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Jun 4, 2023Liked by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Just finished a good cry, its been a rough week with round 2 of shingles starting in less than a month ( doctor said, unusual but not unheard of)....having begun new work with professional for healing resurfacing ptsd crap, and generally feeling mostly angry and sad. And being grumpy and unloving to those i care about most. And tears flowed when I got to these words, ‘inconsistent, lumpy, actual self who God loves madly’. I believe God loves madly... but i don’t think i know God loves madly. I want to know this deep in my soul. God this is my prayer!

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Jun 4, 2023Liked by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Querida Nadia,

My 45 year high school class reunion is coming up in September. My hair is white as snow, almost all the women in my class dye their hair. I am still hanging on to my pandemic weight. I only make my bed right before I go to bed. This morning I woke up on the wrong side on the bed. (my bed is pushed up against the wall). Mos def feeling anxious, irritable and discontented. It is all very much a familiar space for me. Fuck it. This too shall pass. Thank you for being you. Thank you for a space in your corner.

Love,

Kat

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Jun 4, 2023·edited Jun 4, 2023Liked by Nadia Bolz-Weber

There's that prayer, "Dear God, help me to be the person my dog thinks I am." I think there must be something to learning to see ourselves more as the people who love us (oh, and I guess God) think we are. Like, even if Nadia thinks she's still 90% asshole, that's not what those of us who find your work helpful and supportive think or focus on. I dunno; maybe if I knew you personally I might think, "You know? She's right; she's mostly an asshole," but I really REALLY doubt it. Many days I find myself thinking, "Why does anyone put up with me?" And yet, they not only do but seem to enjoy the fact that I'm around. (I realize that not everyone is lucky enough to have friends like that.) Back in my theater days, I learned that deciphering your character should include what your character thinks about him/her self AND what the other characters think about your character. I dunno; I feel like something about this being in community with each other stuff must include the gift of seeing others seeing our best selves and not all the crap that lives in our own heads.

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Jun 4, 2023Liked by Nadia Bolz-Weber

So with every therapist I have worked with, I have asked "when am I going to not be worried about death. I've had this wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night dread, and here I am, 65, and I still have it eve though I have been in therapy forever." Finally, one therapist said to me "Denise, have you ever thought this is just part of being you? You're a poet and writer. Maybe this is why you write. Maybe this is what makes your writing what it is. It's just part of Denise." So I am trying to make friends with this part of myself. I try to say "hi" to it when it hits me instead of just being afraid. But I still wish I found a way not to be afraid. I'm not one of these folks who are sure of the afterlife. I'm one of these folks who are sure they do not want to be in a coffin, or in a crematory, or just not in the world anymore. I can't imagine what the next life (or not) will be, and I don't want to be an (or not). It makes me sad. So I do what my last therapist has said, and I do more of what I want to do and less of what I don't want to do, which is also hard for me since I don't like to disappoint people and will do what is expected or what I think people expect of me. The good girl who resents being good. And disappointing her mother, even though I know I will and do.

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I’ve found a lot of progress in some of the ideas of Buddhism. The central idea, an accessible one, is that craving is the beginning of stepping away from the big Now, and we can learn to identify that craving and relax it-- craving is a muscle tightened. This craving can be about many things, but especially about what we think of as our identity. It’s not that identity isn’t real, it’s just that it’s a structure that emerges based on all the stuff that happens and out habitual reactions to them. There are records that we play over and over, so much that the grooves are deep, but they are just stories we’ve told ourselves and have come to believe. The record is real, but there was a moment before the record started that we forgot, so the record isn’t permanent, it’s just something we play without being aware of it, and we think that we are the record. The awareness of the record playing is mindfulness, and developing mindfulness means learning to catch the record playing enough to go “ah there’s the record playing again”, and in that instant we are no longer the record, we are a person playing a record. That place, where the record no longer is “I” but instead an experience, is where change happens

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Oh, good grief. I needed this. REALLY needed this. I was awake at 5:00 a.m., watching TV and eating a tub of orange sherbet, and all because I'm none of the things I wish I were (including someone who can sleep all night).

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Jun 5, 2023Liked by Nadia Bolz-Weber

I’m right there with you! My starting points are: fuck you, seriously?, and you’re an idiot please shut up. Thanks for the post.

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Thank you Nadia from this 76-year-old guy still trying to change the world, or at least my little part...

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Beautiful!! The conundrum of being and becoming, one day at a time; with occasional setbacks.

I’ve never figured it out, though I do see progress. Wild grace abounds. I am grateful.

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I love the image of the god who is a god of all Rhinos! And I love it especially because if they were a god of all Gurus, they'd be a god capable of loving only one type of human... because the capital-G Gurus are, at root, the same idealized creatures, all blurry at the edges, essentially having no edges at all...

This reminds me of a college semantics class back in the '70s. The professor, Ms. P, was outwardly a product of her generation -- heavy makeup, sprayed hair, and flouncy dresses -- but she was beyond doubt a feminist who Took No Sh!t... and she told us about something called the "ladder of abstraction." The idea is that types of things, such as people, fall generally into more general or more specific categories, which can be thought of as positioned higher up or lower down the ladder. (Note that these aren't better-or-worse positions, or powerful-vs.-weak. They're just concepts: more abstract at the top, and more concrete at the bottom.)

To the point: she talked about a strain of casual feminist thinking at the time, in which a woman might say, "I just want to be treated like men" or "...like a human being." While sympathetic to the sentiment, Ms. P wanted to point out to us that its expression in those particular terms was 100% off-base and possibly not at all what the speaker actually wanted. The reason: to be treated the same way as someone else ("like men") or as everyone else ("like a human being") is to be denied your individuality, your uniqueness. It's like asking to be regarded as and treated like a two-dimensional blank cartoon of a human being, with no beauties (and yes, no ugliness) of your own, i.e. with no specific features which make you, well, *you*.

So yeah, give me the Rhino-loving god any day. I don't want their regard of me to be colored at all by what they think -- or, haha, *hope* -- to be true as all the other kids on my block!

Thank you so much, Nadia!

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Thank You Nadia for inviting me to get off the treadmill, to have my practice be 1% less of an asshole. That is doable in all areas of my life. I so appreciate your honest humor that invites to look at ourselves with a light and gentle heart.

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God willing I will ALWAYS be completely and totally unbothered by saying that I am still an alcoholic. And God help me if I ever deny it. I, too, believe people can change. And here is my favorite joke that proves it:

Two southern bells are sitting on a porch having tea.

Lady 1: Did you see the ring my Henry gave me? extends hand

Lady 2: Oh, how nice.

Lady 1: And did you see the new car my Henry dear bought for my birthday?

Lady 2: Oh, how nice.

Lady 1: Oh, and my Henry says he's taking me on a European vacation!

Lady 2: Oh, how nice.

Lady 1: So what has your hubby done for you lately?

Lady 2: My hubby? Well my hubby sent me to charm school. I used to just say "Fuck you," but now I say "Oh, how nice."

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Jun 6, 2023Liked by Nadia Bolz-Weber

I just finished reading your post and re- opened the book I was reading: "Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is. We must find our real self in all its elemental poverty but also in its great and very simple dignity: created to be a child of God and capable of loving with something of God's own sincerity and his unselfishness." --Thomas Merton

.......hmmm

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At the risk of raising a topic that’s too controversial, how does this insight apply to kids who want to transform their bodies to be their ideal selves (or perhaps they would say, actual)? I’m referring to young teens who want double mastectomies or tweens who want to take hormones that have affects on bone density and can atrophy certain parts of the body. I’m not asking out of hatred for anyone, but out of concern. I feel the need to think about this as a mom of a young girl close to puberty so that if it does come up I’ve put some thought into it in advance. I feel like all of my life experience makes me feel in my gut that I should teach her that physically she is already perfect as is because it’s how she was made, but the mainstream right now is pushing the message that to teach that is somehow to support a genocide, that instead you should teach your child to question whether their body is “right”. If we’re going to spend time thinking about our ideal vs actual selves and human transformation, because I’m a mom, I can’t help wondering how this all applies to kids. There was an article in the Atlantic recently about transhumanism and the push to have humans be able to alter themselves. If the AI industry is to be believed, on some level our culture will be asking us all very soon, not just kids, to answer difficult questions about physical reality and identity. It all seems very sci-fi and it makes me wonder what it even means to be human, and whether our physical reality should ever be considered holy.

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As a person who makes my bed every day, no judgment here! My current dilemma is excercise. I have to find something I enjoy doing that has the hidden benefit of exercise. It just never works for me to exercise with the hidden benefit of having fun. Today I am trying bike riding. I love your thoughts Nadia. Thanks for sharing.

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Jun 9, 2023Liked by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Love the statement 'my first reaction to almost everything is fuck you' that's me right there!! love that.

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