Are You Still Here?

Wow! It’s hard to believe it’s been over seven months since I’ve written anything here. But the time away was necessary, and it’s hopefully oriented me much better for achieving the purpose I originally intended.

I started Interior Mastery with the intention to share what I was learning and applying on a topic that most of us were never taught well.

But that good intention didn’t stay simple for long. I started getting drawn toward what it took to get more engagement, more views, more eyeballs on a post, and that started mattering more than the study, the prayer, and the sharing. At that point, I knew I needed to step away and do some real examination to find out what had gotten disordered and why.

We often think of attachments in a material sense such as money or possessions. But that’s not usually how they show up. The more dangerous ones are usually not that obvious.

Often, they start as something good, something we take up for the right reasons, and then they get twisted. Our intentions can look good for a long time while something else is taking root underneath.

We usually notice something is wrong first in our emotions, not our thinking. For me it was an anxiety, or more an obsession, over the numbers. I was chasing views, engagement and reach on social media all with the seemingly good intention of “reaching more souls.”

It took a while before I recognized what was happening. The weight I was putting on the views and the engagement had become disordered. The numbers had become the focus, not the learning and the sharing itself.

Sometimes we think that experiencing the emotions is the problem. We think the emotions themselves are disordered and we need to correct or subdue them. But emotions are not the problem. They are not evil in themselves.

Emotions aren’t the enemy here. They’re tools, signals, even alarms, meant to get our attention. The problem comes when we give them free rein instead of letting our intellect and will engage with them — when we act on the feeling itself rather than what it’s pointing us toward.

This is one of the constant works we must train ourselves to be more intentional in identifying. When those emotions surface, that’s the signal an attachment may be forming. And when we notice it, that’s the time to examine what’s at the root of it, to identify whatever disorder is creeping in, and make the correction.

We should stop and ask the question, “Are You still here?” Is God still the root and the center of this, or has something else taken hold?

This time away has been very fruitful. It’s been filled with more reading, more prayer, and layers of deeper understanding from God that I’ll be reflecting on here going forward.

Thank you for reading. God willing I’ll be sharing more soon and keeping on track with a more disciplined focus.

Pax Christi,

Phil

“In a life that is almost exclusively active, the soul is excited, worked up, scatters its energies and, by that very fact, weakens itself. But for the interior life one thing alone is necessary: union with God. All the rest can only be secondary, something accomplished solely by virtue of this union and in order to strengthen it more and more.”

— Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate