Noticing the Patterns of Our Brokenness

So, the problem is though, I think most of us have lost touch with our inner reality. And that on its own, is such a huge topic, right? You can address it spiritually. You can talk about it theologically. You can talk about it psychologically. Why is it that we have lost touch with our interior reality, which ultimately is where God dwells.

[00:00:22] 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.

[00:00:59] Hey, good morning. So, today is day two of my 30 days of going live on Instagram to talk about different facets and different themes of the interior journey into authenticity and wholeness. So, yesterday, in the first sharing that I did, I spoke about how I started on the interior journey, right. And that it was a very human experience of being very lonely within me, very abandoned that really got me to seek an answer to my pain.

[00:01:42] And I shared how God became that answer that I sought. So, if you haven't heard that story, I invite you to go back and watch day one as well, where I shared how a very concrete human experience started me on the interior journey.

[00:01:57] And I think that's important because our interior journey is actually very, very much about being human, okay? Very, very much about the challenges of being human. So, today in day two, I want to talk about how we can notice the pattern of our brokenness. Okay, so not our in general. I need to be very specific. How I notice the patterns of my brokenness and how each of you watching this - how you can notice the pattern, the unique pattern of your brokenness and why that is a very important part of the interior journey.

[00:02:36] WHAT IS "INTERIOR"?
Okay, so, first let me just briefly talk about what I mean by interior. Why there's even that word, interior, okay. So, interior of course is - you know, you think contrasted with exterior, right? And our human journey has both parts, of course. We are not just made up of our interior experiences, right?

[00:02:55] We live in the world. We have to relate with other people. So, other people, the world, things - most of our lives, we are very aware that we are in a world that is outside of us. And what we do and how we act in the outside world, of course, matters, right - is important. It's how people experience us as well.

[00:03:17] So, the problem is though, I think most of us have lost touch with our inner reality, and that on its own, is such a huge topic, right? You can address it spiritually. You can talk about it theologically. You can talk about it psychologically. Why is it that we have lost touch with our interior reality, which ultimately is where God dwells.

[00:03:41] God is not just outside of us, right? He's Like He's within us. He's in every cell of our body. As in, we are one in a very mystical sense. I don't want to go into the weeds here, okay? Because this is not a philosophy or theology kind of a lesson.

[00:03:55] But I want to say that when we talk about the interior journey, it is connected with the exterior journey. But my emphasis on my work, the emphasis is on the interior journey because my journey has shown me that the answers to the human condition cannot be answered just by trying to take action outside of us without that action or those actions coming from an interior reality that has become more healed and more whole. 

[00:04:33] Because if not, the more zealous and passionate we are about fixing a broken world that is outside of us, the more harm we actually inflict on others, without ourselves even knowing because.

[00:04:44] We would be completely unaware of the fragmentation inside of us. And we project our issues, the perspectives that we have, and we're not even aware of our blind spots, okay? And we bring that out into the world and we try to do good and we try to heal others and we try to fix a broken world, and we just create actually much bigger messes, and we can't even see that.

[00:05:07] Okay, so, it's not that difficult for you to check whether what I say is true. Because usually when we look outside of ourselves, it's not that difficult to see problems that exist outside of ourselves. It's not so difficult to notice that yes, the systems are broken, institutions are broken. It's not so difficult to see how other people are broken. But it is usually very difficult for us to notice how we ourselves are broken.

[00:05:34] Okay, so the interior journey matters for the world because it is within each person's heart and soul where we can find healing and peace and reconciliation. And it is often the degree to which we have found some healing, some integration that our actions in the world can be healing and can actually truly make a difference and be spiritually fruitful, okay - or bless others.

[00:06:13] PATTERNS OF BROKENNESS
So, back to today's topic, on the patterns of brokenness. Now, because we usually are blind to the ways that we are broken, really. I mean, we don't know what we don't know, right? That's often the challenge. We don't know what we don't know. So, one of the ways we can begin to notice how we are invited to healing, is by noticing the ways that we have experienced great pain in our lives.

[00:06:41] There's a saying that pain is God's loud hailer. Okay, like, you know, it's this microphone, it's His amplifier. A lot of times we just go about our lives and we don't even really notice or realize what we're doing until we stumble and we fall - until we get really hurt.

[00:06:58] For example, be in a relationship or the loss of a relationship. Or we experience some great failure that matters to us. We experience being abandoned. And then we know that something's wrong, something's off, right? But how do we deal with our pain? I think that's another thing that most of us, we never really were apprenticed and mentored how to really deal with our pain in a healthy, self-aware way.

[00:07:28] Because these things, if they're not modelled to us, we don't pick it up. So, instead, we pick up often the dysfunctional ways that our families of origin, our mentors, our caregivers, or you know, our teachers, our leaders - how they deal with pain, we tend to pick it up and copy that and learn that, without us even knowing.

[00:07:49] So, to make this concrete, I'm going to go back into sharing something from my own life, okay. Since I was a kid - so, one of the patterns of my brokenness is I would lose connections with people that mattered a lot to me, and I wouldn't be able to usually tell why it happened. So, what I could think or what I could rationalize or try and reason would be; there must be something wrong with me, right. Why is it that someone is, let's say, willing to be my friend for a while just when I thought we were getting to be really good friends, something happens and they just ghost me or the friendship falls apart.

[00:08:33] And I really recall even since primary school days, that feeling of bewilderedness - of I don't know what happened. And even if I tried to ask the person in question like, what happened? I usually wouldn't be able to get an answer, right. And sometimes they didn't want to entertain my questions. So, from my end, the experience of it is these repeated cycles of losing someone that I care about and not knowing why and desperately trying to fix the problem so that it wouldn't happen again, right?

[00:09:15] So, for me, it's desperately trying to fix the problem of having people abandon me without me understanding why. So, I've got to figure out what I'm doing wrong. I've got to stop doing what I'm doing wrong. I have to try and make myself - so, this is kind of like my thinking - make myself so likable or so needed that people would not abandon me.

[00:09:39] So, without my realizing, I was already in a kind of - if you understand something about attachment styles, okay. So, that's something that's been going around quite a bit in recent years about secure and insecure attachment styles, how we attach to somebody else - relationship styles.

[00:09:59] I didn't know, but I was being formed into having an ambivalent kind of insecure attachment style, okay. And that tends to be, sometimes it's kind of known as like the codependent attachment style. So, the fear of losing someone makes me pursue and cling onto those that I love. 

[00:10:21] And in a very paradoxical manner, usually when I do that, it pushes them further away. Now, I had no idea of what I've just said. I didn't have the ability to understand that. But what I did see was a pattern in my life from primary school days up to my twenties and even my thirties where, it's like I can't help it - I fall in love, so to speak.

[00:10:46] I mean not necessarily romantic love, right? But I come to care about somebody. I invest my life and my feelings, my emotions, my time and energy into a relationship, into a friendship. I pour myself completely into it. And then maybe without realizing it, I overwhelmed the other party.

[00:11:04] That's one possibility. Because sometimes, I might overwhelm the other party or whatnot. And at some point, that friendship becomes unsustainable. And then I seem to get into all kinds of trouble as well. Like people will misconstrue - like from my perspective - people will misconstrue my affection, the intensity of my devotion to someone, right.

[00:11:26] You see, in my mind, as far as I can understand, all this was a way of loving someone else. And come on, I mean, love is good, right? We are told, love is the greatest commandment, right? To love our God and love our neighbour. What I didn't get was the, as ourself part - you know, love your neighbour as yourself.

[00:11:47] I never knew what it meant to love myself, so I focused on loving others. What I didn't realize, because it was a very unconscious and subconscious, was that in me trying to love others, it was actually desperately trying to help me get the love that I needed. Right, because like I shared in yesterday's video - more than anything, I longed to be loved to have someone who understood me and knew me, someone with whom I could just be myself. 

[00:12:18] I didn't have the language then, but I wanted to be able to feel really safe with someone, not have to worry that I'll do something and this person would leave because that kept playing out in my life.

[00:12:27] It became a vicious cycle, right? It became a vicious cycle that the more I experience people leaving me suddenly, the more desperate I became to try and make sure that people don't leave me. The more hungry I became for love and the more indispensable I tried to make myself in someone else's life. 

[00:12:47] Actually within me, the fear actually gets greater, right? Because the more I invest in a friendship or relationship, the more fearful I am that it won't work out. And sometimes it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that I push people away. I end up pushing people away. So, something that often happens for not just for me, and I know for a lot of people - especially earlier on in our relationship with God, is that when we meet a crisis, we turn to God with more commitment, right? We turn to God with greater zeal because well, we're sorrowing. We're broken-hearted.

[00:13:22] We feel misunderstood, we feel rejected, all that. That happened to me also, of course. And I was constantly asking God, why? Right, and I wanted Him to fix me. I wanted Him to fix others. I wanted Him to fix the relationships that were important to me, that were getting broken, and which I didn't want to lose.

[00:13:46] So, here's the thing that I didn't know, actually back then, which is that the way God answers prayers may not be the way I expect or anticipate. I think I subconsciously was hoping He'd wave a magic wand kind of a thing and just fix what's broken in me, you know? Because sometimes I couldn't explain, back then, why I kept repeating these patterns or why I kept going into these patterns of relationship, right?

[00:14:11] Dysfunctional relationship - there's some co-dependence or there's some needing somebody, and then suddenly that relationship breaking. But over time, while I didn't seek an answer, I didn't seek a human answer, I didn't seek even a psychological answer, whatever - for that because I just knew that this hurt and I wanted to be able to love because God wanted me to love.

[00:14:32] So, I wanted to be able to love well. And eventually, what he revealed to me was that there's actually a lot of stuff that I'm running away from myself and trying to love others was actually my way of trying to run away from the pain that was inside myself, the brokenness that was inside myself. So, back in 2006 or so, when I was still living abroad, that was the time when I went through another one of those very painful relationship breakups.

[00:15:06] Okay, it was a friend. It's not a romantic relationship. It was a friendship, but a very important friendship to me. And a relationship that I had invested a lot, a lot of myself in. And it got broken. And not only was it broken I got construed by the other party as a villain in the story somehow.

[00:15:26] And although those who were close to me, like my own family members and you know, really good friends - they assured me that I didn't do anything wrong, in a sense. I mean, like, yes, objectively speaking, I never intentionally did anything wrong or malicious. Some of the accusations that were levelled at me were indeed unjust and in the sense, not true. 

[00:15:50] Certainly not true from the perspective of I didn't intend those things that I was accused of intending. But I think by the grace of God, in that swirl of pain that I was in, I thought surely there can't be smoke without a fire, right? If I was indeed completely, completely innocent, like completely without fault, would something like this have happened? Like could it really? I couldn't say that I'm like Jesus - completely innocent, right? Completely without sin. So, I began to wonder, could there be something inside me, or going on within me that I could not see, that was actually tripping me up, that was actually causing me to do things that I wasn't aware that I was doing to hurt people without me even realizing. Now, that thought was very freaky. I mean, I don't know. I think it was very frightening to consider the possibility that against my own conscious will and desire, I could be hurting the very people that I just wanted to love more than anything else.

[00:16:56] Now, this was also where Henry Nouwen - I'm sure most of you may have heard of this name, at least. Henry Nouwen. He's a very prolific writer in spirituality. He's passed on already, but he was a Catholic priest and his books resonate with so many people because he's very honest about his struggles.

[00:17:19] Okay, and during that time when I was struggling with this broken relationship, a broken friendship and, and really beginning to entertain the thought that maybe there's something inside me that is horrible, okay. I'm very fearful that there's something inside me that's horrible. Look, I've always been because that's where the shame dwells.

[00:17:37] And if something is horrible inside me, then it's going to confirm and prove that I'm not worthy of love. So, during that time of this broken friendship and I happened to pick up one of Henry Nouwen's books and it's called The Inner Voice of Love. 

[00:17:54] And it happened that The Inner Voice of Love is actually a series of journal articles - as in not journal articles, sorry. Journal entries, not articles. Journal entries as in personal journal entries that Henry Nouwen himself made over a period of several months when he was recovering - so-called recovering from the rupture of a very intense friendship that had broken.

[00:18:23] Okay, and as I read his journal entries and I also read about like the introduction to this, I remember thinking, wow, this Dutch priest, who many people really look up to - as you know, a great spiritual writer, somebody who accompanies us in our journey, who can speak to the depths of the human spirit and the human heart who bring so many people to God, actually, through his writing. I was thinking, oh my gosh, this guy is so needy. It's like he is as needy as me, or in some ways even needier than me. And he's so honest about it. He's so authentic about it, right? And that gave me hope. That gave me hope because in that period of time, I was really depressed.

[00:19:13] That friendship had like, become such a big part of my life. I've always been a very all or nothing kind of person, right? So, it's like all for Jesus, you know? And, and then when I care for someone, it's like, I'll put everything into this friendship, this relationship. And then to lose that so abruptly I felt like I had nothing.

[00:19:30] FACING OUR SHAME
And then here was this priest Henry Nouwen, who had gone through something just as heartbreaking. And in some sense, I felt it was shameful. I thought it was shameful for him as well, being so broken up over a friendship, even having such an intense friendship in the first place, or relationship in the first place. My head always knew my first love I wanted to be Christ and I wanted to be God. But how is it that I can get so attached to another human being that it feels like my existence, my life needs to revolve around this relationship? I didn't want it to be that case, but it just is that case, right?

[00:20:18] And for me to even have that space and the ability to just be honest and say, this is the situation for me - that was very, very hard to feel without shame.

[00:20:31] So, during that period of time, after I read Henry Nouwen and I cried a lot during that season, of course. There are a lot of tears. Every day I prayed and I cried. You know, I would pray and cry until I had no more tears left, until I had no more words left. And one of these times when I became silent because I just had no more tears and no more words left to pray.

[00:20:56] I felt the stillness and the silence in the room I was in shift. Right? I don't know if you've ever experienced that. Sometimes, it's just like the presence or the silence. There's a change in the silence, you know? I can't explain why? There could be many explanations why that happens. But for me, part of that shift made me feel suddenly, that I'm not alone.

[00:21:17] That this stillness and this silence, this room is full. Full of what? Full of presence. I felt God was present with me. I felt that I was not alone. I felt I was loved. And suddenly this experience that I was not alone, that God was surrounding me and holding me in my heartbreak, it gave me the courage to tell the Lord.

[00:21:44] I keep thinking that there may be something inside me that's really broken and I'm afraid to look. I'm afraid to find out what it is because I don't think I can bear seeing what's wrong with me. Because you know, I find it so hard to even accept myself.

[00:22:01] But, I got this sense, you know, and Jesus really in that experience, I felt that Jesus was telling me, “You know, Ann remember how in the gospels I've said also, it is not the healthy, that need a doctor, right? There's the sick, they need a doctor. And so, I came for sinners and not for the righteous. 

[00:22:20] And He said, you know how you also always know that I dwell in you, right? Like God dwells in you, I dwell in you. He said, well, guess what? I dwell in the very parts of you that are sick, that is broken.

[00:22:38] I choose to make my home not in the parts of you that you're proud to show Me, but like the hidden dark places that you're so terrified to look at. That's actually my home and I felt like, oh. You know, if that's where You are, if You are there then I have the courage to go and look at what you might want to show me - to find out what's inside me that may be broken on my own.

[00:23:04] I'll be terrified. But He has made his home there, right? So, that helped me to realize that my whole life, I needed for people to know that I love them so much. So, here's the thing. I need people to know that I love them. Okay, which is different from just loving someone. Okay, I realized that for me, they need to understand that I love them.

[00:23:30] I need them to understand that I love them. I need them to understand when I make certain decisions or do certain actions that hurt them, that it's really because I love them and I feel so hurt and so misunderstood when they can't see that, right? When they cannot accept, or when I feel that they miss the point that I'm actually doing this because I love them and I get very, very - I get very broken and very upset and feel very misunderstood.

[00:23:53] So, I felt the Lord ask me, why is it so important for you that people know that you love them? Why can't you just love them? Why can't you just love them the best that you can? And regardless of whether they get it or not, can you not be at peace? And I realize that I can't be at peace because it's like right - this was the moment of revelation for me. Because I was in search of being loved myself, and then I saw it all so clearly. 

[00:24:26] All the love that I always poured into my friendships, which I thought was always so self-sacrificing because I really, really would sacrifice my needs, my wants, everything - just for someone else, and it looked so selfless.

[00:24:42] But actually it was because I really wanted to be loved. So, really it was all about me, right? All my selfless deeds was actually at the heart about me, because I was so insecure and so hungry for love. Because inside of me, there is this bottomless pit that can never be filled. No experience of love, no amount of experience of love, not even high-quality love - because like, I would say high quality, right? In the sense that even when I entered a really good relationship with my husband and that was like the healthiest relationship that I had. Okay, there was still a lot that was wrong with it. I mean, dysfunctional because we were both broken, we're both broken human beings.

[00:25:26] But even when I knew that I was loved by someone, like really loved by someone, that bottomless pit, that ache inside of me never went away for many, many, many years, right? And so that realization, it changed something for me.

[00:25:51] What I didn't know even then, so this was back then 2006, right? I began to be aware of this. What I didn't know was what I needed to do so that I could heal. Now, you see, I still can't help but say, no, what do I need to do, right? Because there is, of course, an element of my participation, but there's so much impatience on my part.

[00:26:14] I want to fix myself. Oh, like, God, please fix me. I don't want this. Right, and of course it's natural. I don't want this. Who wants to be codependent? Who wants to need to be needed? Who wants all that pain that comes with it? So, you may have a different kind of attachment style, you may have a different kind of insecure attachment style and what my experiences may not describe what your experience is.

[00:26:40] Okay, because there there's more than one kind of insecure experience. But the point is whether it's similar or different, I think you would agree when it's so painful, you'd rather not have it, right. You don't want to have that kind of ex insecure kind of experience, but God didn't just lift it, you know? He didn't just take it away.

[00:27:01] And in fact, that wasn't the last time that heartbreak - was not the last time that I had to go through something like that. You know, less than a decade later, I went through another round of losing people, losing relationships that actually mattered very deeply to me - people that I cared very much about.

[00:27:22] LEARNING WITH ACCEPTANCE
And again, I was wondering how did this happen? How did I get into this mess again? You know, I'm so consciously trying not to do the same mistakes again, and it happens again. There's still a part of me now that's afraid that something like that might happen again. There's a pattern in my life, and even though a lot of healing has happened since, I'm also learning.

[00:27:51] That this interior journey, a big part of it is about acceptance, accepting even the way that we are broken and we're wounded, accepting God's pace and time in the way that he wants to heal us. Right, but the patterns of my brokenness for me, the last time that I got into this mess, which was, it's almost a decade ago now.

[00:28:13] But I felt so powerless and so helpless. But I knew by then that this has something to do with my family of origin. So, before that, before this last run round of me, kind of like, you know, losing friends and all that kind of thing, I never traced it to my family of origin. I never connected that this pattern of brokenness is connected with my lived experience of relationships within my own family.

[00:28:43] Okay, but since then, I had become aware that what I thought were really close relationships in my family was actually problematic, okay? So, my eyes began to be open, that there was co-dependency and that was something very toxic and very dysfunctional in the way I was loved, in the way that I experienced love, in the way that I was taught to love.

[00:29:05] I didn't know what was healthy. All I knew was I realized that what I had was unhealthy, right? And when you realize that what you have is unhealthy and you don't quite know what to do with it yet, you can't help but still live with that unhealthy pattern. So, this last run, when I did the best I could to care, to love, to do - I willed so much good. And I am taught, we all learn, right? Love is an act of the will. It's not just an emotion, it's an act of the will. You will the good of the other. But guess what? When you're broken, you’re willing the good of the other will somehow still be distorted, right?

[00:29:40] You can't see what your blind spots are. You can't tell how distorted, your image of love or your impression of what love is if you haven't been healed of that distortion. The only way you know how to love others is the broken way that you were loved. And so, your love will hurt others, and that's what was happening with me.

[00:29:58] I love so hard. Nobody can fault me for not loving. And if, if love is, is the will to for someone's good. If love is about really caring about someone or having affection for someone and you know, caring for their soul, I had all that and yet by the grace of God - now I can say it was so painful - but by the grace of God, He allowed so much pain and brokenness to happen, not just in my life, but in the people that I loved.

[00:30:28] For me to realize there must be something wrong in the way that I was loving even when I was doing my very best, even when I was turning to God every day, even when my spiritual life was in order - you know, all that stuff - like the way I loved was broken.

[00:30:48] And so finally this last time, I connected it with my family of origin. I sought out a religious sister that does kind of like work in psycho-spirituality. I just asked for an appointment and just told her what happened most recently and the shame attack that I experienced, right - of wanting to just run away from everyone and everything. That's how much shame I felt in why is it the way I love others, the way I try and love God - why is it that it's still hurting people?

[00:31:21] And this sister pointed me to some resources on family dynamics, on basically on inner child healing and on - yeah, basically on family dynamics.

[00:31:34] I had never before then gone or read any literature about dysfunctional family dynamics or read about toxic shame. So, this was like the first time I began to pick up language that as I was reading about them, it was like, oh my gosh, this author is describing me. This author is describing my family.

[00:31:55] It's like, how did this person know? So, I realized that the reality that was being described in family dynamics and dysfunctional family dynamics was describing me, my family. 

[00:32:05] And not just my family, I could recognize other families that I knew in what I was reading. So, that was my introduction. That part of the forces that are at play without our awareness that is keeping us trapped and keeping us unable to love the way we want to love.

[00:32:24] Even those of us who sincerely, genuinely want to follow Christ, whatever we know about Him, whatever we understand about what it means to love, we can't know what we don't know, and we can't see the traps and the dysfunctions that have formed and shaped us. We bring that into the way we love, right?

[00:32:41] So, for me, the patterns of my brokenness, when I look back at my life, they're all pointing to the wounds, the specific wounds that I have, right. And at the heart of my brokenness is usually the root of my sin. All the patterns of sin, or my lack of compassion - well, everything. It's the superficial actions, superficial meaning on the surface, right?

[00:33:05] The external actions can be different, but at the heart of it, usually, the root is the same. The root of the insecurity, of the fear of not having enough, not having enough what? Ultimately, not being loved, right? And then we spend our whole lives learning how to control and get the love that we need, which is natural.

[00:33:26] GROWING TOWARDS LOVE
You know how trees grow towards light? They have no sense of direction. Trees have no sense of direction. But they grow towards where the strongest light is. It's part of the organism, it's part of the way God created it, created trees. I think for human beings, for creatures, especially for human beings, we have something similar like phototropism.

[00:33:45] You know, I think we naturally lean towards love, towards being loved, and when that's distorted and dysfunctional and when we can't get healthy love, we try to get any love at all because we need love to survive. Just like trees need light to survive, right?

[00:34:04] And until we begin to notice the pattern of our brokenness, we may not be able to address at the heart of our lives, what is causing us to fail in loving well, or to fail in living a virtuous life. Yeah, so, because at the heart of spirituality as well is love, right? And love cannot just be understood in philosophical and theological terms - that would be very sterile and very inanimate.

[00:34:30] You know, just imagine, I mean, I know I could wax lyrical in the past about God and about love. But actually, inside me, inside my being, my nervous system, my body, I didn't experience that love. And it broke me too. And I thought there must be something wrong with me that I didn't experience God's love.

[00:34:48] And in some sense, actually that's true. There was something wrong with me. I don't mean that in a judgmental way. I mean that actually it's a blessing that there was something wrong with me. It's a blessing to discover that, oh, it's because there was some kind of sickness that I had, and it means that there's hope, right?

[00:35:05] It means that I'm not meant to be this way forever, that God wants something more than that for me. He wants me to be able to love. He wants me to be able to experience his love and to love as He does, but it takes time. It takes time.

[00:35:21] So, that's it for day two, about noticing the patterns of our brokenness. And I'm inviting you to maybe notice what's the pattern of brokenness in your life. You know, we all have a very unique way in which a kind of pattern shows up in our life.

[00:35:39] And a lot of times if we only lament at how others have misunderstood us or how others have not held up their end of the bargain. And then we just kind of like for our own selves, we just kind of stop at that shame because it's so difficult, right?

[00:35:56] Once you feel shame or whatever, you don't want to go there. You don't want to see what's wrong with you. None of us can actually look within unless we feel safe. We can't look within ourselves honestly and see clearly unless we feel safe - safely held.

[00:36:10] So, I really pray for each of you who are watching this, that you can receive that grace as I did at that point in 2006 when the norm for me was not feeling safe at all, okay?

[00:36:24] The norm for me was not feeling safe with God. But for a while, He gave me that grace of feeling so safe in His love, that He was there for me and with me. That I was able to see something true about myself that was so difficult to see - you know, to see the pattern of the brokenness in my life and to begin to recognize.

[00:36:45] I remembered the feeling was - the way I described it in my journal back then - I felt like some chains have fallen off me. These chains that have bound me, that made me feel like I had always had to be the best friend to anyone possible - those chains broke because I realized that that wasn't really love. That was my need and my own hunger for love. And sometimes the first step towards freedom is recognizing the ways that we are unfree.

[00:37:15] So, may you have the grace to be able to recognize, even if it's just one way in which you are unfree in your life, your interior life is unfree. May you recognize maybe just one pattern in which you keep falling again and again in your life. May God reveal to you that He's there, that He's always been there, and that there's nothing inside you that's causing all this hurt in you and to you and to others.

[00:37:44] There's nothing there that is greater than Him and you are safe with Him. Okay, see you tomorrow for day three.

[00:37:52] And if there are any questions, as usual, or any topics that you would like me to address, you can drop me a direct message, okay?

[00:38:01] I probably won't be able to address every question or topic that's requested, but I will discern, I'll pray and discern about what is it that God is asking me to address from what you're asking or what you're requesting, okay.

Till tomorrow, then.

[00:38:17] 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, you 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!