Seth Haines's Blog, page 15

Waking, Week 2: Know Your Joy

I spoke with a world-class photographer yesterday, a good man with a good eye and a better heart. Society is like a camera, he said, and these days, our lens is fixed on the negative, the shadow, the pain. He offered the obvious example—the political vitriol of the day. He mentioned the angry undercurrent of the 24-hour news cycle. He read violent tweets from his timeline. He read some self-aggrandizing tweets too.

The photographer—he’s right. So much media—traditional, alternative, social—is...

Waking, Week 2: Know Thyself

“Know thyself”—it’s a Greek maxim, one which was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. It’s a maxim that appears with regularity in books written by modern-day self-help gurus, executive coaches, and counselors. It’s used with such regularity that some might consider it cliche, and though I’m a fan of taking potshots at cliches, I’ll let this one slide. I might even argue that “know thyself” is one of the most important maxims you might apply to your life.

Know thyself—what is it b...

Waking: Meditating Through The Anxiety

Yesterday, we took a hard look at the ways we lull ourselves to sleep. The ways we tap out. And I confess, I’m not exempt from this sort of tapping out. When stress, pain, or anxiety comes calling, do I turn to prayer, meditation, and the like, or am I prone to turn to other coping mechanisms? As much as I’d like to claim the spiritual actualization of a mindful guru, I must admi...

Waking: Why We Numb Ourselves

As I shared yesterday, I used booze to tap out, to anesthetize me to the pain of my own doubt. When the pain came, I drank. But breaking the bottle didn’t wake me forever. In fact, there are days I’m still prone to use pleasure to avoid pain. Even in these years some would call “sober,” when the stresses and pains of life come calling, I’m prone to chase appetites that lull...

Waking: What Does it Look Like?

I’m in Grand Rapids to read the audio versions of my first book, Coming Clean: A Story of Faith, and my next book, The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing The Divine Love That Orders a Life. I’m reading them in order, starting with the one sharing how I woke to my dependence on alcohol and how I moved into what I call “inner sobriety.”

Coming Clean represents my journal from the first 90 days of my sobriety journey, and revisiting this material all these years later hasn’t been easy. It’s taken me back into the expe...Cleanhref="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/se...

Waking: What Appetites Lull You to Sleep?

Last week, I fell down on the job and failed to post the last two pieces in the Creation series. There’s a good reason for this, a reason that involves a dumpster fire that needed a firefighter. I happened to be that firefighter, and after the flames dulled to smoldering cinders, I was flat burned out.

Generative energy—this is among the things you lose in a fire.

I’m back this week, and we’re moving into a new theme: Waking. It’s the theme we’ll follow for a while, in large part because The B...

Creation: How Art Wakes Us Up to The World Around Us

Yesterday we examined how the act of creation can be therapeutic, how it wakes us to the meaning of our more complex emotional realities. Creation not only helps us make sense of our emotional realities, though. It wakes us to the world around us, helps extract meaning from our physical realities too.

I sat with Sean Womack at The Depot—the best and only creperie in Fayetteville—and we “scraped the universe.” (Scraping the universe: Sean’s term for agendaless, free-range conversation.) We discussed his m...

Creation: How Creativity Silences Demons

If I were to name the season, I’d call it tempestuous. If you’re human, you know this sort of season. The adrenaline rush at two in the morning. The mind loops of arguments and justifications. The white-hot pulse throbbing behind your eyes, in your stomach, in the back of your knees. Searching for that mythical animal resolution, that unicorn of rest—this is how those sorts of seasons go.

The details matter less than the chaos, the anger, the sorrow, the trauma, whatever, particularly in my o...

Creation: In the Beginning

In the beginning and for the seven days that followed, God created. Heavens and earth. Sky and land. Animals and humans. You remember the story. And after the close of the first week of Creation, he gave humans the best gift—the ability to be co-creators in the world around him.

Painting, writing, playing the guitar, sculpting, woodworking, knitting, cooking up a batch of gumbo—these are all acts of creation, things we humans do every day. But why do we create? What are the benefits of creati...

Silence: The Final Word

Silence.

Count to seven. Listen only to your breathing. How do you feel?

I’ve been musing on silence as a practice this week. It hasn’t been the easiest week to practice silence because my own voices of inner-chaos are pretty loud. This happens from time to time, especially in stressful seasons. And yet, when I’ve pushed into silence this week, I’ve found myself cooler, calmer, more collected.

The practice of silence works to bring us a sort of waking rest if only we’ll let it.

So w...