IIC 11: JR’s Story: What Happens When You Listen to Your Body

Come join us as we accompany JR, one of our listeners on his pilgrimage inside, as he shares with us his discovers through the bodyset exercise in the last episode. JR shows how it’s possible to access parts of us that are deeply buried, yet having a tremendous impact on us, without us even knowing it.

[00:00:11] Welcome to our podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem. Let us seize the day. This twice weekly podcast helps us to rise up. It helps us to embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis. And our podcast does this through being thoroughly grounded in a Catholic worldview. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. It is great to be together with you. Thank you for tuning in. This is episode 11 and it’s released on April 24th, 2020. This one is called JR’s Story: What Happens When You Listen to Your Body. I am super excited about this episode because we’re going to do a deep dive into the experience of JR. Now, JR is one of us in this podcast community. We’re going to look at what he discovered about himself when he did the guided reflection in the last episode around listening to your body. But first, let’s do a quick review. We’ve been discussing our Catholic bodies in times of crisis, and we’ve been discussing how we can increase resilience through having a better bodyset. What is bodyset? Remember when I use the word bodyset, I’m referring to how our body affects us, how our physical reactions impact us, how they impact our dispositions, our attitudes, our inclinations. We are embodied beings. We’re composites of body and soul. Therefore, our physical bodies have a huge impact on us. And we don’t always realize that.

[00:01:54] We don’t always think about it that way. The state of our body, our relationship with our body, how our body impacts us, that’s bodyset. As I discussed with you last time, the main message about bodyset is that we need to listen to our bodies, and we need to respond in love to our bodies. Last episode, we focused on the listening part. We focused on listening to our bodies. And, at the end, we did this experiential exercise where we did some really focused listening together in order to hear the messages from our bodies that we may otherwise be ignoring. We really created a space to do a deep dive into what’s going on in our bodies. And that’s not something that we typically do in our culture. Now that exercise, that focused listening, that brought in some great responses from some of you out there in our podcast audience, in our community. And nothing brings me as much satisfaction in doing this podcast as hearing how you’re really engaging with this podcast, how you’re taking in the information, how you’re doing the exercises and how you’re discovering new things about yourself and growing. That is what this podcast is all about. So before I share this email, I’m going to suggest that if you have the time and inclination, go back to the last episode. That is episode 10. It’s titled Your Catholic Body and This Crisis: Bodyset. Listen to that episode if you haven’t already done so.

[00:03:31] Go back to that last episode and really experience the exercise. Truly listen to your body with that guided reflection that we did together. Then come back to this episode and listen to the story of JR in Indiana and what he experienced as he did the exercise from that last episode. Now, whenever I share these kinds of stories on this podcast, because they’re so deep and because they’re so meaningful, because they’re so personal, I always ask for permission from the person out of respect. If the person’s not willing to allow me to share their story on the air, that is totally understandable. I really value your privacy. These stories, though, they really illustrate the experiences that I so much want you to have. They show the possibilities of what you can learn, and they show how you can change by deeply engaging with this podcast and with our community. This story of JR is also a clear example of what this podcast community is all about. It’s not about me. It’s not about me lecturing to a microphone off in my makeshift studio far away and you listening alone, a passive recipient. No. This podcast is about engagement. It’s about relationship. It’s about connection. It’s about community. It’s about being pilgrims together in these hard times. It’s about moving through this valley of the shadow of death. Yes, it’s about these hard times, but we are also together on the road to salvation.

[00:05:04] So I’ve responded to every one of you that’s reached out to me by phone or email. We are small enough community that we can still do that together, and that’s a top priority for me. So I want to start by thanking JR for his openness. I want to thank him for his openness. I want to thank him for his willingness to share his experience from the last episode with all of you. Thank you, JR. I’m going to read this as J.R. wrote it, because he expresses himself so well in his own words. He emails me this from Monday, four days ago. This is what he says. “My back is physically out of shape due to a lack of exercise, and I was diagnosed with some arthritis in my lower back a couple of years ago. I’ve also had to perform some physical home chores recently that I thought might be the cause of the pain. I’ve been working hard at self-care, stretching, walking, a lot of time on my back with my legs elevated. Usually this self-care would have worked by now, but not this time. I can move, but not without pain. This morning when I followed your guided meditation and asked my back pain what it wanted to tell me, it said, ‘Slow down.’ I replied, ‘Slow down? I’m on my fricking back and I can’t move. I can’t go any slower. I’m isolated. I can’t go any slower. I can’t find meaningful work. I can’t go any slower. I can’t engage with the body of Christ. I can’t go any slower.’ I have no idea what slow down means, but I will take this suggestion to prayer and further meditation.”

[00:06:35] Okay, so that was his first email. So let’s take a look at this. He’s got back pain. He’s been working hard at self-care. He follows the guided meditation. He chooses to listen in to that back pain. And that back pain tells him something totally unexpected. That back pain tells JR, slow down. And that’s frustrating to him. There’s a part of him that’s really frustrated with that because he feels like he can’t go any slower. He’s already, you know, experiencing a fair degree of incapacitation. It bothers him. But you know what he does? And this is really critical. He says, you know what? I’m going to take the suggestion to prayer and further meditation. He’s going to listen in again. Here’s my response to him. I said, “I suspect that the pain has some deeper meaning. I definitely think you are on the right track with taking the message to prayer and further meditation. I would also check in with your pain again. See what more it has to tell you. You can do that on your own, or it might be helpful to play the relevant section in today’s podcast over again if you want a little guidance on checking in. But approach that pain and its message of slow down with curiosity, openness and acceptance if you can.I get that part of you is frustrated with all the inconvenience of the pain. See if that part can give you a little room to understand what’s going on with the part that is in pain.”

[00:07:59] Okay, so no specific like interpretations. I’m not making any interpretations there. I don’t know what’s going on with the pain either. What I’m doing is inviting him to reengage with it, to see if he can find out some more. It’s the next day, he writes me back. “Dr. Peter, over the past 24 hours since my first meditation, which gave me the words, slow down, I have done meditation two more times — late last night and this morning.” So then he starts to tell me what happened. “Here is what I think I learned after the first meditation. My unconscious, in the form of the little child in me was saying, slow down. The little child, still wounded, was trying to stop my chronological age by slowing me down physically.” All right, so this little child within him, this part of him that’s like a little child, is trying to slow him down physically in order to stop him from aging. So he goes on. “It would take me longer to reach old age and death if I couldn’t move as fast. With the slowing down, then I would have more time for things to occur, like healing and so on.

[00:09:18] And I wouldn’t die.” Okay, let’s stop a second here. This is a great realization. This is an example of how unconscious parts of us can really be working on us in ways that we don’t understand. JR has just identified a part of himself that was connected to his back pain. When he focused on that pain during the guided reflection, he discovered a part of himself that seems like a little child. It’s got the characteristics of a little child. This is so common. I see this all the time. I firmly believe that we all have parts of us, parts that are young and often neglected or exiled. And these parts of us get trapped in the past and they think and feel as children do. Sometimes we condemn these parts of us as “irrational.” This little part of him is trying to protect him from death. It’s trying to help him in the ways that it knows how. But it’s not integrated with the rest of him. It’s been disconnected somehow. And the beautiful thing is that JR is now reconnecting with that part of himself. He’s becoming more integrated as he relates with this part of himself. He understood that this part of himself was in his unconscious. It was telling him to slow down because it wants him not to die, and it wants him to have more time for healing. That’s an amazing realization.

[00:10:59] But there’s more. So he tells us more. He goes on. “What is making my unconscious feel threatened about lack of time or my death?” He’s asking that question, right? And then he gives a list of things that have gone on in his life. You know, the deaths of people that were close to him, a history of health issues, the fears that he has about the coronavirus, very kind of standard stuff that might lead people to think about death. And now he says something just really fascinating. He says, “My little child has not yet heard the voice of God the Father say, ‘You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.'” Whoa, think about that. JR has just gotten in touch with a part of himself that’s alienated from God. It’s not all of him. It’s just a part of him. And I will tell you, this is the number one thing that I focus on when I’m working with clients, is helping the parts of them that are disconnected, that are unintegrated, that are out of touch with them, get back integrated, and not just so that we can have a nice integrated self, but so that these parts can actually come in touch with the living God. In addition to stalling death, writes JR, “I think my unconscious also wants to give me more time to accomplish my purpose in life. The past six weeks are forcing me to reassess that purpose. I have no idea today how that reassessment will end. And until then, I have no end in mind.”

[00:12:44] So now it’s bringing up all these existential issues. What is his purpose in life? Remember, all I did in the exercise was ask him to get in touch with that pain and see if he could hear what it wanted to tell him. And all of this is now flowing out. He is accessing all kinds of things that have previously been unavailable to him because they’ve been buried in his unconscious. This is amazing, people. This is tremendous work. We go on to a second meditation. And JR writes, “I heard the little child say, ‘I’m scared.’ I held him, I reassured him, and we prayed the Our Father at the end.” This is exactly what I look for when I work with people clinically, right, for the self, the core of the person, to reach out to this unintegrated part, to this disconnected part, to this part that’s been exiled or just is not in touch, and be a bridge to God the Father, to be a bridge to our Mother. This is JR loving himself. Loving himself implies that JR has a relationship with himself. We’re not some sort of unidimensional, homogenous, monolithic beings, right? We have different parts. And JR is getting in touch with some aspect of his experience, some part of him that he has not been in touch with before. He writes, “Providence occurred during this meditation because at this point in time at the podcast, when you asked us to listen to our body, Safari on my iPhone crashed, unbeknownst to me, and I was able to sit in silence for a lot longer than if the meditation had continued and the podcast had ended in an orderly manner.”

[00:14:48] So his phone locks up right at the moment he needed it to lock up in order to be able to spend much more time with this little part, right? And much more time than I would be able to have in dead air space. Right. So the beautiful thing about this is that JR recognizes it as Providence. He sees the finger of God in this. He sees the hand of God in this. This isn’t just happening in some vacuum. This isn’t some self-improvement project that JR has embarked upon. No, this is real. This is happening in the natural realm. It’s also happening in the spiritual realm. Amazing. Amazing. Third meditation. So this is when he goes back, the morning before he wrote me this. JR says, “I heard the voice say, ‘I want to be understood.’ And ‘I want to have purpose for my life.’ I’m still thinking through this second and third meditation. I will continue to meditate on my bodyset and to pray about what I’m learning and discovering.” JR recognizes that this is just the beginning. He’s just come into contact with a whole realm of himself that he wasn’t familiar with before. And he’s a pretty self-aware guy, from what I can tell.

[00:16:13] I mean, this is a guy that thinks about psychology. He can tell that by the way he’s writing me. But all kinds of things are opening up. And you know what that flash point was? You know what the trigger was? He listened to his body. He listened to his pain. I see this happening over and over and over again. I was trained as a psychodynamic psychologist, and that meant that part of what I did is I made all kinds of interpretations, all kinds of guesses, throwing darts in the dark. You know, thinking about what might it be? What might it not be? And one of the things I’ve learned in recent years is that, wait a minute, just listen. Let’s just listen rather than making those interpretations. Let’s not speak for those parts. Let’s have those parts speak for themselves. Because if you are willing to be still, if you are willing to listen, you will learn amazing things. And you don’t need therapy to do that. You don’t need therapy to do that. You don’t need therapy to be recollected. You don’t need therapy to be still. It’s really helpful sometimes. And some people really do benefit from therapy, right? But most people can make incredible progress without it. That’s one of the things that’s so inspiring to me about this.

[00:17:35] He then writes, “I will continue to meditate on my bodyset and pray about what I’m learning and discovering. He says, thanks again for responding to God’s call to develop these podcasts. Blessings. JR.” What a gift. Thank you, JR. What a gift. I’m kind of at a loss for words here. I am so appreciative. I am so thankful that you shared this with us and that you had the courage to be willing to share this with our entire community, because this is exactly the kind of thing that I want people to be able to experience. So we’re going to continue with bodyset for a little while longer. I asked a close psychologist friend of mine, Dr. Andrew Sodergren of Cincinnati. Dr. Andrew Sodergren is a guest lecturer at the John Paul II Institute. He’s also the clinical director at Rua Woods, which is a Theology of the Body Center in Cincinnati. I wanted him to listen to the last podcast. He’s an expert on the theology of the body. He’s an expert on the psychological aspects of the theology of the body. And we’ve been discussing via email some of his key ideas in this area. I’m very much looking forward to sharing those insights with you. Dr. Sodergren and I are focusing very much on what it means to love yourself through loving your body in an ordered way. What does that mean? Especially where the rubber meets the road, especially in the really practical aspects of it.

[00:19:15] We’re addressing the psychological obstacles that get in the way of loving your body. And I’ll tell you, those obstacles to loving your body are really, really common. I’m wanting to get him on this podcast with me as a special guest. He’s interested in that. He says he’s excited about our work. And so keep that intention in your prayers that we can work out the timing and the details. I’m so excited to be able to share his insights with you. All right. So, when I started this podcast, I was kind of hedging my bets in my own insecurity. There’s a part of me that was fearing failure, that was fearing that this whole thing, this whole podcast business would flop, and it would just be lame. This part of me was questioning whether I could actually pull this off. And that part influenced me to tie this podcast to the pandemic, because if the podcast failed, I could just shut it down with the excuse that, well, the pandemic ended. So I ended the podcast as well. And another very self-confident part of me was totally sure I could do this. Totally like I’ve got this and that with enough effort and savvy, enough study and learning, I could make it happen. I could make this podcast a success. So two parts of me: one insecure, one very self-confident. You know what? Both parts were wrong.

[00:20:42] This podcast is already a great success. It’s starting to change lives. It’s starting to help people along the road to salvation by shoring up the natural foundations for the spiritual life. So my insecure part was wrong about it just being a flop and a failure. But it’s not a success because of my efforts or my savvy. I can’t do this on my own. It’s a success, not because my super competent part is in charge and it’s running the show and making everything happen. It’s a success first and foremost because of the grace of God, and because this podcast is entitled to Our Lady. It’s also a success because of the prayers and the sacrifices that you are making for it. I keep asking you to pray and you keep praying and it’s working out. And it’s a success because JR is engaged, and because he’s doing his work, because he’s loving that little part of himself, that little part of himself that doesn’t want to die. And he’s approaching that part of him with love and with appreciation rather than contempt. All right. I’ve heard some feedback. I’ve heard that people do not want to hear any more about the coronavirus crisis. They’re inundated with it, and that’s actually driven them away from actually looking at this podcast at all. They look at the title, they say, oh, more coronavirus stuff. I don’t want to hear it. And you know what? As I was thinking about this, this whole podcast and our whole community is actually not primarily about the coronavirus crisis.

[00:22:21] It’s about resilience. Resilience on the natural level and also spiritual resilience. It’s about psychological, physical, emotional, cognitive, relational resilience. It’s about how can we stay integrated and how can we get more integrated within ourselves, just like JR is doing. And truth be told, I’ve been fumbling around trying to get my footing with this podcast, trying to figure out where is it going to go, right? There’s a lot of fun in that. It’s kind of an adventure, right? But there’s also a really steep learning curve for me on this. And as I was considering this podcast and I was praying about it, which I do a lot. And as I was thinking about you too, which I do a lot, two words keep coming back to me. Two words: Catholics and resilience. And I was thinking about who we are, especially who we are in this podcast community. And I was thinking about who we will be when this whole coronavirus crisis has passed into history and the current name no longer applies. I want our community to go on. We do not have to end this when the coronavirus pandemic ends. So here’s my question for you. What do you all think about changing the name of this podcast? I don’t think of this as my podcast. It’s our podcast.

[00:23:51] It’s God’s podcast. It’s Mary’s podcast. It’s your podcast. It’s my podcast. It’s all of us together. So I want to hear your ideas. If you really like the current name, let me know that. If you want a new name, let me know that. If you have a new name idea, let me know. So I have a possibility for a short name that might capture the essence of the podcast and the essence of us as a community. But I’m not great at picking names. Nevertheless, I’m just going to throw this out there. See what you think about it. How about the name Resilient Catholics? Resilient Catholics? Okay, here’s the deal. Get engaged. Email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Call me at (317) 567-9594. Talk to me, leave a voicemail or you can text me. I keep forgetting that, yeah, I can get texts on my phone. Right? You can text me at (317) 567-9594 as well. Let me know what you think about this whole name situation. Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem is the current name. We’ve got options to change that and, you know, have it somehow be different. Also, please register for this podcast so you can get the Wednesday emails. And that’s so that we can keep you updated on all the exciting things that we have in store. I am right now gathering together the best instruments to measure resiliency in crisis. I just got permission to use the Connor Davidson Resilience Scale that’s been around since 2003.

[00:25:32] It’s got the best psychometric properties, reliability, validity, all that stuff that us statisticians love. I’m also working on getting the Resilience Scale for Adults. That’s another measure of resilience that’s also been around for a while, also has great psychometric properties. You can’t just get these, you can’t just order them, you can’t just download them from the internet. I have to explain what I’m using it for, and then I have to get permission from the authors to be able to use them. And so I’ve been doing that. I’ve also just begun working on a measure of psychospiritual resilience as well. All right. That brings in the Catholic, the Catholic part of this, the Catholic worldview. So soon I’m going to be making these available to those in our podcast community so that you can receive your scores on these measures, and you can see your own pattern of relative strengths and weaknesses in resiliency. We are then going to have a live webinar where I walk through the instruments, and I walk through the meaning of the scores with you. And I’m also going to have time to take questions. There’s also going to be a discussion forum on our website that’s on the landing page for this podcast. And we’re going to be able to discuss, right. So I am going to charge a fee for all of that. That’s all going to come as a package to help support the work of Souls and Hearts.

[00:26:45] Get registered though, so that we can keep you in the loop. Registering for the podcast is different than being registered with Souls and Hearts. If you’re not getting the Wednesday emails and those go out at 5:00 AM, very early in the morning on Wednesdays, then you’re not registered. You might still be registered for Souls and Hearts, but for some other product that we have there. If you’re not sure if you’re registered, just email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com, or text me or call me. Get in touch with me and I’ll find out whether you’re registered or not, and I’ll get you registered. Don’t forget, be in touch with me about the name of this podcast. And also, you know how this podcast is impacting you. I want to hear your stories. And I don’t just want to hear them if I can use them on the air, I want to hear them anyway. I get other stories that I’m not including in the podcast. It’s really important that you be free to know that, you know, it isn’t just about, you know, broadcasting it. I’m also looking for constructive criticism. Many of the best fraternal corrections I’ve ever gotten have been from my clients. Bring on that criticism as well. I want to hear it from people in this community. All right, so that’s a wrap for today. Let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Mother Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.