“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout as well as eternal salvation-come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” – Norman Maclean
“The quiet scares me ’cause it screams the truth” – Pink
Fishing is one of the easiest places to accept silence and solitude. In many ways it is the quiet and stillness which make it an experience more than just an activity. Even now, somewhere in a mountain valley, a fly-fisherman immerses himself into the river as the once-snow now water rushes over the rocks and over his boots. The wind blows. Every now and then a fish jumps and the splash offers hope. The fisherman turns to notice, smiles, and whips his arm through the air to cast again.
It is quiet and stillness that invite the angler to surrender to the art of his craft: art because it is an experience and art because a true fisherman does not manipulate a catch. As Herbert Hoover said, “All men are equal before fish.”
The angler can lure and invite and coax with the sweep of the line and a dry fly but the trout rises when it and only it decides.
Just like our heart.
A woman left my counseling office, and I sat down as usual to make a few notes from our session. For this particular appointment, my scribblings were less about my client and more a caution to myself. Be careful, Luke. With an inclination to see who people are and who they could become, desire and hope tempt me to rush the process.
I will fail. Every time.
So as a reminder, I wrote, “This will be her work; not stirring up the past, but rather learning to sit with herself and letting the past rise as it needs to.”
People often make this mistake: We think we must manufacture our own healing process by forcing ourselves to feel painful emotions from the past. What if the attempt to manufacture past emotions is not necessary?
Memories do inevitably surface, but they are not the point of healing. The danger in making remembering the goal is that people force themselves to grab a shovel and hack away at buried stories.
Practically, this means someone sits on my couch and wanders through their memory bank trying to pick the right story to talk about. Or it means knowing the pain that wants to remain buried and finding every reason to resist its resurfacing. Neither of these approaches accomplish very much. On a deeper note, grabbing and digging only bring violence to what lies dormant precisely because of harm and toxic-shame. Buried stories are buried for a reason.
If digging and hacking are our approach to our story, we will not recover our heart. Instead we remain stuck. Stalled. Lifeless. Bored. And alone.
Counseling is not primarily about digging up the past or forcing ourselves to feel our pain; counseling is about learning how to be. Being is an art, as much art as anything ever painted or composed.
In the art of being, we are lost.
All of us have a “be” problem. We do not know how to be human. We forgot a long time ago. (And by the way, it takes a lifetime to learn and relearn how to be. Good counseling simply helps facilitate restoration along the way.)
The painful story of our heart stands in the way of learning how to be, and we cannot practice or learn the art of being without engaging our past. Wrapped in toxic-shame, the past wants to stay buried, and it will as long as we want it to. Our heart will only be willing to face our story when it is ready, and nothing you or I do against our heart speeds up the process. We cannot force growth or microwave healing.
So we must learn to slow down. Instead of stirring up the past, we learn to sit still. While there is no formula to healing, there is a context. In the presence of stillness, love, and truth:
Our heart rises.
Our story rises.
Our truth rises.
We must come to our story like an angler with his fly rod on the river. While his rod sweeps back and forth through the air and the fly hits the water, he cannot make the fish rise. He cannot yell, order, or instruct the trout. The fish, like our heart, rises when it is ready. The angler can only set the mood. Silence and patience invite the fish, along with the artful swoop of the fly.
To angle for our heart, we seek stillness in the presence of love and truth.
None of these come easily. Stillness is a process. And love and truth can feel scarcer than a secretly stocked fishing hole. But we need them. Our path of healing requires people who seek to bless us with their presence and truth spoken in love. It is in this kind of relationship we are invited and freed to learn how to be still.
Even in the midst of truth and love, though, being still takes grace, patience, and practice. As we learn stillness, we open ourselves to healing relationship.
God seems to speak to this in Psalm 46.
“Be still,” He says, “and know that I am God.”
I wonder about different ways we can look at this verse. Might the contrast be, If you cannot be still then you cannot know I am God. Or, if you cannot be still, you cannot know me in a personal way as God. I could wonder about him as a higher power or Creator, but not God in all of his personality, character, and love. To know God as Father. To know Jesus as friend. To know the Spirit as counselor and comforter.
To know God, I must be still. To know myself, I must be still. And quite possibly they go together. If I learn to be still, the truth of my story rises and the silence invites and leads me to cry out for God. Eventually in the mess of the truth of my emotions, I find God, not in spite of the feelings, but through their leadership.
But if I never slow myself and allow the truth to rise, I miss out on both. I do not get the joy and pain of knowing myself, and I lose my need for God.
We need God, and we start with our desire and pain.
In your pain, know you do not have to manufacture your own healing process. There is no need to hack away at past memories or buried shame. Instead trust the story locked inside of you wants to rise. Trust the kinder parts of your heart will only let enough of your past surface at a time, only the amount you can take in the moment and not enough to drown you.
Again, our heart will be ready when it is ready. We learn to sit with ourselves in the presence of love and truth, and our past rises little by little.
We simply show up in the process, open and curious. This is the posture of the heart in the presence of healing relationship. We come palms up, as Bob Goff says. The opposite- arms crossed and fists clenched- tightens our body and closes us off from what memories and emotions our honest being invites. Palms up leads our body to open our heart to engage our reality.
If you want to heal, if you want to learn the art of you, commit yourself to learn how to be. Just be.
Present. Still. Palms up, even. Full of desire rather than demand. Open. Known. Humble. Curious.
And your heart and story will rise, not wildly or in haste, but softly, like a quiet splash in the mountain stream as a fish hits the fly.
