Leading Our Emotions

Are we leading our emotions, or are our emotions leading us? What happens when we get stuck in unhealthy patterns? How do we let Jesus into the broken places and step into spiritual and emotional wholeness? In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Ali Ash about the things that get in the way of healthy relationship with God, ourselves and each other.

Ali Ash is a certified Life Purpose Coach. She is also certified in the Restoration Therapy Model, a TRR (The Relationship Resource) trainer and has been cultivating healthy leadership for the nonprofit world for over 10 years. She is passionate about coming alongside people where their mental and emotional health intersects with Spiritual Formation. Seeing people find a renewal of hope, joy and purpose through intentional holistic living is her sweet spot. She and her husband Ryan have been married for 20 years and live in San Diego, CA with their 3 boys.

Spiritual Community and Emotional Health

Gina:

You’re a certified life coach. You’ve been in ministry for a really long time. You worked with relationship resources for a long time, both as volunteer and on staff and built their entire skills workshop program, which equips (women’s skills, men’s skills and couple skills) people to integrate their spiritual life with their emotional mental health and life, which is really powerful.

We’re also in a season that I feel like the church is finally learning that the two need to be integrated. They’re not mutually exclusive. Old things are passed away, behold, everything’s new. “You should never struggle have anxiety or something. Are you reading your Bible enough? Are you praying?” We’ll get over it, just no patience for process. Maybe I received some supernatural healing and deliverance from really hard things. I’ve experienced trauma and Jesus has brought some incredible restoration, but now I have to walk that out.

You have a lot of experience with all of that and have seen God move firsthand with some of your classes, in those places. It’d be really cool to have a conversation about that. You and I could talk for hours on any of these things.

Ali:

Thank you for the introduction. This is a topic that I am really passionate about, partly, because it is a piece of God’s story in my life. It’s a space where my testimony speaks into why I believe in the process of spiritual formation, specifically where it intersects with mental and emotional health.

A great place to start is Ephesians 4:22, Paul says, “To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

When I read that verse I tried to figure out what it looked like to live my life for Jesus. We think, “Well, if we have a relationship with Jesus, we shouldn’t struggle with some of the things that we’ve struggled with before. Or that we should automatically be freed from these areas of darkness and shame and just feel embarrassed about things in our life before we entered into a relationship with Jesus.”

What I’m finding is that sometimes when we immerse ourselves in church community, more or less, or in God’s Word, we feel like if we just prayed more, if we just knew more Scripture, or if we just practiced what we see, what we just read, then we shouldn’t struggle.

It’s both. Of course God can do miraculous healing. Of course you can be freed from some of those struggles, but for most of us, the process of growth, the process of transformation happens as we continue to deal with some of those things. We continue to seek God’s way in them and actually go through what it looks like to grieve, protest, surrender, learn how to take our thoughts captive.

The workshops that I get to be a part of and get to facilitate, focus on unpacking family of origin, understanding sexuality, understanding our coping, shame, forgiveness and specifically renewing the mind. We get to do that in a group environment, which is really beautiful. There’s a lot of things that you can’t learn outside of relationships, and being with others.

That’s one of the many things I get to do that helps, women specifically, identify and really test their thoughts, seeing what’s connected to false core beliefs, or what’s connected to areas that God’s inviting them into healing, in order to learn how to refute those lies and then reframe it with God’s truth, which will directly connect to our moods, our behavior, our choices, the way that we can live our daily life.

Gina:

You nailed it. We have largely missed what spiritual community is and could be in the modern evangelical church. We can be alone in a crowd. You alluded to, I can come to Jesus, I can have an encounter with Him, but I can still come to church and look around me and feel like everybody else is living this life where they have victory in Jesus, or they seem to just be thriving with Him and what’s wrong with me.

If they knew what I was dealing with. That shame and that accusation happens. There’s that isolation that happens in a crowd where I’m too fearful to speak about what I’m going through and what I’m wrestling with. These classes give a safe place for people to say, “I’m hurting, I’m struggling. I came to know the Lord and I’m been walking this out, but I still can’t shake this thing.”

They’re in that cycle of trying to take their thoughts captive and they’re trying to do in their own strength. All this stuff that they haven’t really allowed the Holy Spirit and Jesus into those places to bring healing. When you say we’re made for relationship and how integral that is, relationship with Jesus intimacy, but then relationship with one another, because that’s where we can bear one another’s burdens.

That’s where we can pray for one another. That’s where we can do all those things. The enemy is laughing all the way to the bank a little bit, because he’s convinced us that that isn’t a safe place.

Ali:

I love it when people say, “Ali, I thought psychology is bad. Aren’t we supposed to stay away from therapists and, and counseling?” Obviously each situation, each person’s story is different. One of the things that I feel like God is showing me more and more is how to meet people where they’re at. I always try to really study and understand by listening and watching the verbal and non-verbal cues from people to see where I can get access, so to speak.

When you think of the greatest commandment you see in the Gospels, people say, “What is the greatest commandment?” And Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” Therefore God cares about our whole being, and that includes our mental and emotional health.

If you are immersing yourself in Bible study and immersing yourself in Scripture, which is absolutely necessary and beautiful, yet if you keep coming up against some of the same blocks or same areas where you feel like you don’t feel the intimacy that you desire or you don’t feel like you’re able to be you. You don’t even know who you are in relationships with others.

I feel like those are clues that maybe God is inviting you into deeper places that need healing and that need surrender. Some of those things can be unpacked in really beautiful ways when you’re actually willing to step into coaching, counseling, therapeutic relationships. I personally love human counselors that believe in Jesus, because you can come from a foundation that’s rooted in truth.

You look at it in a different way, because you’re basing it on the foundation of how we were created and that we were created in the image of God. Therefore we have these innate needs and desires that God put in each one of us and we’re inherently relational. You can look at your life from this perspective of truth.

When you seek support from a Christ follower that’s equipped to help you see some of the blocks or areas that there’s past trauma or there’s past pain that you didn’t even know at the time, you dismissed or just tried to not address. But now is the time that God’s inviting you to address those things and to really heal, so that you can surrender and step deeper into your relationship with Him. And like He says, grow us up into the image of Christ.