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My new spiritual practice: Dealing with “demonic” thoughts

Lynne Baab • Tuesday May 23 2017

I’ve been writing about what I’ve learned from counseling in the past year. My counselor suggested separating thoughts from feelings, which I described in the first post of this series. In the second post and third post, I described how I'm learning to feel the feelings. In this post, I’ll talk about thoughts.

I observe two major categories of thoughts that don’t help me in any way:

1. Catastrophic thoughts about the future. “What if this happens?” “What if that happens?”

2. Judgmental thoughts about myself. “What’s wrong with me that I don’t I trust God more?” “What kind of a person would eat cookies...

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My new spiritual practice: Feeling the feelings

Lynne Baab • Wednesday May 10 2017

When I’m stressed about something, my feelings get buried under my thoughts. Some of those thoughts center around questions about the future: “What if this happens? What if that happens?” Other thoughts are about the feelings: “You shouldn’t be feeling these negative feelings. You should be trusting God.”

I wrote last week about advice from my therapist about separating thoughts from feelings. Some months ago he suggested that I practice self-compassion as a way to cope with negative feelings, and I’ve had a wonderful year learning more about what self-compassion looks like and why God would desire it for me.

The form of...

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My new spiritual practice: Separating thoughts from feelings

Lynne Baab • Thursday May 4 2017

A year ago I was feeling stressed by several things, so I started seeing a therapist twice a month. My times with him have been very helpful, and in these next few blog posts, I want to reflect on what I’ve learned. In fact, I want to argue that what I’ve learned is actually a spiritual practice.

Last year I could tell I was stressed because of the thoughts swirling in my head: What if this happens? What if that happens? How will I cope? Why am I not trusting God more with these things that are stressing me? What’s wrong with...

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Spiritual practices for the Easter season

Lynne Baab • Tuesday April 18 2017

This week I’m reposting an earlier post because the ideas are still so relevant. Maybe I’m reposting it because I need to follow my own suggestions!

Did you know that in many times and places in Christian history, Easter has been viewed as a season, not just a day? The Easter season goes from Easter Day to Pentecost Sunday (June 4 this year), a period of seven weeks. Because Jesus’ resurrection is such a huge, amazing, overwhelming, fantastic gift to us, focusing on it for seven weeks allows time to ponder many aspects of what we receive on Easter Day.

The liturgical color...

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