When I was steeped in the New Age, I used to talk a lot about spiritual bypassing.

Granted - spiritual bypassing is a real thing and it is a problem in every spiritual community - even in mindset communities - it’s mindset bypassing instead of spiritual bypassing.

I used to believe that the way to be free from spiritual bypassing and patterns of denial was through the body.

I believed that you had to learn to regulate your nervous system to truly heal and understand spirituality.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I still think the nervous system plays a major role in healing of any kind.

And if you were to take Jesus out of the picture, then that is where you would start - with the patterns in the body.

But the Bible is true when it says that the Spirit (that is the Holy Spirit) makes the body alive. (Romans 8:11).

Jesus gives you a new heart when you give your life to Him.

Before we know God we have a heart of stone. The heart of stone is a heart that is spiritually blind,...

That Distinct Feeling of being Under the Shadow of His Wings…

I shared with someone yesterday about this very distinct feeling that is old and yet new to me at the same time.

It is the feeling of being under submission to God, and sealed by Him. It is a sense of his protection and covering. The felt-sense of a shield around me. 

As a child I felt this distinctly… a sense that there was something different about me. A vulnerability in my chest. That feeling was wrapped up in the extreme trauma that was my household filled with chaos, abuse and dysfunction.  And it was made complicated by the fact that I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to be normal. I didn’t like the feeling. I wanted to thrash out of it when I was around other people. 

Since my salvation last year that vulnerability in my chest has returned. The sense of being different. But what I have realized is that this is the soft, fleshy heart the Lord...

‍ Learning to Trust the Lord ‍

The thing God has been dealing with me most about since I gave my life to Christ last year has been trust.

Trust is a scary dirty word for a lot of us.

Add in a childhood wrought with abuse and neglect or any kind of relational or spiritual trauma for that matter and you compound on the challenge.

In my years of personal trauma recovery, nervous system repair, and formal training - I’ve learned and experienced a lot about the body and trust.

About how the nervous system can be wired for a kind of closed off hyper-independence in which we construct a life where we protect ourselves from the need to trust others for anything.

How the nervous system can learn to be drawn to (and even cling to) what is unsafe in relationships and deeply untrustworthy.

How we can be so cut off from our God-given intuition that we can’t even FEEL the instincts let alone discern and trust them.

How we can feel terrified to trust that which is actually...