Reflecting on a challenging week

Tuesday
It was pouring with rain Tuesday morning, yet even so I enjoyed the walk to a meeting in connection with the ‘Wholeness Through Spirituality’ project. This project is about setting up a support group:

to provide a safe place for people to explore and express aspects of their lives and beliefs which have value and meaning, and which give them some sense of purpose and hope.

Previously I had volunteered to draft 5 session plans, and took along the work I had done in this respect. I’ve been reading a book, ‘Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy’ which talks about the use of metaphors in speaking of our lives, and I had taken Metaphors as the overall theme for the 5 sessions, breaking it down into:-

Session 1: ‘Metaphors for life’ (eg. ‘Life is a journey’, ‘life is a learning experience’, ‘life is a battle’, etc)
Session 2: ‘personal metaphors’ (eg. if you consider life is a game of chess, are you a pawn or a grand Master?; do you ‘clam up’? Do you think you’re an egg – cracking up? etc.)
Session 3: ‘metaphors for the world’ (eg. the world’s your oyster)
Session 4: ‘metaphors for God’
Session 5: ‘metaphors for death’.

At the meeting I talked through the detailed plan for Session 1, then invited feedback. In retrospect, it would have been wise to offer the feedback up for general discussion. Instead, I answered each comment myself – which shut down the group process and ultimately undermined the group dynamic. Reflecting back on the meeting later, I realised I’d been quite defensive. One person who has vast experience in devising and presenting courses felt that the icebreaker game was too risky – (I’d assigned 7 minutes to learning names, and with a view to getting people comfortable with hearing their own voice speak out loud in the group plus to familiarise ourselves with each others’ names, I’d decided we would toss a juggling ball to each other, calling out our own name as we tossed the ball initially, then switching after several minutes to calling out the name of the person you toss it to) she felt people might feel unduly anxious about fumbling and dropping the ball. She also felt that the word ‘metaphor’ might put people off, and wanted to substitute the word ‘images’. (When I’d been preparing the session plan and come up with the basic idea, I’d googled ‘Metaphors for life’ and found the following site very helpful in informing the work I was doing:
http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/selfhelp/a/metaphors.htm)
She had concerns about where the conversations might go. I deflected the things I was hearing by suggesting that they were coming from her fear of not being in control – which I had intended as a helpful reflection! Meanwhile the other group members sat quiet, looking on. The person unofficially chairing the meeting gathered the reins to gently move things on, but the lady who had been challenging the session plan looked at me and asked “Do you mind if we tweak it?” I didn’t answer immediately – surprised to discover I DID mind. Perhaps my answer could have been "'We' don't feel it needs tweaking", said with a smile (yet normally when I put an idea forward, I’m very happy for it to be ‘tweaked’ until everyone is content). I remembered that this lady had wanted to ‘tweak’ the ‘Growing in Awareness and Practice’ training course that had been presented to us by an excellent trainer commissioned by the local Mental Health NHS Trust. I guess it is sometimes hard for us to trust another’s expertise in a field we consider our own. After a brief pause I concluded, “I’ll leave that question asked and unanswered for now”. When I tuned in to my body, I realised my heart-rate had increased slightly from the conflict.

The walk back home did me good – a ‘cooling off’ period and an opportunity for prayer. One of the beauties of prayer is that it allows me to hear what I’m thinking without risking damaging a relationship. As sometimes happens, I was surprised when I opened my mouth and started praying, to hear some of the stuff going on inside that I hadn’t been consciously aware of. For example, I hadn’t realised I had been seeing the project as a way of establishing a place for myself at the centre of something; that I had been looking on it as a way of giving myself significance. I was surprised to recognise I’d felt angry about the ‘Do you mind if we tweak it?’ question – specifically about the pronoun, what my mother would have called ‘the royal we’. I felt it came across as patronising (although knowing it wouldn't have been intended that way). I realised I had been regarding the project as ‘my baby’ from the beginning, and I had wanted to be trusted to run with it. Now I found myself wondering whether to walk away from it altogether. In prayer I surrendered it to God, mentally trying to leave it with Him.

Back home I looked again at the devotional I’d read the evening before, from Power to Soar:

(Hebrews 11:6)
Baffled Deliverer,
Do you want bewilderment bombarding your mind for a lifetime? Then solicit everyone’s opinion – about everything! Teeter on a tightrope for people who couldn’t care less and for those who are impossible to please! When I speak, refuse to respond until 10,000 confirmations arrive, hand-delivered by angels!
Yours with Tender Concern,
Father

Wednesday
I had an appointment for 9.40 am with the Breast Surgeon at the hospital. Fortunately the weather was fine as it takes about 40 minutes to walk there. The waiting room was packed, and appointments were running behind schedule, but I picked up a copy of The People's Friend and was content sitting reading whilst I waited. It was nearly 10.30 when the nurse called me in to see one of the junior doctors. He wasn't altogether sure why I was there. I explained about the second operation having been postponed due to a relapse in my mental health, and that possibly the Surgeon had wanted to check my mental state for himself before scheduling the further surgery. Accordingly he left me sitting alone in the room for a few minutes and went to invite his senior colleague in to see me. I looked around and smiled to myself at the mischief I could get up to in the room, were I that way inclined. When he came back, he started filling in a form, asking for my contact details. I was reciting my mobile phone number when the Consultant breezed in with a cheerful greeting and perched on the windowsill. I interrupted myself to respond, then explained that I was just giving the doctor my phone number. The Consultant raised an eyebrow and looking at his junior with a grin, asked him, "Why? Are you going round for dinner or something?". It only took a few minutes for us to sort out that the operation would be scheduled as soon as possible, and the Consultant left. The doctor finished filling in his forms and answered my questions, then as I was going, I couldn't resist saying with a big grin, "My cooking is ok, by the way". "Sorry?" he asked, with a startled look. I jerked my head in the direction of the Consultant's office and explained, "He was joking with you about coming round for dinner - I was just saying my cooking is ok". He blushed, and I went off chuckling to myself. Later on I was describing the morning to a friend, who commented in surprise, "It sounds like you enjoyed yourself!" and I realised with surprise that yes, I had enjoyed the light-heartedness of the encounters.

In different vein at Cell group Wednesday night, without me having breathed a word to anyone about what had been going on the day before, the concept of surrendering all to God cropped up several times. It seemed to chime with me wondering whether to walk away from the Wholeness through Spirituality project.

Thursday
Thursday was a glorious day where the space and time and peace I had were very much in tune with the ‘A Course in Miracles’ daily exercise:
“Into His Presence would I enter now”, which began with the words
‘This is a day of silence and trust. It is a special time of promise in your calendar of days. It is a time Heaven has set apart to shine upon …’
Sure enough it was a day of glorious weather and the joy bubbled up in my heart. I was on a high all day – until I found myself reeling in shocked surprise when some very angry words were fired at me unexpectedly by one of my closest friends. I felt bewildered at the time, wondering what I’d done wrong, but listened and discovered that there had been an accumulation of small irritations over a long period of time. Tonight as I reflected on what had been said, I realised that my friend had previously defined various boundaries for the relationship that I had not taken seriously but had trespassed over the line with joyful abandon. Whoops! That’ll teach me! The metaphorical rap on the knuckles left me smarting but smarter, hopefully.