Reverence as a Practice
Reverence is a spiritual practice. By engaging in the practice, we enhance our feelings of worth and awe. I have talked extensively about mental and physical health. As a Personal Trainer and Mental Health Therapist, physical and mental health go together, but to get a person to marry the two together can be problematic, often because of one’s lack of reverence for oneself.
Reverence according to Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat is “Reverence is the way of radical respect. It recognizes and honors the presence of the sacred in everything — our bodies, other people, animals, plants, rocks, the earth, and the waters. It is even an appropriate attitude to bring to our things since they are the co-creations of humans and the Creator.”
Too often, our Christian theology has us believing that we are all walking around as sinful, broken creatures, helpless without the grace of God. Original sin is the Christian doctrine that holds that humans, through the act of birth, inherit a tainted nature with a proclivity to sinful conduct in need of regeneration. This single theological stance has from my side of the chair both as a pastor and as a therapist has done more damage to people’s sense of selves than all the wars ever committed to humanity. It is often the key source of a person’s dysfunction whether the idea was actively taught in the home, or it is a belief that people have about themselves because it was civically passed down to us.
If you are a person who does not see themselves as a good person or even deserving to be seen as a good person, it is time to shift your perspective. You, we need to see ourselves with our flaws, but also with our strengths. Furthermore, God, after creating often exclaimed “it is good,” at the end, God said “it was very good.” Here, God is reflecting on what had just been created. With this goodness, comes our intrinsic worth and divine essence.
Here are some steps you can take to cultivate a healthier sense of reverence in your life:
Self-Acceptance
Have you ever done something so wrong that you think that you must be the stupidest person on the earth? I have, a lot. As a kid and a young adult with relatively unchecked ADHD, I was a bit of a pill and a pain in the butt. While I may have said some negative things to myself along the way, I was never serious about the words I said to myself. I knew that God loved me and that was all that mattered.
But many of my clients and many people I talk to really struggle with self-acceptance. Self-criticism often leads to misery. We suffer because we cling say the Buddhists. In this case, we suffer because we cling to what we should have done, or not done. We suffer because we were not enough, whatever that means. We must practice self-compassion to be able to cultivate a healthier self-acceptance.
Emotional Self Love
Emotions are hard and feelings are stupid. A lot of the why behind this is because feelings are so subjective and unreliable. Cultivating emotional self-love starts with our ability to recognize our emotions and being able to see them separately from our feelings.
Often, in my practice with my clients, I am working hard on helping the client connect their head to the heart. What they are thinking can often be different from what they are feeling. This is abundantly evident with someone who is emotionally immature. We must begin with mindful observations of our emotion states. In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, we learn to simply recognize the emotion and then engage in a variety of anchoring or coping skills to just notice the emotion without reaction.
Sharon Salzburg offers that “it is hard to sustain love for others over the long haul until we have a sense of inner abundance and sufficiency.” Cultivating emotional self-love begins with cultivating this.
Discovering the True Self
Perhaps my favorite philosophy is Existentialism. I love contemplating who I really am and how I have gotten to the idea of who I am now and how this is in alignment with who I believe I am to be.
Richard Rohr offers “Contemplation “helps us access our True Self, the part of us that is always connected to God. Contemplation teaches us how to live in this open place where we watch reality come and go. We learn from it and let it change us.”
At our core, we are loved, we move away from this awareness through the conditioning our family and our socio-religious orientation expose us to. Cultivating an understanding of the true self requires us to peel back these layers of conditioning, roles, and expectations to reveal the essence of who we really are. Hint, it starts with the awareness that you are God’s beloved.
Mindful Presence
In Buddhism, we learn about the eightfold path: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. This path can be seen parallelled in teachings of all the prophets of the Abrahamic religions and when one studies each of these points, one begins to become aware of how to conduct oneself in life, beginning the practice of mindful presence.
Cultivating mindful presence is developing a deep, nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. For me the question why and how come are the main drivers for this practice for me. Are things really as I see them, or am I deluded by some preconceived notion, am I flooded with an emotion, how am I seeing what I am seeing?
We must engage our senses fully in whatever we are doing. Each one of these senses tell us something about what is happening. It may take some training to reawaken our awareness of our senses.
Reverence of You: Practice
You are a beautiful creation of God.
“There is another blessing the Rabbis teach us to recite, upon seeing someone of exceptional ugliness: “Blessed is God Who has created all different kinds of beings.” Some people might recoil in horror at seeing deformity or ugliness; others might scream or make a face. The Rabbis teach us to recite a blessing, one that reminds us that this person, too, is a creature of God. Beneath the outward ugliness there is to be found a person who was created by and in the image of God. “Gershon Schwartz, Michael Katz
If you woke up today, say thank you. Then look in the mirror and regardless of what you see, smile, and say thank you. May you see not the scars, the fears, the selflessness, see the Divine presence. You are not only looking at you, but you are also looking at God, and it is exceptionally good.
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