The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). To consult or setup a session with Bryan, you can e-mail bryan@vothcenter.com.
Episode Highlights:
The Needs of the Heart by Chip Dodd
“We must continue to rediscover and surrender to the reality that we are emotional and spiritual creatures, not slugs, raccoons, rats, birds or scorpions. Do you get it? Those things get by on essential provisional existence. We're made for more than provisional existence. We're made to live fully. We're made for more than survival and instinct. We are created to be guided and to guide.” -The Needs of the Heart, Chapter 9
Neediness is the key that unlocks the treasure trove of God.
Neediness “allows” God to:
- Meet us in our dreams
- Touch us in our desires.
- Address our longings for a world that we can’t create, but we long to make it better. • Continue to maintain hope that the future can be different than the present.
- Return to a place that was better than where we are now.
When we stop only being grateful for our provision and equate love with provision only, we stop our imagining having more than what we were given already.
When a person says their parents were great because I had food, water, shelter, and clothing, then you have stopped your imagination and you’ve stopped yourself from feeling the rest of what’s true. You stopped yourself from feeling sadness, from acknowledging hurt, loneliness, or fear. Once you stop your feelings, you stop acknowledgement of needing.
Guidance is neediness and the need to learn.
“Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.” Jeremiah 17:5-8
The heart of guidance is the willingness to recognize you need help.
When we run from how we are made, we wind up doing things that:
- end up being nonsensical (not connected to our senses/feelings.)
- we do things that we think are very raLonal, but they are crazy, because we try to use the rational to avoid how we are made.
- we run away from the solution.
The solution is to admit the pain.
Hurt people…hurt people. Hurt people who don’t admit hurt, harm people.
Our shame and defensiveness keeps us from asking for help and guidance.
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Living with Heart: From Birth to Death 