Spiritual practices: Sabbaticals or Stopping

[Anonymous]

I posted on my kitchen wall:

Quote:

But every seventh is the stopping day of

I Am Your God

It’s been staring at me for months.

[Anonymous]

cwald wrote:

I think I remember reading a post awhile back that you were attending the Unitarian church??

Thanks for asking, CW. I made it out to the Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation last Sunday for the first in a long while. It was a nurturing delight as always. But generally these days I have been every Sunday either at my parents’ ward or my children’s ward accompanying them. Anymore, any LDS Church participation I do is for the people. And the people I most want to spend time with are my family. So I have generally stayed clear of my assigned ward. I’m still essentially homeless with respect to church.

[Anonymous]

Things I would like to stop… caring what others think about me. I know who I am, I know what I want, and yet my caring about how others view me is interfering with who I want to become.

I have decided that I do need a sabbatical from the LDS church. At least 6 weeks or so. I need to figure out how to be there on my own terms, and to feel like I am there because it my own choice and desire to be there… AS ME!

I just hope s#!t doesn’t all hit the fan while I am trying to figure myself out!

[Anonymous]

flower wrote:

Things I would like to stop… caring what others think about me. I know who I am, I know what I want, and yet my caring about how others view me is interfering with who I want to become.

I’ll be interested to hear how that works for you. I think I am honest in saying that I don’t care what others think of me, though it’s possible I am deceiving myself. I have a family member, though, who spends a lot of time worrying about how he appears to others and I know it’s often painful for him. I wish I had something to offer this person, but I can’t help thinking that in his case it’s a personality trait (Idealist) and that it’s just an inherent way of thinking.

Tom — I’d be really interested in hearing your perspective on the Universalists. I understand they’re probably all over the place, doctrinally, but I’ve always been curious and thought I might find some kinship there. After all, if it was good enough for John Adams (one of my heroes) it ought to be good enough for me.

[Anonymous]

doug wrote:

I have a family member, though, who spends a lot of time worrying about how he appears to others and I know it’s often painful for him. I wish I had something to offer this person, but I can’t help thinking that in his case it’s a personality trait (Idealist) and that it’s just an inherent way of thinking.

hmmm…. I am an Idealist too (idealist/healer) I never thought of myself as someone who worried about appearances because I could care less about worldly views/materialism. But I have since realized that I care a lot whether or not I am viewed as a “good” person. I could spend the rest of my life dedicating myself to humanitarian causes, yet I know many people in my church and family would still look down on me because I was not living the gospel to their standards. This shouldn’t bother me so much, but it does. This kind of thinking is at the root of many of my current struggles.

[Anonymous]

Flower — one thing, in developing my own way within the Church, I found that attending Church was important in framing my own ideas. It was there that I was able to observe my reactions to people given my new state of mind, and also introspect on my feelings as I experienced the Church. There were positive experiences along the way too, which helped. But the experience of attending gave me more fodder to help develop my own philosophy. When they asked people to move, I realized I could just not volunteer. And I could simply sit there like a bump on the log forever if I wanted, for example.

If I did take time away, I did it with a restart date in mind — in my case, it was two weeks, which I invested in camping and spending time with my kids. But I knew I was going to return in two weeks and also had a lesson scheduled to teach that day — so I had a commitment to others that helped me keep my motivation to attend.

I did have a panic attack once at Church — like you — years ago when I ran into the person who broke my prior engagement to a very desireable person a year previously. My new wife and I left immediately — but I dealt with the feelings that week so the next time I saw the person, I had already visualized my response and the attack didn’t occur.

However, you have to do what you feel is best for your own sanity, as each person’s experience is different.

[Author]

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