{"id":227724,"date":"2023-07-20T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2023-07-20T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/?p=227724"},"modified":"2024-08-14T12:36:16","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T16:36:16","slug":"embodied-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/embodied-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Embodied Trust"},"content":{"rendered":"

To be human is to suffer. As we will eventually see, the question is not <\/span>if<\/span><\/i> we each suffer. It is, rather, <\/span>To what degree are we aware of it?<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>How are we in relationship with and responding to it?<\/span><\/i> These questions reveal not only the story we believe we are living in, but the role that suffering plays in that narrative.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I make no promise that we will suffer less. But I am confident that we will suffer <\/span>differently<\/span><\/i> and will become even more durably hopeful as a result. Primarily, I expect us to come to see that hope is actually a word that, in the world of interpersonal neurobiology, serves as a proxy for an ever-deepening attachment love with Jesus and the commensurate awareness of God\u2019s relational presence of lovingkindness.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to invite you to pause and direct your attention to what you perceive your embodied responses to be when you consider what it means to \u201ctrust\u201d God. Your embodied responses are what you sense in your body upon imagining Jesus telling you, \u201cIndeed, it is finished. It\u2019s all done. All those things that we both know keep you from receiving my love for you\u2014I\u2019m not paying attention to them. I\u2019m paying attention to you. And I want you to only pay attention to me. I want you at my banquet. I want you sitting right next to me and to the others who I know can\u2019t wait to sit next to you when they see you. I would love for you to believe me\u2014that it\u2019s all true.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How difficult is it to receive that? What do you sense, imagine, feel, think, and want to do physically in response to hearing Jesus say this? Moreover, were you to imagine such an encounter, could you receive it as having represented something genuine, something real that has taken place in the real world? Or, since we have come to believe that if we are imagining something \u201cin our minds\u201d then it could not possibly \u201cexist\u201d as a real event in the real world, would you dismiss it?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We have been trained by many cultural forces over the last five hundred years to believe that if something can\u2019t be currently measured in material terms, if it is limited to the \u201cimagination,\u201d then it can\u2019t be \u201creal.\u201d But you know that just because you can\u2019t see your friend sitting before you and can only imagine their face and the sound of their voice in your mind, they are not merely imaginary.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What are we to do with findings of research that demonstrate how athletes and musicians can enhance their performance on the court or in the concert hall by repeatedly practicing those very actions <\/span>in their imaginations<\/span><\/i>?<\/span>i<\/span> They are effectively shifting their embodied responses in certain contexts (the athletic court and the concert hall) by wiring their brains to anticipate those very scenarios. In this way, their brains\u2014from which emerge the functional feature of their imaginations and their conscious awareness of them\u2014and then, by extension, the actions they take as a result are essentially on a continuum, connected as they are within their bodies and to the intentionality of the musician or athlete.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, who of your friends could tell you how they feel about you and you would live, at least for the next few hours, as if you believed them? As if what you felt in your chest was <\/span>real<\/span><\/i>. On more occasions than I can tell you, people have told me how much I mean to them, how much they love me, only for their words and presence to vanish like vapor from my mind the moment they are no longer in my sight.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am left with only the memory of what they have said and what I sensed, imaged (that is, to literally construct a visual image in my mind), felt, and thought as they said it\u2014and often the memory is not durable enough for me to sustain the same felt sense of their affection for me which I had for that brief moment. Hence, I have to <\/span>practice<\/span><\/i>\u2014literally\u2014bringing those moments to memory over and over in order for them to become embedded not only in my cognitive recollection but in my embodied sensations, feelings, and images as well.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this way, by practicing with real, embodied relationships in my here-and-now life, I am granted what it gets close to being like when I imagine Jesus coming for me in the same way. This is how the body of Jesus works, and it is why Paul\u2019s words of us being Jesus\u2019s <\/span>body<\/span><\/i>, and not merely his followers or his church, capture everything that we are to become for each other and the world. And it is why hope is first given life in the context of securely attached, physically remembered relationships rather than being merely a function of our cognition.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hope\u2014the future state of time that our minds long to occupy\u2014must begin with a relationally grounded, material experience with Jesus mediated through the Spirit, the Scriptures, and, often most powerfully, his body. We become increasingly receptive, experientially and thereby theologically, to our having been justified\u2014declared free of our guilt and shame and welcomed into God\u2019s family\u2014to the degree that we encounter that justification in an embodied fashion, one in which we are ever living into earned secure attachment. <\/span>Upon this taking place, the prospect of hope\u2014even in the presence of suffering\u2014begins to form in our minds.<\/span><\/p>\n

Taken from The Deepest Place\u202f <\/b>by Curt Thompson.\u202f Copyright \u00a9 2023 by Curt Thompson. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com.<\/em><\/p>\n

Inspired by deep compassion for others and informed from a Christian perspective, psychiatrist Curt Thompson, MD shares fresh insights and practical applications for developing more authentic relationships and fully experiencing our deepest longing: to be known.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Through his workshops, speaking engagements, books, organizational consulting, private clinical practice, and other platforms, he helps people process their longings, grief, identity, purpose, perspective of God, and perspective of humanity, inviting them to engage more authentically with their own stories and their relationships. Only then can they feel truly known and connected and live into the meaningful reality they desire to create. Curt and his wife, Phyllis, live outside of Washington DC and have two adult children.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To be human is to suffer. As we will eventually see, the question is not if we each suffer. It is, rather, To what degree are we aware of it? and How are we in relationship with and responding to it? These questions reveal not only the story we believe we are living in, but\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":304,"featured_media":227725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[425,1,35],"tags":[],"coauthors":[351],"class_list":["post-227724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hope","category-life-advice","category-wisdom"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/304"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227724"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":227730,"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227724\/revisions\/227730"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227724"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liveoriginal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=227724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}