Self-awareness and your ministry

by with No Comment Self-awareness

We have read how carrying out a ministry has become a challenge for pastors today. Let’s see how to show self-awareness in your ministry. Social networks, conflicts, the COVID-19 crisis, and the effects it has produced on a social, psychological, and emotional level, among others, have left pastors facing unprecedented challenges, both in their inner world and the world of those they minister. The question then is, how do you minister with a broken identity? How can you help others when you, as a pastor, are facing your own struggles in life? How can you give others the support they need that you feel you cannot give? I will show you how you can do it.

Practice self-awareness

This is an indispensable discipline. There can be no change in your life without self-knowledge. This requires seeing ourselves clearlclearly, being aware of our thoughts, and our emotions, being aware of how our pain leads us to see ourselves and others in dysfunctional ways, and how that impacts us.

Saint Augustine said: How can you get closer to God when you are so far from yourself? And he prayed, “Lord, let me know myself so that I can know you.”

Your healing and freedom begin with self-awareness

Carl Jung said the following: “When you make the unconscious conscious, you can choose.” We cannot change something we are not aware of.

Let me explain the idea: the mind has two dimensions. Three, according to Freud, but I will only talk about the two most important of them, the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious is what I have in my mind at the moment, the short-term memory. In the unconscious, I store all the positive and negative experiences, traumas, sad memories, and long-term memory. But, they are not on a conscious level.

Most interesting of all is that 95 percent of my daily decisions come from my unconscious. My unconscious directs my life, not my conscious. I am being driven by the mindsets, life scripts, and core beliefs that I have developed throughout my life and stored in my unconscious.

Why you need to practice self-awareness

That is why we end up doing the things we do not want to do, as many times we are directed by the interpretations that we have unconsciously given to the experiences we have had in our lives. If those experiences have not been processed properly, they have the potential to lead us to repeat patterns of thoughts and behaviors that will influence our future positively or negatively.

But there is more to it. You need to practice self-awareness because your emotional stability is at the mercy of your ancestors, according to William Matta. Your ancestors’ emotional dynamics and maladaptive or positive behaviors are transmitted from generation to generation, and, today, you are not just the result of your decisions, but also the result of the influence those previous generations had on you. Your ending was written at your beginning. If you do not want your future to be determined by your ancestors, you need to rewrite your history. Only then can you write the last chapter of your life.

Self-knowledge comes with vulnerability

You cannot achieve self-knowledge if you do not make yourself vulnerable. Feeling vulnerable refers to a psychological state in which we are aware of an emotional wound that we feel we cannot overcome. Vulnerability is the step you take toward uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

While Adam and Eve hid their shame behind fig leaves, they did not experience healing. The change in the lives of our first parents began when they acknowledged the pain in their histories and made themselves vulnerable, coming out of hiding to make themselves vulnerable and receive help. How can you achieve this? Be brave and ask for what you need. You have to be willing to expose your feelings. Be transparent with yourself and with those around you. Accept yourself the way you are. Accept the things that make you human. If your problem is preventing you from functioning in your home or ministry, maybe it is time to seek professional help.

How can I practice self-awareness?

By keeping an emotional journal. An emotional journal is a therapeutic tool that allows you to talk to yourself and discover the areas in your life that need to be processed. Another thing you can do is sit down with someone you trust and ask him/her to tell you the things he/she thinks you should grow in your life. And you must tell him/her that you will not get upset, that you will accept everything he/she tells you. People who are next to you know things about you that you do not know about yourself, and you need their help to discover them.

Prepare a genogram of your family. This will also help.

Everything mentioned above will help you care for your emotional wounds and will thus be able to restore your identity.

Practice the ministry of presence

The best gift you can give to those who suffer and are around you is your presence, said Thich Nhat Hanh. That was the ministry Jesus carried. He was with those who suffered, with the sinners, the miserable, and those who were mourning. His presence was more effective than any miracle He could have performed. Jesus’ presence brought security, hope, and refuge.

When you allow those who suffer to experience your presence, you are telling them these three things:

I listen to you actively

Listening is an art that is developed. Some people pay for therapy, seeking someone to listen to them. When you practice the ministry of presence and listen to the person suffering, you are setting aside a space in your time, mind, and physical space to say to that person, “I am present before your pain.”

But this is often a difficult task because we are so absorbed in our pain and the demands of our ministry that we think we do not have time for anything else, and we simply drift with the currents of discouragement and exhaustion. This causes us to lose sight of our identity and, as a result, the people who are by our side looking for a helping hand suffer in silence, as they do not want to be intrusive and invade our private space.

Why listen actively

When we listen actively, we withdraw and get away from what is important to us, giving others the gift of our presence. We create the space for others to be themselves and to come to us on their terms.

James Hillman, director of studies at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, wrote this about counseling:

“For the other person to open up and speak, the counselor needs to reach that person. I must withdraw to make room for the other. . .”

This withdrawal, rather than meeting the other, is an intense act of self-knowledge. The space that I offer the person who is hurting with my presence allows him/her to grow.

Do you think these techniques are easily applicable? Do you think that they are challenging for you? Or even do you feel that your ministry could be carried out regardless of your broken identity if you follow these recommendations? Please, share your opinion in the comments section of this post, so we can enrich our experience together. God bless you.

If you need professional help, you can call us at 407 618 0222 or write to us at Efrain.duany@floridaconference.com

 

 

Learning to Love -Key for happiness

by with One Comment Emotional IntelligenceSelf-awareness
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] I thought I knew how to love, and I won’t have to worry about learning to love. I was married to my beautiful wife, Zoraida. And was ready to make her happy for the rest of her life. So, I was confident that being raised in an Adventist home was more than enough to make me a good husband.

However, when the honeymoon ended, I began to see all my wife’s imperfections and suddenly began to mistreat her in ways I thought I never would. The good behaviors I wanted to practice with my wife, I did not do, and the bad behaviors I never thought I would show, I did. I had the same problem that Paul describes in Romans 7:19, “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

Be able of learning to love

What was the problem? The answer we usually have for this issue is that we are sinners and that we have a sinful nature. This is correct, but it is not an excuse I could use to justify my negative behavior. Another answer is that we do not know how to love. But how could I say that I did not know how to love if I had been in love for almost my entire life?

It is a different thing to say that you are in love than to say that you know how to love. I am talking about Agape love, the divine love that is sacrificial and unconditional. The love, described in the Bible in 1 Corinthians 13, is not governed by emotion but by a principle.

Why the need of learning to love

So, why didn’t I know how to love? I did not know how to love because the way I showed love was connected to my lack of emotional growth. My biological growth was not proportional to my emotional growth. In other words, I could have been 50 years old, but I was still behaving like an infant emotionally.

Neuroscience generally divides the mind into two dimensions: the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is the one in charge of our short-term memory — everything we have in the present. The subconscious mind is the one in control of our involuntary actions, automatic thoughts, emotions, dreams, intuition, and impulses.

The important thing about these concepts is that, according to the psychological literature, the subconscious mind is the one that directs our life. 90 percent of all the decisions we make every day come from our subconscious minds.

A life script

Our subconscious mind performs certain actions before we can think about them consciously, thereby impacting our free will. These “little voices” are nothing but mere thoughts that emerge automatically in our minds. They are part of an internal life script that tells us where to go and what to do. This script determines the way we interpret the world and our basic way of being.

Unconsciously, we have been developing a life script since our childhood. We were influenced by our attachment figures, especially our parents or the people closest to us, and now we are almost obliged to represent these individuals in our life. This explains why I was behaving in ways that were hurting my wife’s feelings. My life was guided by the life script I had received from my parents.

What a life script is?

A life script is the mental programming that affects our lives. It gives us the language we want to use and the actions we are going to develop. It is not easy to be aware of the life script that we follow, but seeking to answer complicated questions about our existence makes the difference between conforming to the flow of “what there is” and truly following the path of a healthy heart.

Today, we all live life scripts influenced by someone from our past. That is the number one reason why we need to learn how to love. We are reliving the same emotional dynamic we had in our families, and if our parents were not teaching us how to love, we are probably going to find it difficult to show love for others.

Everyone lives love in a limited way until they learn how to transform their lives, and the fact that someone does not love may be due to a lack of knowledge about love. If we want to learn about cars, we will undoubtedly do it through a diligent study of cars. If we want to be chefs, surely, we will learn the culinary arts, and maybe even try to take some cooking classes.

How do we learn to love?

Nevertheless, it seems less obvious to us that if we want to give and receive love, we should devote at least some time, like the mechanic or the chef, to studying and learning to love. No mechanic or cook would ever believe that the mere fact of just wanting to obtain knowledge in these fields would make them experts. The same goes for love. It is necessary to learn how to love and be loved. How are we learning to love?

1. we need to practice self-awareness

We cannot change what we do not know. We need to find, with the help of the Holy Spirit, the imperfections we have in our lives that keep us away from God and others. In my case, if I wanted to learn how to love Zoraida, I needed to make myself aware that I was not managing my anger correctly.

I needed to understand the memories or experiences that I had in my subconscious mind that was preventing me from expressing my anger in a godly way. The first two chapters of the book “Learning to Love” present this issue and provide practical exercises to help readers make sense of their past and change their present behavior.

2. We need to increase our emotional intelligence

How do we grow in this area? By reflecting on our emotions and labeling them. Practice empathizing with yourself and others. Know your stressors. Be resilient. Practice responding rather than reacting. Increasing our emotional intelligence is a lifetime process, so do not give up.

3.  We need to renew our minds

The transformation of our minds is the work of the Holy Spirit. In the end, the most important task we have is to learn how to love God and others. The Apostle Paul said:

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing, and perfect will” (Romans 12:2).

We want to challenge our families and communities to learn how to love and be loved. We will conduct seminars in churches, schools, and many other institutions. And we also provide resources for every person who wants to learn how to love. Be part of this movement, #learningtolove. Visit our section where we provide more information about Learning to Love.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]