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Showing posts from November, 2013

With Open Eyes

About two months ago, I began to wrestle with feelings of anxiety, depression, and a sense of alienation from my Quaker meeting.  Very distressingly to me, I began to have these feelings in worship, both while in attendance at my meeting and in my Quaker practice at home during the week. I began to feel unable to sense the Presence whose warmth has marked most, if not all, of my time in worship.  And I began to feel a terrible heaviness and grief that seemed familiar to me from my last years as a psychotherapist when, despite no feelings of burn-out or any obvious external stressors from that work, I began to feel that I was going to have to let it go. This feeling I have since come to call, in Quaker parlance, a stop .  The stop in my work as a therapist proved quite final.  Though it took me a while to be clear about it, it did eventually become evident to me that I was going to have to lay down that work.  Initially, I did not know what would follow it, and I experienced both g