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My new spiritual practice: Coping with feelings that want to dominate

Lynne Baab • Wednesday May 17 2017

I’ve written the last two weeks about a new spiritual practice that I have been engaging in for the past year: separating thoughts from feelings, letting the thoughts go and feeling the feelings. Last week I wrote about the RAIN acronym that helps me feel my feelings. I argued that this is a Christian spiritual practice because it helps me bring my feelings into God’s presence, as modeled in the Psalms. It helps me love and serve God more fully because I am less distracted by negative thoughts and feelings.

In this post I want to talk more about the third step...

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My new spiritual practice: Feeling the feelings

Lynne Baab • Wednesday May 10 2017

When I’m stressed about something, my feelings get buried under my thoughts. Some of those thoughts center around questions about the future: “What if this happens? What if that happens?” Other thoughts are about the feelings: “You shouldn’t be feeling these negative feelings. You should be trusting God.”

I wrote last week about advice from my therapist about separating thoughts from feelings. Some months ago he suggested that I practice self-compassion as a way to cope with negative feelings, and I’ve had a wonderful year learning more about what self-compassion looks like and why God would desire it for me.

The form of...

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My new spiritual practice: Separating thoughts from feelings

Lynne Baab • Thursday May 4 2017

A year ago I was feeling stressed by several things, so I started seeing a therapist twice a month. My times with him have been very helpful, and in these next few blog posts, I want to reflect on what I’ve learned. In fact, I want to argue that what I’ve learned is actually a spiritual practice.

Last year I could tell I was stressed because of the thoughts swirling in my head: What if this happens? What if that happens? How will I cope? Why am I not trusting God more with these things that are stressing me? What’s wrong with...

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Support for Earth Day from hundreds and thousands of years ago

Lynne Baab • Tuesday April 25 2017

Earth Day has been important to me ever since I was an undergraduate student majoring in biology. I fell in love with the beauty of God’s creation and felt sure that humans were called to care for the earth simply because God made it and entrusted it to us. Earth Day 2017 was last Saturday, April 22, and the science marches around the world were scheduled to coincide with Earth Day.

Sometimes we fall into the error of thinking that the notion of caring for God’s creation is something new, unique to our age. Not so!

Psalm 104, which dates back well over...

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