Life’s Interruption Is the Invitation To Your Real Work

EPISODE 88 | LIFE’S INTERRUPTION IS THE INVITATION TO YOUR REAL WORK

When those interruptions happen and we feel powerless and helpless, that's when our scripts will often kick into gear. Our normal coping mechanisms, the way that we respond when we are under threat, all that surfaces, right? And if we are interior pilgrims who want to grow in freedom, we will actually be able to be thankful, as uncomfortable as it is, because now we can see more clearly the ways that we are broken. Now, we can actually recognize more clearly the ways that we are trapped.

[00:00:32] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me. 

[00:01:09] Good morning and welcome to day 13 of my 30 days IG Live challenge. Okay, so, this morning I would like to talk about, well, something uncomfortable, but also something that's good news, okay. Today's topic is about how life's interruption is the invitation to your real work or our real work.

[00:01:36] WHAT INTERRUPTIONS HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED?
So, what am I talking about when I say life's interruption? Illness, perhaps your own? Or when suddenly someone in your family falls ill? You know, the interruption begins even before there's confirmation of illness. I think too many of us have the experience when a loved one maybe goes for some routine scan or test, and then we find out, oh, there's something of concern - you know, there's something of concern that showed up in the CT scan or the MRI.

[00:02:11] I'm actually going through something like that right now. And suddenly, life just shifts, right? All the plans that you've made, the schedules that you have taken time to plan out, they suddenly look very rigid because now you have to make space for something that you didn't plan for.

[00:02:31] So, an illness is just one example. It's a big one and I know it's one that so many of us experience whether again, we are the ones falling ill, or someone that we love is falling ill and then you have to make room for doctor's appointments, for family meetings and discussions.

[00:02:48] Burnout could be another example of life's interruption. We don't plan for burnout. But, again, it's something that happens to some of us. And then when you truly burn out, you know you have to stop, even if you felt like you couldn't. Being laid off; another painful experience and one that is very real and one that just can make us feel like the rug's been pulled out from under our feet.

[00:03:18] Maybe, one moment we think everything is fine, the next moment everything it seems insecure. If you are still a student - especially in a place like Singapore - not doing well enough for your exams or failing your exams can sometimes literally feel like the end of the world. There's so much fear and insecurity in us of failure, right?

[00:03:44] Some of you may have experienced recently the end of a significant relationship. It could be a friendship. It could be a romantic relationship. And the end of any significant relationship always feels like death, a kind of death. Now, it's not just the end of things that interrupt us, right? Like the end of a relationship, maybe a marriage breaking down, or actual death, sometimes losing someone that we love.

[00:04:15] Those are all interruptions to life. But so are things like pregnancy, an unexpected pregnancy perhaps, or giving birth. I think every parent knows what a big interruption that is to life, and to your plans, and maybe even your dreams. What other interruptions do we often experience? Being betrayed, being disillusioned in something that we have always had faith in, or hope in.

[00:04:45] That's a big interruption because it disrupts our sense of life. It disrupts our sense of stability, right? So, for example, whether things are now going awry in a family and you suddenly realize that family isn't a source of stability anymore, or you belong to an institution like I do - the Catholic Church for me.

[00:05:11] And for so long in my life that has been a bastion of stability and security and safety and certainty, really. And then as I grew up - and I'm not just talking about physical age, but I'm talking about maturity in my spiritual journey, in my ability and capacity to see the real and hold opposing realities.

[00:05:32] QUESTIONING MY FUNDAMENTALS
I'm realizing that actually, there's a lot that is wrong and a lot that is broken in that bastion of certainty and stability that I thought it was. And that interrupts my life. It interrupts my sense of self. It makes me ask very fundamental questions again, like, what does it mean to be a disciple of Christ in the midst of the church?

[00:05:52] What does it mean to be Catholic? What if the answers that I found when I was younger, which satisfied me then, no longer are enough reasons for me now to even say that I am Catholic, or to remain Catholic? What does it mean to be faithful? You know, those are huge, huge questions that in our own lives can feel like we have to find again - the centre of gravity from which we live.

[00:06:23] Now, many of these things we all know, but we often do not see on the surface of another person's life. So, there was a friend who just last night, very sweet. I haven't talked to her in a while and she just texted me and you know, she was thinking about me and asked me how I was doing.

[00:06:41] And I just gave her a very brief update about currently what's going on in my life. And like I mentioned, there's some disruption in my daily life to do with family, to do with illness. And my friend kind of mentioned, you know, oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't know how much you were going through.

[00:06:59] THE HIDDEN STORIES
But isn't that the truth? I don't think any of us ever really know how much someone else is going through. We see what we put out there. We see what has been put out there. We see what is shared. We see maybe the work that they do, but everyone has a hidden story. Something that they're struggling with.

[00:07:20] And most of us, we see these hidden things that we're struggling with as interruptions, right? As unwelcome, irritating, annoying, frustrating interruptions to our life. We wish that we wouldn't have these interruptions and that life would just go on - our plans could just continue to be carried out. We can continue to grow and enjoy ourselves or learn, achieve our dreams and all that.

[00:07:43] That's natural to feel that way. Because when our life is interrupted, and usually the bigger the interruption is, or the bigger the crisis is that happens, our sense of control is taken away from us. But, the point of today's sharing that I want to make is, if you are an interior pilgrim, which means that you want to make this interior journey into authenticity and wholeness, you are interested in integration, you want to know more deeply who you are and be grounded in that identity, so that you can have a sense of stability, no matter what storms come in your life.

[00:08:23] WHAT'S THE GOOD NEWS?
Well, then, in that case, life's interruptions are actually good news. They are uncomfortable, very, very uncomfortable. But life's interruptions are actually invitations to do the real work of our life. What is the real work of our life? Freedom, restoration, and love. I mean, that's one way of putting it, that's how I put it.

[00:08:48] Freedom; freedom from all the things that bind us. Freedom that keeps us living in fear, afraid to be ourselves, afraid to risk, afraid to fully live even in the midst of imperfection. Freedom from the patterns of dysfunction, the wounds that have been handed down from generation to generation in our families, in our communities, that bind us - for us to break free of that and to be able to become a source of healing in our families and our communities and a source of hope for the generations that come after us.

[00:09:31] Restoration, right? Because freedom cannot come without restoration and love. Because ultimately the freedom is for something, and the freedom is for us to be able to connect more deeply with one another, with God and with ourselves. So, if the real work for the interior journey is freedom, restoration, and love, then life's interruptions, these horrible, uncomfortable, painful interruptions - they are actually kind of like highlighters that help to focus us, help to focus us on what is actually most important, and also help to focus us on where we are very trapped and unfree.

[00:10:13] Okay, because think about it, when those interruptions happen and we feel powerless and helpless, that's when our scripts will often kick into gear. Our normal coping mechanisms, the way that we respond when we are under threat, all that surfaces, right? And if we are interior pilgrims who want to grow in freedom, we will actually be able to be thankful, as uncomfortable as it is, because now we can see more clearly the ways that we are broken. Now, we can actually recognize more clearly the ways that we are trapped, right?

[00:10:49] So, it's a very strange experience sometimes. It's painful, but yet at the same time graced. Right? And anyone who has been in this journey for some time will know what I'm talking about. There's often that pain, at the same time there's gratitude. But when this kind of interruption happens, I like to say that there are usually two options that we can take.

[00:11:12] DOUBLING DOWN OR FREEZING
And we usually always take one of these two options. Option A would be, in a sense, to double down with our usual coping mechanisms to the extent that we are able to. Okay, so, double down in our attempts to wrest back control in our lives. Have you ever seen or experienced in your own life, or seen someone else, try and fight these interruptions? So, it's like, you know, they buckle down, right? And you try and over function or not just try - you actually over function. Like, the more life seems to throw at you, the more you fight back and oftentimes, we see this as a virtue, right? This is like the white knuckling the way we honour brute strength, the brute force of will to try and overcome. We often, or the world often rewards that and sees that as something admirable.

[00:12:05] REINFORCING OUR SCRIPTS
And I'm not saying there's nothing admirable about it at all. But when we're talking about the interior journey, and when we go into this mode of over functioning and trying to use our brute strength to fight back, what usually happens is we are actually reinforcing our scripts. We are actually reinforcing the things that keep us trapped and keep us unfree. So, that's not a good thing, all right.

[00:12:31] But that's what often happens because it's what we are used to. So, we will over function, we will continue to suppress our emotions, our desires until we lash out. If you see how often families and communities are in crisis, one mode is this - is that they will over function, they will try harder to maybe so called be together, but there's even more tension and there's even more anger and there's even more hurt, right?

[00:12:55] It's like, they can't get out of that collective script of trying to over function. And all the brokenness that was already inherent becomes even more emphasized. Because why? When we are acting out of scripts, whether it's individual scripts or collective scripts, we're acting out of fear. And fear generates more fear. It will not bring peace, right?

[00:13:19] So, one is we try and keep over functioning until we get some kind of an upper hand and sometimes it may seem like we get an upper hand, right? Like the illness may recede, we can power through after we've lost a relationship or someone that we love, we think that we're okay, we can continue to function, even though we actually haven't addressed our grief, we haven't addressed our vulnerabilities.

[00:13:45] It seems like we're okay, but all that stuff is still simmering underneath the surface until the next interruption in our life happens. And over time, when there's a cumulative effect of interruptions that we have not actually dealt with, or we haven't answered that invitation to do the real work, it comes to a point, I think, when we finally get the message that we can't just over function and overcome life's interruptions.

[00:14:15] Then what happens? Because trauma is really real and even the way we over function often is a response from our past traumas. When we can't over function anymore, another coping mechanism or not just coping mechanism, I think something that our bodies just automatically go into, is a kind of freeze, right?

[00:14:34] We can just become very paralyzed. We give into despair. We disassociate, give up trying to change anything, kind of start thinking, what's the point? What's the point? Discouragement can get the better of us, right? Both that, giving up, giving up hope, and trying to over function. I actually group them under the same option, which is - I want to caveat, when I say option, I'm not saying that we're completely free to choose that option because our scripts and our trauma response, a lot of that actually takes away our freedom.

[00:15:13] So, that's the point, right? We are not free. So, we default to this, but there's still some extent of choice and we can at least, over time become aware that this is what we are doing and then we have a choice to desire something else, at least to hope and want to be able to respond in a different way to hope and want to be free.

[00:15:35] Then if we want to move towards freedom to actually do what I'm calling the real work of our lives, which is the real work of freedom, restoration, and love. The way to do that requires us not to run away from our helplessness or to try and over function to overcome our powerlessness and to wrest back control in our lives.

[00:16:00] The way towards freedom requires us to acknowledge our helplessness, acknowledge our brokenness, and to a great extent, that we don't know what we are doing. Now for those of us who have a very low existential sense of safety, and I think that's many of us, this can feel very, very difficult to do, right. And which is why when I speak of the interior journey, I always speak of grace.

[00:16:31] I am very, very aware that this journey is impossible without divine intervention and without grace. Much of it is gift, but having that huge truth that grace has to go before us, does not minimize the amount of effort that we need to put in. Okay, I don't know whether you're trying to get what I'm saying.

[00:16:54] We can't do it without grace, right? Divine intervention is necessary. We are really helpless without the divine intervention. But yet at the same time, sometimes when we think of that, it's like, oh, then I don't have to do anything at all. And that's really not true. There's nothing that requires more courage, more faith, more determination and more intentionality than to say yes to grace.

[00:17:15] Okay, that's why I say, this is the real work to acknowledge our helplessness, that we don't know what we're doing, to seek help from God and from others, to get support in the journey. What often happens is that we try to ignore the interruptions in our life or we try to make the interruptions disrupt us as little as possible by trying to continue to work as hard as we have to, let's say at work; by not wanting to change around our, like I say - I don't know, not just our schedules, but the way we see what we need to do.

[00:17:53] I'm experiencing that right now, okay. I find that when there's an unexpected interruption, first, there's kind of like a, oh no, here we go again. I already have so much on my plate, so many things that I had to plan in advance to even get them to kind of like fit in my calendar and to try and make room and make space for things that matter. And then now with this sudden interruption, everything's up in the air again.

[00:18:19] And because I've also only been learning, in more recent years, the concept of boundaries, I also have to be careful that when these interruptions come, I don't cave immediately and lose all my boundaries and you know, there's a part of me that that feels like I have to now be available 24/7 whenever it's required for the person that needs me.

[00:18:41] Right, and that the good daughter script - because this is apparent you know - or the good family member script can kick into high gear. And you see, in my growing up years, because of the nature of the dynamics in the family, I've often stepped into trying to pick up slack when it wasn't really my role. Right, and I thought that that was a good thing because I was trying to fill in the gap.

[00:19:07] But here's the thing. When dynamics are dysfunctional, two wrongs don't make a right and sometimes trying to fill in the gap, while it may temporarily seem to defer a problem or make people happy or make things better, over the long term, usually, things actually get more toxic, right?

[00:19:31] So, as someone who is on the interior journey, who is learning all these things, as interruptions come that has to do with family, on top of responding to the interruption, there's also this inner awareness that I don't want to default back to the old scripts, the old dynamics. And it can be tempting because in times of vulnerability, in times when we feel kind of helpless and weak, before we can recentre and ground ourselves, the automatic programming kicks in, right?

[00:20:06] And I just want to say, continue to expect that, okay? Continue to expect that no matter how much work you've put in your interior journey, it will come back. It will come back. But it is also in the coming back and our responding to it, that we continue to get more integrated and stronger as well.

[00:20:25] INVITATION TO SURRENDER
Alright, so, when life's interruption comes, it's an invitation. It's an invitation to look where we would rather not look. It's an invitation to surrender. And when I use the word surrender - I think I would like just to also share what I mean by surrender, because for the longest time I thought of surrender as something that was very, very hard to do.

[00:20:53] That I need to give up control, right? And so, I used to pray to God to give me the grace to surrender, and I remember those hours, so many hours of - my fists are literally like held tight, and I want to be able to let go, right? And I find it so difficult to let go and I would ask God, like, give me grace to let go, to let go. It's so hard to surrender. Help me to surrender.

[00:21:16] And finally there was one day when I was praying before the Blessed Sacrament. So, for Catholics, that's you know - (praying) before the Body of Christ, right. The consecrated Eucharist. When, again, I was praying for surrender. I suddenly felt Christ tell me, "Ann, there are two images of surrender". And He showed me the image that I've been living under, subconsciously, right? When I say, Lord, help me to surrender. It's the image of a people being conquered by a stronger enemy. And I'm asking for the grace to wave the white flag so that I'll stop fighting, so that I will surrender. Right, so, I'll stop fighting God and I will surrender. And that is the image. It's true. That's how I've been feeling. Then He said, "there's another image of surrender, Ann". And this is the image that's contained in the Song of Solomon in the Bible, okay?

[00:22:08] The Song of Songs. It is a very beautiful, erotic imagery, actually, of the surrender you give into your lover's embrace. It is a surrender - you know, you really surrender yourself, you become completely vulnerable, you give yourself over to the other person. And the Lord showed me that also is surrender. But you see the difference is, in the first image, I see the other person as my conqueror, as someone who is stronger than me, someone that I know I ultimately cannot fight. And so, I want to surrender before I'm destroyed.

[00:22:47] In the second image, the other person is not, you know, a harsh conqueror who is so called, that I'm afraid of, that will destroy me. It is someone that I trust so completely because I feel safe with so completely and trust so completely that I want to give myself over in love and fully surrender.

[00:23:10] When the Lord gave me those two images, I realized that what I desire and actually what He desires is the second image of surrender, right? But that was also revealing to me that I didn't have that kind of relationship with Him yet; that I felt so safe with Him, that I trusted Him so much, that surrender feels like just throwing myself into His embrace.

[00:23:34] Because life sucks, right? And when these interruptions come, it's painful and I still want to fight. I want to resist. I want to have control. My scripts are still very strong. But ever since that episode, I knew what to pray for. When I asked for the grace of surrender, I knew what image I had to have in mind.

[00:23:53] It is no longer the image of Lord that helped me to give up to You, to surrender to You, like wave the white flag. But Lord helped me to grow my trust in You, grow my sense of safety in You. And I no longer feel ashamed if I don't feel like I trust God enough, or that I don't feel safe enough with Him.

[00:24:10] This is the other thing that used to happen when I realized I don't trust Him enough. I feel so much shame, right? I should be able to trust Him. And it was also Christ who allayed that fear in me because He told me, you know, just like every bridegroom will woo his bride and he wins the trust of the bride - He says it is up to Him to win my trust and I should let Him earn my trust.

[00:24:40] Now, caveat, when I share all this, it's coming from experience, it's coming from relationship, okay? I just want to say that these are things that I bring in all my years of journeying into spiritual direction, to retreats. To receive, also that confirmation and that illumination of how these experiences really bring to life what scripture says and what the teachings of the church actually say.

[00:25:10] Without these personal lived relationship experiences, I only understood - whether it's scripture or even what I believe the church is teaching - I understand it in very sterile, really quite clinical ways, right? So, I'm sharing this with you not to replace your own experience because I think everyone really needs to have this as a firsthand experience.

[00:25:37] There's a saying that God has no great grandchildren. No, God has no grandchildren. It's only first generation, right? You know, kind of we all need that firsthand experience. And why is it so important? when I speak of the interior journey, it is a synthesis of the spiritual interior journey, the kind of journey that the mystics talk about, okay?

[00:25:58] And the interior integration journey that is human, that deals with our body, deals with our emotions, deals with the matter of life. That, I think in a lot of places, maybe you can say, in psychology and trauma work and all that people - even non-religious or non-spiritual people deal with that kind of interior integration work as well.

[00:26:21] But the way I make this journey, the way I speak about this journey, and really the people that I'm speaking to, like to you who are listening to this, are people for whom these two journeys are actually one journey. And the difficulty that many of us have is synthesizing these two journeys; the spiritual interior journey and the human kind of interior journey.

[00:26:42] They're meant to be one, integrated. And a lot of us, cognitively, can even say that, yes, it's meant to be one. But in reality, we only live in one dimension or the other dimension, right? Some of us only live the spiritual dimension, the very spiritualized understanding of the interior journey, and it's not embodied.

[00:26:59] And we don't know how to bring our bodies, our emotions, the matter of our life into this journey. So, what you will see when you do that is, you will prioritize formal prayer, or all the spiritual and religious things, activities that you believe are important. But it is disjointed and disconnected from your relationship with yourself, from the important relationships in your life.

[00:27:24] You do not address the struggles and the tensions that come there. I'm not saying that we always have to be addressing those tensions head on, but we need to be looking at how it connects. So, and how they connect usually is in our own lives. Before we even address the relationship with other people, we have to look at letting God heal what is fragmented within us, right?

[00:27:48] INTERIOR INTEGRATION
So, that is how the interior journey, the way I speak about it, brings together and synthesizes the relationship with Christ, relationship with God, the spiritual mystical dimension and the, you can say, the scientific human, earthly dimension of integration. Embodied faith has both these dimensions, okay? It's spirituality that's grounded in the matter. Matter, as in really, like - I don't know - matter, right? Think something that's matter. We are flesh and blood. We are matter. So, spirituality that is grounded in the matter of our humanity, in the humus, right - which is the earth, the earth of our flesh, of our bodies, embodied faith is what the interior integration journey allows us to live.

[00:28:39] Okay, so, from that perspective, from that lens, I want to encourage you if you are facing an unexpected interruption in your life, right? Whether it's illness, death, the end of a relationship, losing a job, welcoming a new member into your family, whatever it is that you experience as disruptive, interruption in your life. I encourage you to see this as the matter, the substance in which God will bring forth your freedom, okay? Again, these interruptions are the matter and the substance in which God will work to set you free. Instead of running away from them, instead of trying to overpower these interruptions to try and respect control, how about considering softening into it? Okay, and if you don't know how to pray, ask for help. I really, I really, really believe that the Holy Spirit helps us as soon as we are open enough and willing enough to be helped. And He will show you where to seek help, and the connections will be made.

[00:29:57] Release is rarely ever immediate. It's part of the interior journey, but this yielding and softening into life's interruptions is ultimately how we will address the real work of our lives and how we will experience growing in freedom, how we will experience being restored and how we will experience becoming more deeply connected in love with God, with ourselves and with the other people in our lives.

[00:30:28] So, if you are also experiencing some difficult interruption, know that I keep you in prayer and I ask you to also keep me in yours and my family. The healing work never ends and feeling vulnerable is never easy, but with grace and with God, all things are possible. So, take care and I will talk to you again. Bye!

[00:30:53] CONCLUSION
Thank you for listening to Becoming Me. The most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive.

If you like what you hear on this podcast and would like to receive a monthly written reflection from me, as well as be updated on my latest content and offers, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter, Begin Again. You can find the link to do that in the show notes. Until the next episode, happy becoming!