12: 1-12).
      This revelation caused Apostle Paul to see his thorn as no longer a sin or an issue caused by Satan.  Now, he saw his thorn as a gift, a gift that humbled him and caused him to experience God’s spirit even more profoundly in the vulnerability of his human weakness.    I am not saying that Apostle Paul was struggling with same-sex attraction, although I suspect some scholars have contemplated this interpretation with this text.   However, I am claiming that Paul was wrestling with some aspect of himself that he clearly saw as sin, even evil in nature based on his Jewish Pharisaic training, and this sin was totally beyond his ability to control or manage it.  In the end, God helped him realized that he needed to change totally what it meant to “work on his salvation.”  Instead of focusing on his sin, this evil thorn, God showed him the importance of focusing on his longing for God to meet him in his vulnerability.  In doing this, Apostle Paul discovered that the Spirit of God joined him in that place of vulnerability, that place where he emptied himself of his egoic self.  This spiritual practice of kenosis, self-emptying, is actually the Biblical context for the teaching "working at one's salvation.  (See Phillipians 2: 5-11, the verses immediately before the verse that talks about working on our salvation).    Through the practice of kenotic self-emptying, Apostle Paul discovered different aspects of God’s Spirit manifesting in his life, in ways Apostle Paul never imagined.

      For me, this teaching from Apostle Paul has two profound applications.   For those who live with same-sex attraction, this text encourages you to stop listening to any Christian community who judges your same-sex attraction as sin.   Instead, I invite you to see your same-sex attraction as a gift from God and explore what it might mean for you to connect with your longing to experience God’s gracious spirit in your place of vulnerability, whatever that may be. 
      For those who still feel it is important to see same-sex attraction as a sin, I invite you to consider that your judgmental attitude toward homosexuality maybe your thorn, and that this thorn is interfering with your ability to experience the gracious nature of God in deeper ways within your own life, and especially within the lives of people who live with same-sex attraction.    It is easy to judge homosexual people as sinful people when you rarely relate to them, but when you befriend them, as Jesus invites us to do, and experience the world through their eyes, you eventually see why Jesus spent most of his time with people the religious leaders judged as sinful.  


Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator ​

​      I realized that there is more to love than the meeting of attachment needs, but if your attachment needs from your childhood were not met well, they will have a big impact on shaping your love relationships. 
      However, when a loved one dies who met their partner’s attachment needs well, suddenly these attachment needs are exposed causing the bereaved person to re-experience their unmet attachment needs from their childhood.  When this happens, the grief takes on a deeper quality of emotional pain for the bereaved person is now feeling a profound sense of loneliness and abandonment.  This is because their deceased loved one is no longer meeting the deep longing of their young child part that wants to be seen, held, validated, and comforted.

      When you understand the core attachment needs of each human, you can see why Santa Claus plays such an important role in our culture.   In many ways, Santa Claus is seen as the idealize parent for children, even a God representative for them.    Santa is seen as someone who sees our children, validates them, and cares about them.  And for the parents who take their children to see Santa Claus, I wonder if the child parts within these parents are grateful for Santa too.  Santa is providing for their children something that was often missing in these parents’ lives around their attachment needs.
      When we turn to the Christian Church, I think something similar is happening each year during the Advent season.   Each Advent season, we express our longings for God to come into our world and address the problems and issues of our life.  Many of these longings expressed are our child part's desire to be seen, validated, and comforted by someone beyond us.     
      As I suggested earlier,  I don't think our child part ever fully outgrows this longing to be seen, validated, and comforted.     This longing is actually a spiritual longing that causes us to seek and relate to God throughout our life, and eventually this longing is what guides us to our heavenly home when we die.  
     One of my favourite songs that my congregation sings at Advent is "Longing for the Light" written by Bernadette Farrel (1993).   When you look at the words of this song, you realize that these words capture the longing of our child part for someone beyond ourselves to see us, validate our experiences, and comfort and care for us.   Click here to watch a youtube video that shows you the words as you listen to the song.   

       As we, as a faith community, sing songs like this during the Advent season, we put words to the longings of our child part that wants to be seen, validated, and comforted by the God we worship in church.   As we do so, I think it helps all of us in worship become aware in a experiential way of the Divine Presence within reality that actually sees, validates, and cares for us. 
       Each Christmas season in the Church, we celebrate the incarnation of God in human form beginning with the birth of the Christ child.  This may be hard to believe but this Christ child was identical to you and I when we were babies.  The baby Jesus cooed and cried, was totally vulnerable and was depended on the care of his parents.  Young Jesus had the same attachment needs as we did as a child…the need to be fully seen, validated, and comforted by his parents.   For me, this is all part of the incarnation process that Christianity teaches that happened in the human development of Jesus.    It was through his parents and other key people in Jesus’ life that Jesus would eventually discover the God-Spirit or Divine Self within him that would see, validate and comfort the little boy part within Jesus.     Jesus traveled through the same spiritual developmental process that all of us as humans go through.   
      So when we celebrate the birth of the Christ Child, we are also celebrating the birth of the Christ Child in all of us.   ​

      In early November, I, like many people in Canada, hopelessly watched as our American friends voted in Donald Trump as President.    For myself, I was shocked and confused this happened for I was sure that Truth and Christian values would prevail, and that all the mistruths and lies propagated through this election would fall by the wayside, but that is not what happened.   I was also confused by how major parts of the Christian Church in the USA could support a presidential candidate whose talk and actions seem so contrary to Christian character.
       The next day following the election I was forwarded an article that was published in Psychology Today titled “Political Grief” (June 19, 2024) (click here to read article) written by Shelvock and Harris.   I found this article helpful for it labeled well what I was experiencing, namely political grief.  In this blog, I want to explore this experience of political grief building on the psychological insights shared by Shelvock and Harris but also from Internal Family Systems.  In doing so, I hope to show how the framework of political grief can help us understand what it means to love our “political” enemy as our Christian faith encourages us to do. 

      We saw all four of these trauma/survival responses during the election process, and these dynamics are still very active now.  Furthermore, if you watched your own experience during this election process, you probably noticed that your survival responses kept changing.  Some days you felt like venting hatred toward your political enemy.  Other days, you wanted to avoid anything to do with the election.  Still, other days, you wanted to hide in your home due to deep despair and hopeless, and still other days, you were compulsively agreeing with people around to avoid all conflict.  But even with these other 3 trauma responses, while there are no outward expressions of hatred present, we still feel inside a lot of hatred.  We hate being forced to feel and act in these powerless states of being involving fleeing, freezing, and fawning.   This hatred often comes out in more active-passive ways toward those we judge as the enemy.   
      Within the past USA election process, we have seen all four of these trauma responses, and often in very intense and profound ways.  This tells us that this election process has touched many trauma buttons within Americans.  However, when I look around the world at all the political polarization that is arising, including my own country Canada, I see similar patterns of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, all signs of trauma being touch leading to political grief.  This should cause us to pause and ask ourselves, what is at the root of all these trauma responses?
      Here again, Shelvock and Harris provide a helpful framework to understand these trauma behaviors by turning to attachment theory developed originally by psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907–90).  Due to our early childhood attachment experiences within our holding environment, Bowlby posited that we develop a “working model” of our self, the Sacred, and the world. ​

​      Building on this working model, Janoff-Bulman, professor emerita of psychology and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, surmises that our very young selves develop an “assumptive world” based on three core assumptions that shape how safe and secure our world is, namely: 

• How we find safety in the world.
• How we believe things work, and why events happen.
• Our view of ourselves and how we fit into our social spheres.  (par. 7)

       The Diamond Approach, which I have a been a student of now for 18 years, teach that  we, as babies, are in touch with Basic Trust, "an innate, unquestioned, and preverbal confidence in reality" (Almaas, Facets of Unity, p.  14).   Due to our young childhood experiences of safety and order, our experience of Basic Trust adjusts to the realities of our holding environment.  When these unconscious understandings of  Basic Trust are not realized, then we become quite anxious and unsettled, just like we do when we experience attachment wounds in our childhood environment or experience trauma in life, all which also break our foundation of Basic Trust.    
       This is why the political grief that we have been and are experiencing throughout our world now reflects many aspects of trauma behavior.   There is a deep sense within us that our world is no longer safe, and we are searching for ways to bring safety and Basic Trust back to our world.  However, what feels safe for the one side, for example, the Trump side, feels very unsafe to the Democratic supporters within the USA population.  As a result, we have an intense polarization around two different core understandings of Basic Trust and what feels safe.  This leads to what Shelvock and Harris describe as an intense political polarization, “where both sides of the divide describe a feeling of moral outrage over the views expressed by the other.”

        But IFS takes this polarization one step further.   It also teaches that this external polarization which is present in the external world is also present within us.  We have an internal part that merges easily with one side of the external polarization, in my case, the Democratic side of the American context.  This part resonates with the values of truth, compassion, openness, inclusiveness, the rights of women, climate change, etc., core values that often connect with the progressive left.  As a result, I found myself supporting strongly the Democratic Party and hoping Kamala Harris would win the USA election.  However, the other side, my internal part that would resonate with the Trump side was almost missing, essentially unconscious within me.   Where was this internal part within me that would resonate with the Republican desire for change?   Had I disowned it and treated it as my enemy?
       Thankfully, I had enough curiosity within me, a dynamic of Divine Spirit, to listen to this Christian Trump supporter and, in doing so, I discover a little of why she was thrilled that Trump was becoming President.  As I listened to her, I discovered to my surprise that I resonated with her need to have the current fallen social order disrupted for I had similar feelings about the fallen social order within my own country.
      The world I entered from university 40 years ago provided me a good wage, 2 months of on-the-job training, job security (no contracts), a pension plan and benefits, etc. and the price of my first home was 3 times my salary.    The world my young adult children are entering now is very different.  Despite having college and university education, jobs are hard to find, lot lower salaries, little to no on-the-job training, jobs with term contracts and little long term security, no pension and benefits, and now a basic starter house costs at least 15 times their current salary.  With little money to save, I have no idea how my children will save for a home let alone be able to retire financially in 30 years, something l will be doing in a few years.  Yes, as their parents, I will be helping my adult children reach some of their goals, but I know that many, maybe most, young adults don’t have parents who can help them financially in significant ways.
      This is the social order my children and their generation live in, a very different social order then the one they were born into.  Something has radically changed in the past 40 years for my children can no longer trust their social order to provide the safety and support they grew up expecting, and I thought would be there for them.  Remember, the social order they were born into was a social order with lots of opportunity, support, safety, and trust.    This is the assumptive worldview, that I described earlier, that unconsciously formed within their psyches.    Seen through this lens, I understand more clearly why my adult children are far more anxious and fearful about the future than I was at their age.  Yes, I had concerns around possible nuclear war and high interest rates which were the challenges in the 1980's, but these were more fears of what could be,  not real life realities that my adult children's generation have to live in each day.   It is clear to me that the current social order here in Ontario, in Canada, has fallen from grace, and that tells me something.

      This social disorder needs to be disrupted…and I currently see no political party in Canada wanting to work at this disrupting this social order.   The people with power are trying to maintain the social order, rather than disrupt it which would allow us to work toward restoring our trust in the safety of the social order for all.  If a political leader arose in Canada who promised this type of disruption, or we, Canadians, could imagine this type of disruption happening through their leadership, I can easily see many people voting for this leader, especially those who are trapped in this fallen disorder.  
      I sense that this was where my Christian Trump counselling peer was coming from, that she had an internal part that wanted disruption to the social order within the USA.   I am grateful to this counselling peer for she has helped me embrace a “disrupting part” within me, a part that I had kept pushing to the side and not truly owning.   I had treated this part like an enemy, a part within me that I didn’t want to welcome for it means disrupting the status quo which benefits me a lot.  This massive social change would cause me to feel all the anxiety that goes with such disruption, an anxiety that many in the younger generation feel on most days due to our current fallen order.      My hope is that more people who are aligned with the left side of the polarization can become curious about those on the right.   But even more so, I invite you to become curious about a part within you that maybe you have disowned, rejected, even treated as enemy, a part that longs for a similar disruption in the fallen social order so that all benefit, not just those who have wealth and assets.   We, who value progressive politics, may have more in common with the Trump followers than we realize. 
       However, it is also my hope that followers of Trump will become curious of the people who wanted Kamala Harris to win the presidency.  And not only be curious about those on the left of the political spectrum, but also become real curious about an internal part within you that may even resonate with the values that Democrats are fighting for.  I know that this may be hard to picture but I find it hard to imagine, especially if you are a Christian follower of Trump, that the values such as truth, compassion, openness, inclusiveness, the rights of women, climate change, etc.  are not important to you.   These values are essential to what makes a new social order safe and trustworthy.  If these values are missing when disruption to the social order happens, we could find ourselves in an even worst world for this new social order will have even less safety, order, and trust then we have now.    ​

      As I wrap up this blog, I want you to consider again Jesus’ invitation to “love your enemy”.   Hopefully, by now you are realizing that for us to love our political enemy outside, we have to be very curious, and curious in two different ways.   First, we have to be curious about the people we judge as our enemy in the external world.   In doing so, I am hoping we will discover a second level of curiosity...a curiosity toward that part within us that possibly resonates a little with the enemy we are actually fighting against.   As we open the door to both of these curiosities, we may discover that our enemy is not our enemy after all.  

​Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator

      Theophostic Prayer Ministry, developed by Christian counsellor Dr. Ed Smith in the 1990’s, was also popular then in addressing such mental issues within this group of Christian healers.  Smith taught that mental health issues were tied to people believing powerful emotional lies that crippled their lives.  Often external evil spirits were seen connected to these emotional lies.  Using a form of guided prayer, Smith instructed his clients to listen to the voice of Christ to see if this emotional belief was a truth or a lie.  When clients realized that this emotional belief was a lie and replaced this lie by the truth they sensed came from Christ, often significant healing happened for them.  At that time, I was intrigued by Theophostic Ministry and read many books and went to a few training seminars to learn how to practice this form of prayer ministry. ​

​       IFS also teaches that people are born with parts that arises naturally when needed.    We have thinking parts, feeling parts, creative parts, doing parts, sports parts, music parts, speaking parts, quiet parts, caring parts, relating parts, child parts, etc.  These parts arise as requested by our Self in response to what is needed in life.  When this happens, one could say that these parts are Self-led, that is, they are guided by the holy spirit of our Self. 
       However, due to childhood attachment wounds or traumatic events in our whole life, the parts with our soul can become burdened.   They become burdened because these parts now have the extra responsibility to carry or manage the pain caused by these painful or traumatic events.  Due to these burdens, these parts no longer are fully Self-led, especially when triggered into action.  There are two types of burdened parts that live with this historic pain. 
       The Exile parts are the burdened parts within our soul that carry the memories, emotions, narratives, beliefs, and body sensations of our traumas and childhood wounds.  They are called exiled parts because these painful parts are often hidden away in our unconscious with the hope that they are not triggered or re-experienced.  
       To make sure these Exile parts stay exiled, we have Protector parts whose responsibility is to keep our Exile parts protected through them not re-experiencing their memory pain.   Some Protector parts are called Managers for their goal is to keep the pain within the Exiles from being triggered.   These Managers are very proactive, often hypervigilant, constantly doing their job to make sure the Exile parts are not triggered by the people or events in our life.   Manager parts include over-thinking parts, numbing parts, avoiding parts, anxious parts, performing parts, caregiving parts, denying parts, inner critic parts, and many more.   However, sometimes something happens in our life that gets past these Managers and the Exile parts are triggered creating much emotional distress.  When this happens, another type of Protector part jumps into action, namely the Firefighter parts within us.   Unlike Managers who are proactive, Firefighters are reactive.  The goal of the Firefighter is to escape from this Exile pain at all costs, even if this firefighting strategy creates other types of pain.   Examples of Firefighters include addiction parts, rage parts, physical cutting parts, purging and gorging parts, suicide parts, or fighting parts.  

       Furthermore, IFS has discovered that unattached burdens are not part of the client’s internal system.   They entered the client’s psyche during a time of extreme vulnerability, often due to severe trauma or abuse.   This is why the question, “are you a part within me” is a key question for the psychotherapist to have the client ask themselves (p. 90-94).  
      Due to many experiences working with UBs, Falconer has developed a healing process building on the practices of IFS.    He treats UBs like separate personalities, similar to burdened parts.  He says they can talk to us, take actions, and seem to have wills on their own. Clients also see them in their internal worlds as independent beings (p. 70) and yet their source is from outside the person.   He has learned that UBs pick up quickly on the fear of the psychotherapist and so it is important that the counsellor operates from their sense of Self (p. 87-90), free of this fear. Furthermore, since UBs are scary to the various burdened parts within the client, there are often many Managers and Firefighters who are in relationship to this UB trying to control it.   This means that part of the healing process involves these burdened parts detaching themselves from the UB and realigning themselves with the Self of the client (p. 96-100)  This can take time.   IFS's goal in this healing process is to get the UB to leave the person, and once the UB has left, to ask the client to invite what spiritual resources they need from Self to help them live into the future.  
      There is much more I could say about IFS and Falconer’s approach to healing UBs but the fact that most evil spirit phenomena have no connection to unattached burdens should cause us to pause.    Rather, most evil spirit dynamics are tied to burden parts within us seeking to protect us.   Can you imagine the harm that has been done to vulnerable people throughout history when Christian leaders sought to exorcize evil spirits that were really authentic psychological parts within their clients?   Falconer talks about the psychological and spiritual damage that happens when deliverance ministers have tried to amputate burdened parts of persons that were not UBs (p. 94).
      In this blog, I have shared my journey of understanding the reality of evil spirits and the demonic from my early days as a young pastor to now 25 years later discovering how IFS works at healing the pain caused by trauma, burdened parts and unattached burdens.   There is much more to learn about healing such painful realities, but I am grateful for the advances happening in recent years due to the interaction and integration happening between psychology and spirituality.  

Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator

​      Through my palliative care ministry, one of my clients asked me about the Christian “born-again” experience.  One of his professional caregivers was highlighting it, and was asking if he had had a born-again experience.   He had no response for her for he was not sure what she was getting at.  In this blog, I want to explore these new birth experiences through the lens of Internal Family system for it provides a helpful framework from which to understand these sacred moments.
        

​       Personally, I was troubled by the conflict these born-again experiences were creating within the church, not just the Mennonite Church, but many churches leading to church divisions over the decades.   I also had questions.  Why did some people have born-again experiences while others did not when embracing the Christian faith? 
       Furthermore, I found these rebirth conversations interesting for I personally could relate to the born-again experience.
      During the third year of my university education , I had a profound sacred moment that shifted my faith dramatically from an intellectual faith based on theology and beliefs to one that was based on spiritual experience.   This shift was triggered due to a faith and self esteem crisis I was going through due to relationship mistakes I had made in my  high school/university years as well as struggles at university.  I remember reaching a place one evening when in tears I prayed to God to prove to me that God was real…and if God would do that, I would reset my life and reorient my life around my faith.  
      The next morning, I awoke and began looking for signs to see if God had answered my prayer.    In the process of looking, I sensed that something had changed in the way I experienced life.  I began to see signs of God’s spirit active in my life. Coincidences, here and there. My heart was more alive and sensitive.  I remember going to a movie theatre for a normal movie and throughout the film seeing connections and helpful insights that spoke key truths about life in general.   It felt like God was mysteriously speaking to me.   It’s hard to explain.  All I know is that these strange mystical experiences made me realize that there was another realm to life beyond the physical:  the spiritual.  I woke up to a new way of seeing life, a new way of being. 
  

​    I remember going to the local library and reading tons of pop psychology and spirituality books, going on prayer retreats, and attending church growth retreats for I was longing to understand better what I had and was experiencing within my life.  Eventually after four years being a computer programmer/analyst for Canada Trust, I went to seminary to get my Master of Divinity and became a pastor.    As I reflect back over my life now, I see that my life journey has been about seeking to understand the mystery of this mystical rebirth experience through training as a pastor (1989-1993) , then training as a spiritual director (1997-1999), then training as a psychospiritual therapist (2001-2006), and then training as a supervisor-educator of psychospiritual therapy (2017-2020).  
      I have come to see this spiritual rebirth experience as something essential to the Christian tradition, and an experience that appears to be unique to the Christian faith.   
       Biblically, there are many places where this rebirth experience is highlighted.   A key story occurs when Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader (Pharisee), secretly meets with Jesus one night.  Here, Jesus tells him that  “no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’" (John 3:  5-7).    Within the story, it is apparent that Nicodemus had no idea what Jesus meant by spiritual rebirth.  It was a foreign experience to him.    So, it should not be surprising that Christian leaders today would also struggle in understanding this "born again" experience. 
       Apostle Paul also talks about the spiritual rebirth in many of his letters to the early church.  In his letter to the Roman church, he stresses being "buried with Christ through baptism into death so that we will be resurrected into a new way of life"  (Rom. 6:4).   To the Galatian church, he highlights the importance of being crucified in Christ for it doing so, the spirit of Christ will live in us (Gal. 2: 20).  Finally, to the Church of Ephesus, he emphasizes the dying to the old corrupted self so that we can put on a new self and mind that reflects the righteousness and holiness of God (Eph. 4:22-24).  

   Within this unblended place, separate from my parts, we experience this unblended space as a "being" space.   In this being space, there is no managing my feelings, no thinking, no striving or pushing to make things happen.   Instead, we are simply being with our experience of life, observing and noticing what is happening within that experience.  We may also choose to join with the dynamics we notice arising within us.  When we are in this unblended place, the spiritual dynamics of Being/Sacred start to emerged within our experience toward what we are noticing.  
      I still remember clearly the time one of my clients, who lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder, experienced the dynamic of unblending for the first time.   They had always experienced themselves through the blending of one of their parts or alters.  The feelings of self rejection and worthlessness had dominated their life for decades.  Now, with unblending happening, they were were having experiences of  "me" that were free of this merge.   In this unblended place, they were far more accepting of self, still had a little doubt, but much more accepting of self and feeling more capable.  Now, they felt it was OK to be "me" and that was good enough.  They noted that when this unbending was happening, their sense of internal struggle was missing.  Instead, they felt that they would be OK no longer matter if others accepted them or not.  
      Can you imagine what happens when these people, who are often merged with their egoic parts. go to a spiritual revival meeting?   Sometimes during that event,  due to the moving music or the powerful influence of a dynamic speaker, their sense of “I” unblends from their many parts, and they drop into a deeper nondual experience of the sacred where no merging is happening.

        Here, in this unblended state, they experience Divine love, compassion, and many truths that speak to their hearts and minds, and their sense of “I” feels so alive.   They often feel a deep sense of being God’s beloved, just as Jesus encountered in his baptism when he heard God say these words to him “You are my beloved child and I treasure you”  (Mark 1: 11).  They encounter deeply a totally different way of experiencing themselves, one that feels very real and authentic. 
       What I have described from an IFS perspective is a born-again moment, a rebirth experience that arises when unblending happens in profound ways.   Clearly such profound moments are very healing to people.  No wonder these people get so excited by what had happened to them and want others to experience it too.  
       The challenge with such strong born-again experiences is that sometimes our ego quickly finds ways to structure such powerful moments into a  "born-again" egoic part that keeps deeper healing from happening.    That sacred born-again moment can become a powerful rigid identity structure where people believe that they are fully saved,  that they are going to heaven, and that God has chosen them to be a missionary whose goal is to save "unsaved" souls.    As a result of these fixed beliefs, these people  can fall into the trap of believing that they are fully saved and that no further spiritual transformation is needed.    In reality, these significant spiritual rebirth occurrences are just the beginning of the faith journey and often provide the way for deeper healing to happen in the future.   ​

       Another way these born-again experiences can become structured is that they become like an addictive drug.  This is why some people almost become addicted to having such born-again experiences over and over again.   We are constantly seeking these sacred born-again experiences.   When this issue arises, we now have a “born-again” egoic part that we merge with that keeps us from unblending and dropping in the mysterious dynamics of Being that opens the door to healing aspects of our often unconscious fallen egoic nature.    
     From an IFS perspective, this born-again experience is just one unblending moment, a powerful one for sure, but many more transformational unblending times are needed on the journey toward spiritual integration and wholeness. ​

​       So far I have focused on people who have had rebirth experiences.  While many people are often blended with their egoic parts, there are also many people who are either not blended most of the time with their parts, or their parts are not as problematic.   
       Due to being raised in more caring environments and not being exposed to traumatic events in our life, we find themselves having less powerful egoic parts in our soul that we merge with fully.   Instead, our sense of “I” is more present in our life, and when our egoic parts do become active, merging does happen, but we are able to unblend more easily and return to our more natural unblended state, or when we are merged, our egoic parts don't affect our lives as severely.   We don’t experience the rebirth experience in profound ways like some people do for our sense of identity was never connected consistently to our merged parts.  
        However, many of us still long to experience that sense that we are one of God’s beloved children.  Within our western culture, there is a huge emphasis on the mind and learning.  We spend a lot of our awake time in what is called dualistic awareness, where there is sense of “I” that is analyzing and interacting with a world outside ourselves.   Through an IFS lens, I would call this persistent dualistic way of interacting with life a sign that our sense of “I” is merged with our mental egoic part.   We can do lots of theological, Biblical and ethically thinking from this mental part, but thinking about God is very different than mystically sensing and joining with the dynamics of God's spirit. 
        We cannot experience any aspect of God or the sacred when we are merged with this mental part.   We can only experience the presence of Sacred and all the different aspects of Spirit when we are unblended from this mental part.  When that unbending happens, we drop into the nondualistic dimension of life where everything is connected and part of one reality.  It is here within this nondual aspect of life that we discover this profound sense that we are one of God’s beloved children, which people who have born-again experiences also sense.   Jesus encountered this sacred "beloved child" moment when he was baptized, that profound sense that he was God's beloved son and that God treasured him (Mark 1:  9-11).  This is why the practice of unblending is important for those who have not had a rebirth experience.   It can lead people to discovering that God does love them and opens the doorway to them developing a rich ongoing relationship with the Divine.  

        From this discussion, I am hoping that you are beginning to understand better the “born-again” experience from a psychological  perspective.  The key thing I want you to take away from this blog is the importance of the unblending experience.   For those of us who have had difficult lives, our first full unblending experience often leads to something that is called the “born-again” experience, especially within a Christian context.    But for those who have not had that born-again moment, many of us still long for that sense of being a special beloved child of God.   For this to happen, another form of unblending happens, one which opens the way for us to have a more personal relationship with the Sacred. 

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator ​

        All of these burdened parts are found within our soul, most of which are often judged as narcistic in nature.   I hope by understanding these behaviors through the lens of Self Psychology and IFS, you are seeing how these actions are really survival strategies, ways to deal with unmet attachment needs and the associated pain within our wounded inner child. 
      Due to our challenging developmental years, our sense of Self often doesn’t develop into a unified caring Self that is able to love and care fully for the parts of our personality.  Instead, our Self is often fragmented and merges quickly with our burdened parts and often gets lost or overwhelmed in their beliefs and  experiences.   This fragmented nature of our Self is why it is so challenging for us to feel self love, to feel much if any love toward the parts of our personality.      
      Since most people struggle with a fragmented sense of Self, a core question becomes:  How do we heal our sense of Self so that our Self can regain its ability to love and care for the parts within our personality?  

How Divine Love is the Secret to our Self Loving our Burden Parts
      IFS teaches that the secret to our Self rediscovering its caring role within our soul is through the process of unblending.  Through the process of unblending, our sense of Self is able to break the merge with the burdened part(s) and return to its normal state of being in the Present Moment.  In this being state, our Self experiences directly the love of God/Sacred which can then flow and minister to the various parts of our soul.    This suggests that there is a direct connection between our Self’s capacity to feel Divine Love and our Self’s ability to love the various parts of our personality.    When our Self is blended with a burdened part, our Self is no longer able to sense Divine Love, and thus our Self is unable to share this love with the troubled aspects of our soul. ​

      This process of unblending in IFS is really all about doing spiritual practices that break the merge between our Self and the burdened parts it is blended with.   Such spiritual practices are designed to break the merge so that a prayerful/mindful awareness arises that allows our Self to enter into a place of Presence/Being where we connect with the various qualities of Spirit including love.   Within the counselling room, we tend to use psychotherapy modalities designed to help client’s break this merge so that their sense of Self can discover this state of Being that allows it to reconnect with the Sacred.   However, for those clients that are comfortable with faith language, I have wondered if it would be more effective to have the client interact directly with their sense of God/Sacred through ritual, prayer, or prayerful imagination.   Such religious practices may help these clients break the merge more quickly between their Self and their part(s) allowing their Self to become a conduit of  the healing dynamics of the Sacred to their parts.
      It is important to realize here that this unblending process needs to happen over and over again, especially for people who have major attachment wounds or trauma in their history.   I have found that these merges between our Self and our burdened parts can be quite strong.   Our Self is not used to being centred in Being and the Present Moment.  This becomes quickly evident when our Self attempts to form a loving relationship with each of our parts through mirroring, validating and twinning the part's experience.   Our Self is so used to blending with our parts that it finds it hard to stay centred in Being where it can care for our parts.   Our Self naturally blends and so it takes time for our Self to develop a solid love relationship with the Sacred that can resist the dynamics of merging with its troubled parts. 
​      This is why the Self of the psychospiritual therapist is so important in the beginning of the healing process in the counselling room.   When the Self of the counsellor is grounded in their love relationship with the Sacred, they feel lots of love and caring toward their client’s Self that struggles to stay unblended from their parts.  The counsellor models and supports the unblending process until the client’s Self’s develops to the point that it can stay grounded and unmerged from their parts and truly be a guiding and caring presence to their parts.​

​      When this happens, the love, grace, and insight from the Sacred flows through the client's Self to the various parts their Self is caring for resulting in healing and transformation. 
      In summary, I want to highlight three key truths shown in this blog.  One truth is around behaviors that are often judged as acts of selfishness.   I hope I have helped you see how such behaviors are often survival strategies due to unmet childhood needs.   The second truth is around the complexities involved in loving ourselves.   Many people struggle to feel love toward themselves because many parts of their personality are not able to receive this love.    These parts are often burdened with the task of protecting our wounded inner child from being triggered and re-experiencing the pain from their trauma or attachment wounds.    Finally, the secret to loving ourselves is first learning how to unblend our sense of Self from our burdened parts so that our Self can rediscover the experience of the Sacred again.   As our Self develops a consistent connection to the Sacred found in the Present Moment, the love and other spiritual resources of the Sacred can flow through our Self to our burdened parts leading to deep transformation. 

Gord Alton MDiv RP  Supervisor-Educator