A big mindset shift for me...
Have you ever been to Italy?
If not, when you go, you will be asked if you want your water "sin gas o con gas?".
With carbonation or without carbonation ("gas" meaning bubbles).
Now, my mother can be a bit of an odd duck and she loves learning different languages, but she has this habit of using languages to convey meanings of her own making, which, as you could probably guess, is very confusing for anyone not inside her own head!
So after we came back from Italy, my mother began to order coffee (not her water) to be "con gas", meaning, in her mind, "with caffeine". Cringing under the confused look of many waiters and waitresses her children would kindly translate for the staff at the restaurant and the ordering process would continue, while she contently enjoyed her own little inside joke with herself.
"Sin gas" = Without bubbles
Innocuous enough to consider the lack of bubbles in my own water, but where a big mindset shift began to occur for me was one day making the connection that SIN, the English term for a transgression against God, simply means, without God.
Sin = Without God
I come from a bit of a scrupulous background. The term "sin" for me has a history of conjuring up a gut punch sensation in my body, one of shame, of no-goodedness, of falling and failing in the eyes of my God and and Father.
I have healed and grown much in the part of my heart that sees God Almighty as the "Police Officer in the sky", and I think a huge demonstration I can share to portray that change is the gentle touch I now feel in seeing sin as simply doing something, making a choice, "without God." Sometimes, it's something as simple as forgetting!
Leaving him out of the decision whether on purpose or by accident, by habit or by happenstance, is often the trip before the fall.
There has been a deeper layer to this as well, and this is where my work in coaching is so key. It is the realization that often the choice to leave God at the door of my own interior house, is the choice to go along without him is often the result of two things: a thought error or the behavioral residue of emotional wounds.
Thought Error:
Either a misunderstanding of who He is and the experience of being loved by Him,
Never learning how to bring him along in the first place, or
Emotional Wounds:
The presence of an unhealed emotional wound that causes a psychological reaction within me to seek self-protection, safety and self-reliance at all costs - often with no awareness of the reality of God. In other words, we get triggered.
Friends, sometimes we sin, because we can't help it. We have old patterns of thinking, feeling and acting that are so ingrained we don't know we're operating by them. Sometimes we don't realize we are living and reaction to old, outdated information about who we are and how the world works.
Sometimes, we don't know how to love, because we have been wounded in the very place where we were meant to be taught how.
So that is what I want to do with you. I want to help you find those places in your heart, bring them to the light, bring them to the Lord, so that you can heal, so you can learn to love yourself there, and so you can finally have the capacity to choose to bring God into the doorway of every room in your interior house, your interior life, and from that place of holy integration, be free to become whoever He fully created you to be!
Hi, I'm Nora :) Catholic mother, daughter, wife, poet, blogger, podcaster, avid reader, 12-Stepper, and Certified Catholic Mindset and Interior Life Coach. I help people who struggle to see their dignity and value amidst the hardships of life find hope and fulfillment by reworking limiting belief patterns and learning how to know themselves deeply in a way that invites compassion and understanding. I use the tools of Mindset Coaching through the lens of Internal Family Systems to help my clients see the Truth of the Goodness and Beauty of who they are and how they were Made.
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