Spiritual Talk - Session 6
This is the 6th talk in an 8-week class called "Trauma and Transformation, Level 1". The course takes a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual approach to healing. Both Christians and non-Christians are welcome. This is a reflection time of about 10 minutes that occurs in the class, before the remaining time which is spent in trauma education - helping people understand the impact of trauma on the mind and on all of life.
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Balance. We don’t usually notice it when we have it. When things are out of balance we feel it everywhere.
If and when we have balance in our lives, it usually comes from a lot of thought and a lot of work, which comes from the experience of having had things out of balance and suffering in some way as a result.
So in order to live a truly balanced life, it requires reflection on what about our lives is out of balance. Just as we don’t truly learn from experience, but rather we learn when we reflect on our experiences, achieving balance requires a thoughtful and mindful approach.
A few years back I was taking out the recycling and, distracted by other things, I lost my footing and fell down the stairs outside my house.
I fell on the blue recycling box, so that sort of cushioned the blow, but I still lay there in some pain for about 5 minutes before gathering myself and getting up and limping into the house. No one in the house heard the great crash I made.
Very often others, even those you might expect to notice, just aren’t aware when you lose balance, when you fall.
We’re sadly often left to pick up the mess by ourselves. I just might notice later on when that lack of ballance shows up in our behaviours and words.
My wife was surprised and very sympathetic when I told her the sad story later on, but she had been busy with her own stuff. Life is like that.
Balance. It’s not easy to have, and it is something that doesn’t ever just happen. You have to work at it.
At one point Jesus was asked what is the most important thing in all of the sacred texts of the Hebrew people, what we call the Old Testament, and more specifically the Torah, or the first 5 books of the Bible, also referred to generally as the Law.
He’s asked this question about what is the most important truth about life, and his answer can be viewed as being about balance.
He says that the most important thing is to love God with all your heart, your soul, your mind and your strength. In saying this he highlights a few important things.
He says that love is the most important thing. Prioritizing love above everything else is the way to live.
Elsewhere the Bible says that what’s really important is faith, hope and love, but LOVE is the most important thing, and the thing that lasts into eternity.
He says that the locus and the focus of that love is to be our Creator.
So the most important thing we can do is to direct that love toward the most important relationship we can have, the relationship we have with the One who loves us back the most, God.
It’s like for a couple with a child. When both parents focus first on their love for each other, that most important human relationship, they are then best able to be their best and love their child or their children.
When we focus our best energy on our relationship with God, which if we let it is meant to be our deepest, most fulfilling relationship, all of our other relationships end up being stronger.
Jesus then outlines how to love in this most important, and he says that it’s with everything that we are, all of our component parts as it were.
Love with our heart, our emotions, our passion our deepest longings
Love with our soul, our spirits, who we are really on the inside, that which lasts forever
Love with our mind, our thinking, our reasoning, our questioning, our discerning
Love with our strength, our bodies, our physical ability, our resilience and capacity for action.
Jesus answer to the big question of what truly matters, is one of balance. And of course all the above is not achieved in a moment or a day, or even a lifetime.
Martin Luther said: “This life, therefore, is not godliness but the process of becoming godly, not health but getting well, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way. The process is not yet finished, but it is actively going on. This is not the goal but it is the right road. At present, everything does not gleam and sparkle, but everything is being cleansed.”
Balance also consists of learning to take it slow and to realize that any change we want to experience, in order to really be change that leads to a different and a better life, that change has to be slow in order to become truly embedded in our life.
And since it’s slow, we have to learn 3 things: to enjoy the process, to focus on the process, to take care of ourselves in the process.
There’s a principal that the famous violinist Itzhac Perlman teaches about music:
Everything you learn fast, you forget fast; everything you learn slow, you forget slow.
A gift I received when I came to faith was music, the ability to learn and grow through music. I play a bunch of instruments and now do a fair bit of music production.
When you’re studying music, the hardest thing to do is to play musical passages or melodies slowly, especially when you can kind or sort of play them half ok faster.
But the value of going slow is that you have time to really pay attention to the melody, the harmony and the rhythm. When you go slow, the music has time to get inside you, it has time to find a home in your soul.
So when you eventually play or perform the song, you're not just playing a bunch of notes, you're NOT playing a thing that’s external to you, but you are playing something that is now a part of you.
It has worked its way into your soul, slowly and carefully.
The best musicians do this, and we can always feel when a musician is playing or singing a song that is deep inside them. It is deeply moving.
Likewise with other learning and with self-care and balance. We need to focus our attention on healthy practices, many of which we’re learning in this course.
We need to practice them and allow them to slowly get inside of us, so when we are accessing those learnings as we need them, we are doing so with a wisdom and understanding of ourselves that has become a part of us.
So may we aim, in our journey, for balance, the balancing of heart, soul, mind and strength, toward the purpose of living a life of love. May we enjoy becoming what we are not yet, but what we are seeking to be.
And may we go slow, so that the music of our best life, all of our best learning and changing to be the best version of ourselves that we can be...has time to go deep inside of us and find a home in our souls.
