Re-Examining and Relearning

Another year of EfM has begun and, as has proven true in every other year, it promises to be an interesting and informative one.

One of the first things we share in our groups is our spiritual autobiographies. EfM has four years and each year has a different format for doing spiritual autobiographies. Each year it is possible to take the same stories and see them in different ways to produce new insights. Another amazing thing is that I can hear another person's SA for several years and still find new things about them that I didn't know before.

Doing a spiritual autobiography is like peeling an onion: there are the thin and thick parts. In writing my SAs over the past 6 years, it has taken  a long time to take off more than just the very thinnest layer. It was a question of trust and also one of feeling comfortable enough inside myself to actually choose to open up layers that had been so carefully hidden. It's a process, but it's a process that can't be rushed. Sometimes I just don't have the courage to tell my story; I guess I'm afraid of being judged as a whiner (I've been accused of that before but never in EfM, thank God) or a total underachiever. Self-image is so important, and self-talk, especially when it repeats negatives that I have heard from others, seems to have engraved itself on my being as if it were carved in stone. Part of doing the SA is to open those parts up, look at them, find where God truly was at that time and who were God-bearers for me when I could not be for myself.

The focus of the SA is revisiting the past and re-imaging it, looking at it through different lenses. I find that sometimes, looking through the lens of long-elapsed time, the view I thought I had has turned into something else, something that I can now either re-interpret in a more healthy way or even dismiss altogether as no longer needed or even pertinent. Answering questions about a personal experience,  a world event that had an impact on me, describing a holy place or describing someone who was a God-bearer force me to sift through memories and see what stays in the sieve and which slides through. Even then, from one day to the next, the answers might be different, depending on how my mind is working at the time or what has gone on in my life that colors it. I may find that in retrospect I wish I had responded to a situation differently but I made a choice at that time that cannot be changed. How I use the experience of that choice makes it or breaks it -- whether it is something from which I learned or something I repeated as if hoping the results would be different that next time.

This morning, reading over what I wrote, it feels like I've just been given an insight that I didn't have before. It feels as if doing my SA is no different than going into a doctor's office to get the results of tests taken some time before. All this time I have been waiting for answers, whether from an outside professional or an inside professional (after all, who should know me better than me myself?). It just has to happen at the right time, when all the facts are in, the values measured, the scans interpreted. In the course of preparing and presenting my SA, it gives input and from that I should gain insight into what being me really is about and why. Even after the doctor gives me a diagnosis and suggestions for where to go from here, I still have to process what it all means and come to my own conclusions or accommodations. I have to sit with whatever it is for a while in order for it to start to make sense.

I think now that I have to sit a bit longer with my SA. I'm the doctor here, and while I'm not looking for a diagnosis, I am looking more insight, possible healing, and perhaps pointers to a different way of both looking at and doing my life. It's a matter of  re-examining, relearning and refocusing -- and sometimes waiting for the pro to interpret the results.