130 - Feel Your Feelings (Map to Freedom)
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). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at chip@chipdodd.com. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at bryan@vothcenter.com.
Be sure to subscribe to Dr Chip Dodd’s Substack. He shares two to three articles a week. The topics focus on healthy relationship, personal growth, and leadership. Dr. Dodd shares content two to three times a week. To subscribe, use the link above or go to chipdodd.com.
Go to FREE RESOURCES at chipdodd.com to download The Map of Freedom poster and descriptive material.
The Map of Freedom is a diagram of the steps and the process through which we can gain when we reclaim our makeup as God predesigned us.
The steps and growth set us free to give our gifts, trust outcomes to God, walk in integrity, and lead well. (See The Map of Freedom in Free Resources)
The process of growth can overcome toxic shame, false rules, imposed roles, and survival scripts that block a person from being and doing who and what God designed them to be and do.
The Map of Freedom is not so much about learning something as returning to something. We return to how we are made, then we learn to use what we have “rediscovered.”
We return to stewarding how God made us before we steward what God has given us the opportunity to do.
What is the benefit or payoff?
By returning to our origins:
We remember what it is like to hope and believe how “things in life could be,” instead of always focusing on what “things have turned into.”
We are defeated less and risk more.
We can picture how the world is meant to be and work towards that.
We truly see the “glass as half full,” while dealing in the reality that we do indeed live in a broken place where “hearts break and people die.”
The result is that the reawakened heart brings light to dark places with faith; creative solutions to destructive problems with hope; wisdom to struggles that seem unfathomable; and courage to places of danger.
A child grows into the man or woman that God designed instead of what the world molded them into.
The fourth movement of The Map of Freedom is “Feel Your Feelings.
The first three movements lead to a person into “re-trusting” how God created them and moves him/her to offer or “give” to others they need and others who need you. And “give you” to God, who created you.
This “re-trust” moves a person to use the tools inherent in being human.
We return to the use of feelings as tools that allow us to be “response able” to life as it happens and to express ourselves in a way that keeps us connected to ourselves, others, and God.
“Response ability” is identifying and taking ownership of “where we are” in heart, just as Adam did in the Garden of Eden when he answered God’s first question in Genesis 3:9-10:
But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid . . . ; so I hid.”
(Genesis 3:9-10, NIV)
How amazing that God’s first question dealt with our hearts and the answer to the question was the truth of what our internal experience is—the voice of the heart.
The voice of the heart mattered to God then, matters now, and matters to one’s self and others.
The benefit of being “response able”.
Too often we “hide” out from our hearts rather than “speak” out from the heart, which is to refuse acknowledging how God created us as emotional and spiritual creatures, only truly able to connect when the heart is known and shared.
By knowing our feelings and having the ability to be sensitive to them, we can:
engage in life
stay connected to others
make decisions that are truthful and wise
This principle applies whether we speak it in the moment or are aware of our need to withhold from expression. Either way, a person who can feel is response able. A person who learns the wisdom of expression is fully engaged in living fully.
Please read The Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd for details about the eight core feelings, and their purposes.
The Map of Freedom is a path that has to be followed to receive the gifts we pursue.
When you look at the Map, you notice that the benefits of the far right are what we seek: We all wish to be able to:
give ourselves to full living
trust the process that God designed for living
have integrity
lead well
However, we cannot simply wave a magic wand or jump to the benefits the way we wish to. We must follow the course to have the fullest benefits we seek.
To “Give You” will mean that you will need to “re-trust” and “re-learn” what to do with the feelings that God has gifted us with to be able to live authentically and with healthy vulnerability that love requires.
Additional Free Resources to increase your “response ability”:
Please go to the Free Resources tab at chipdodd.com to download the following short articles for more details on feelings:
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center
Subscribe to the Voice of the Heart Center website
Recommended Podcast
Stories for Kids from the Spiritual Root System - with host, Alex Courington