Good morning lay apostles! This video is near and dear to my heart. My niece Maddie is attending SOH in Ireland right now (she is the one with curly hair and doing a cartwheel!). God is so good! Our sweet Maddie is just where He needs her to be! Enjoy!
We offer you a recap on week one of the SOH! Watch the video to see what some students are saying about their experience so far. Also, we have included for you a brief summary of our daily teachings from the notebooks of the students. Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
School of Holiness Notebook – June.1.15 (Day One)
Today we started class with a gratitude exercise; everyone in the room said one thing we they were grateful for, because gratitude is a theme running throughout the course. We start every class session in this way.
The first thing we were taught was the formation model as laid out by Pastores Dabo Vobis, an apostolic exhortation written in 1990. The Church is universal, and even though we have unity in it, we all have the right to be the kind of Catholic that is consistent with who we are – meaning, none of us should be conforming to a rigid mould of a Catholic. We were asked to list things that we loved about the Church, and to remember that we all need to be bridges to the Church, not obstacles. God contemplated each one of us into being and loves us all, and we need to do everything in our lives because we are loved. We also need to remember to teach people about God incrementally, and be witnesses to God in our representations of Him to others. We must have compassion for ourselves so that we may have compassion for others. We need to be authentic, and we need to have silence in our days, or risk the consequences of silence poverty, which include inability to be still, difficulty listening or focusing.
Margaret then gave us an introduction on human development. There are different stages of development and each stage comes with it’s own anxieties. We learned about appropriate anxiety and neurotic anxiety and how to negotiate each one. Neurotic anxiety contains distortions about reality that must be corrected in our minds. There are three core relationships that we need to work on – relationship with ourselves, relationship with others, and relationship with God. We all need to cultivate better relationships and healthy relationships are one of the biggest keys to physical and emotional – and spiritual – wellbeing.
June.2.2015. Day. Two.
Today we were given a very important truth – “I am imperfect.” Each one of us is imperfect and we have to accept that side of our humanity. Our souls are windows and Christ sees right through them, past the imperfections, to the beauty and the goodness contained within. To demonstrate this point, Anne pointed out that John the Beloved probably did not feel like a success on Good Friday while standing at the foot of the Cross, but that God was not hanging from the cross thinking of John’s imperfections – rather, He was grateful that John was supporting Him with his presence. We then learned about mature and immature thinking, first of all with respect to dualistic and paradoxical thinking. People are not EITHER good OR bad (dualistic thinking), they are BOTH good AND bad. Human beings are paradoxes. Immature thinkers:
- have a need for certainty and control
- think dualistically
- have a limited recognition of complexity
- have reduced empathy
- are prone to ruminating and dissociation,
Mature thinkers:
-recognize complexity
- think paradoxically
- are more compassionate
- are more inclined to seek help
- are more tolerant of limits, and of other people
- can handle strong emotions, and
- are more humorous.
ALL of us are both mature and immature thinkers. Stress, trauma, illness, and old wounds can all trigger or foster less mature thinking, while contemplative prayer fosters mature thinking. The next thing we talked about was rigid ideology, which is a symptom of immature thinking and includes teaming, pessimism, aggression, feeling threatened by different beliefs, hypocrisy, and distorted beliefs. The way to respond to rigid ideology in others is with love, humility, separateness of being, and attunement to the other person.
June.3.2015. Day Three.
We started today by confronting our inner immature thinkers. This was done by a series of questions:
What makes you angry, afraid, or anxious?
What makes you feel powerless, helpless, or trapped?
In what areas are you controlling?
When do you complain about others?
When do you choose to please people or settle rather than change?
When are you perfectionistic?
Each of us needs to reflect on these questions and their answers in order to confront our immature thinker. Some things may not be our faults, but it is our responsibility to take ownership of our actions and thoughts. If we are going to be happy, we need to investigate our minds. We then did an exercise in which we discussed examples of immature thoughts and mature thoughts, which we also called whispers from heaven and whispers from hell.
Some examples of whispers from hell are:
- Nobody likes me
- I’ll always be alone
- I’m not good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, etc
- I’m not wanted
- I ruin everything
- I’ll never be happy
- I’m broken, damaged, not whole.
Some examples of whispers from heaven are:
- I’m so lucky/blessed
- I am loved
- I matter
- I am strong
- I choose joy
- I’m worth dying for
- I’m learning and growing
- I am beautiful
We were instructed to catch ourselves in our thoughts and examine them for accuracy and maturity and change out unconstructive negative thoughts for positive ones. Margaret then taught us about the importance of bonding and the impact that negative or a complete lack of bonding has on our brains, and how this affects our behaviours and beliefs. Good relationships change our brains for the better, and bad relationships change our brains for the worse. We discussed the neuroscience behind these factors and then talked about how this might affect our views of prisoners and people who hurt us.
June.4.2015. Day Four.
Today we started out by learning about self-awareness and choice. First, Margaret taught us about neuroplasticity, which is the ability of our brains to adapt and change. The limbic system is the immature part of our brain that contains our survival mechanism. The limbic system is resistant to change, experiences strong feelings, holds tightly to unconscious beliefs, and never asks why. It has the rationale of a three year old. It is where our immature thoughts are catalogued. The neo-cortex (or our frontal lobes) is the part of the brain responsible for our mature thinking, and develops over time throughout life. It regulates our emotions, it is logical and rational, creative, imaginative, and compassionate. It is also the part of the brain that we use in contemplative prayer. Using this knowledge, we were taught about survival cycles, in which the limbic system moves us round and round in circular thinking patterns, and transformative cycles, in which we can change our thoughts to more accurately reflect reality and to achieve a better outcome than a negative thought or belief might have.
For instance: A negative believe leads to a negative action, or no action, which leads to a negative outcome, which REINFORCES the negative belief.
A positive belief leads to a positive action, which leads to a positive outcome, which leads to and reinforces a positive belief.
In this way we are encouraged to become self-aware and to CHOOSE positive thoughts and beliefs, to create new positive pathways in our brain to change negative habits or patterns. Transformation comes in three steps: Self-awareness, acceptance, and choice/action. We have to be able to identify what we’re feeling in order to accept and change it if necessary. We talked about each of these steps at length, what they mean and how to move through them.
In the afternoon, Father Darragh taught us about emotions according to the catechism. The catechism teaches that the passions are not good or bad; Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, and evil on the opposite case (CCC1768). So there is nothing wrong with us experiencing strong emotions. It is what we do with them that makes them good or bad, and there is great opportunity for holiness in the management of them.
June.5.2015. Day Five.
Today, Father Darragh led class in a session on the teachings of the Catechism. In the afternoon, the teachers handed the class over to the students in a method called “Teach It Back”. The students split into small groups and each came up with their own way of teaching back one of the concepts of the curriculum to the entire class. This method is based off the fact that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.
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Have you been blessed through the Volumes? Please help others receive these words by donating a dollar a day. Your donation makes a big difference.
Direction for Our Times (DFOT) is a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to spreading God's messages as revealed in the Volumes.
We offer you a recap on week one of the SOH! Watch the video to see what some students are saying about their experience so far. Also, we have included for you a brief summary of our daily teachings from the notebooks of the students. Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
School of Holiness Notebook – June.1.15 (Day One)
Today we started class with a gratitude exercise; everyone in the room said one thing we they were grateful for, because gratitude is a theme running throughout the course. We start every class session in this way.
The first thing we were taught was the formation model as laid out by Pastores Dabo Vobis, an apostolic exhortation written in 1990. The Church is universal, and even though we have unity in it, we all have the right to be the kind of Catholic that is consistent with who we are – meaning, none of us should be conforming to a rigid mould of a Catholic. We were asked to list things that we loved about the Church, and to remember that we all need to be bridges to the Church, not obstacles. God contemplated each one of us into being and loves us all, and we need to do everything in our lives because we are loved. We also need to remember to teach people about God incrementally, and be witnesses to God in our representations of Him to others. We must have compassion for ourselves so that we may have compassion for others. We need to be authentic, and we need to have silence in our days, or risk the consequences of silence poverty, which include inability to be still, difficulty listening or focusing.
Margaret then gave us an introduction on human development. There are different stages of development and each stage comes with it’s own anxieties. We learned about appropriate anxiety and neurotic anxiety and how to negotiate each one. Neurotic anxiety contains distortions about reality that must be corrected in our minds. There are three core relationships that we need to work on – relationship with ourselves, relationship with others, and relationship with God. We all need to cultivate better relationships and healthy relationships are one of the biggest keys to physical and emotional – and spiritual – wellbeing.
June.2.2015. Day. Two.
Today we were given a very important truth – “I am imperfect.” Each one of us is imperfect and we have to accept that side of our humanity. Our souls are windows and Christ sees right through them, past the imperfections, to the beauty and the goodness contained within. To demonstrate this point, Anne pointed out that John the Beloved probably did not feel like a success on Good Friday while standing at the foot of the Cross, but that God was not hanging from the cross thinking of John’s imperfections – rather, He was grateful that John was supporting Him with his presence. We then learned about mature and immature thinking, first of all with respect to dualistic and paradoxical thinking. People are not EITHER good OR bad (dualistic thinking), they are BOTH good AND bad. Human beings are paradoxes. Immature thinkers:
- have a need for certainty and control
- think dualistically
- have a limited recognition of complexity
- have reduced empathy
- are prone to ruminating and dissociation,
Mature thinkers:
-recognize complexity
- think paradoxically
- are more compassionate
- are more inclined to seek help
- are more tolerant of limits, and of other people
- can handle strong emotions, and
- are more humorous.
ALL of us are both mature and immature thinkers. Stress, trauma, illness, and old wounds can all trigger or foster less mature thinking, while contemplative prayer fosters mature thinking. The next thing we talked about was rigid ideology, which is a symptom of immature thinking and includes teaming, pessimism, aggression, feeling threatened by different beliefs, hypocrisy, and distorted beliefs. The way to respond to rigid ideology in others is with love, humility, separateness of being, and attunement to the other person.
June.3.2015. Day Three.
We started today by confronting our inner immature thinkers. This was done by a series of questions:
What makes you angry, afraid, or anxious?
What makes you feel powerless, helpless, or trapped?
In what areas are you controlling?
When do you complain about others?
When do you choose to please people or settle rather than change?
When are you perfectionistic?
Each of us needs to reflect on these questions and their answers in order to confront our immature thinker. Some things may not be our faults, but it is our responsibility to take ownership of our actions and thoughts. If we are going to be happy, we need to investigate our minds. We then did an exercise in which we discussed examples of immature thoughts and mature thoughts, which we also called whispers from heaven and whispers from hell.
Some examples of whispers from hell are:
- Nobody likes me
- I’ll always be alone
- I’m not good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, etc
- I’m not wanted
- I ruin everything
- I’ll never be happy
- I’m broken, damaged, not whole.
Some examples of whispers from heaven are:
- I’m so lucky/blessed
- I am loved
- I matter
- I am strong
- I choose joy
- I’m worth dying for
- I’m learning and growing
- I am beautiful
We were instructed to catch ourselves in our thoughts and examine them for accuracy and maturity and change out unconstructive negative thoughts for positive ones. Margaret then taught us about the importance of bonding and the impact that negative or a complete lack of bonding has on our brains, and how this affects our behaviours and beliefs. Good relationships change our brains for the better, and bad relationships change our brains for the worse. We discussed the neuroscience behind these factors and then talked about how this might affect our views of prisoners and people who hurt us.
June.4.2015. Day Four.
Today we started out by learning about self-awareness and choice. First, Margaret taught us about neuroplasticity, which is the ability of our brains to adapt and change. The limbic system is the immature part of our brain that contains our survival mechanism. The limbic system is resistant to change, experiences strong feelings, holds tightly to unconscious beliefs, and never asks why. It has the rationale of a three year old. It is where our immature thoughts are catalogued. The neo-cortex (or our frontal lobes) is the part of the brain responsible for our mature thinking, and develops over time throughout life. It regulates our emotions, it is logical and rational, creative, imaginative, and compassionate. It is also the part of the brain that we use in contemplative prayer. Using this knowledge, we were taught about survival cycles, in which the limbic system moves us round and round in circular thinking patterns, and transformative cycles, in which we can change our thoughts to more accurately reflect reality and to achieve a better outcome than a negative thought or belief might have.
For instance: A negative believe leads to a negative action, or no action, which leads to a negative outcome, which REINFORCES the negative belief.
A positive belief leads to a positive action, which leads to a positive outcome, which leads to and reinforces a positive belief.
In this way we are encouraged to become self-aware and to CHOOSE positive thoughts and beliefs, to create new positive pathways in our brain to change negative habits or patterns. Transformation comes in three steps: Self-awareness, acceptance, and choice/action. We have to be able to identify what we’re feeling in order to accept and change it if necessary. We talked about each of these steps at length, what they mean and how to move through them.
In the afternoon, Father Darragh taught us about emotions according to the catechism. The catechism teaches that the passions are not good or bad; Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, and evil on the opposite case (CCC1768). So there is nothing wrong with us experiencing strong emotions. It is what we do with them that makes them good or bad, and there is great opportunity for holiness in the management of them.
June.5.2015. Day Five.
Today, Father Darragh led class in a session on the teachings of the Catechism. In the afternoon, the teachers handed the class over to the students in a method called “Teach It Back”. The students split into small groups and each came up with their own way of teaching back one of the concepts of the curriculum to the entire class. This method is based off the fact that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.
*********************************************************************************
Have you been blessed through the Volumes? Please help others receive these words by donating a dollar a day. Your donation makes a big difference.
Direction for Our Times (DFOT) is a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to spreading God's messages as revealed in the Volumes.
