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, ...
Welcome to the online journal of a pair of Quaker Pagans.