Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture invites you into transformative conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Each episode, host Joshua Johnson engages guests who challenge conventional thinking and inspire fresh perspectives for embodying faith in today's complex world. If you're curious about how cultural shifts impact your faith journey and passionate about living purposefully, join us as we explore deeper ways to follow Jesus in everyday life.
Subscribe now and shift your perspective.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 323 Cyd & Geoff Holsclaw - Discipleship and Attachment: Healing the Way We Relate to God
Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw join the podcast for a deep conversation on spiritual formation, attachment theory, and why so many of us feel stuck in our faith. Drawing from their work in neuroscience, pastoral care, and discipleship, they unpack how our early relational patterns shape the way we experience God and how we can begin to heal. We explore the four “landscapes of the soul” (the pasture, jungle, desert, and war zone), how spiritual practices like silence, Bible study, and joy impact us differently depending on where we’re starting from, and how to integrate intimacy and obedience in a holistic journey with God. This episode invites us to move beyond a one-size-fits-all model of discipleship and embrace a more embodied, relational, and compassionate approach to following Jesus.
Geoff Holsclaw (PhD) is cohost of the Embodied Faith podcast, which seeks a neuroscience-informed spiritual formation. He is also an affiliate professor of theology at Northern Seminary (Lisle, Illinois) and a pastor at Vineyard North in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Geoff is author of several books, most recently Does God Really Like Me? Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With Us.
Cyd is an author, spiritual director, and pastor. She is also a trauma-informed, Jesus-centered, professional certified coach (PCC) focused on embodied practices and building a secure attachment to God. She co-hosts the Embodied Faith podcast, offering a neuroscience-informed spiritual formation. And she is the co-author of Does God Really Like Me? Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With You (InterVarsity Press).
Cyd & Geoff's Book:
Cyd & Geoff's Recommendations:
Shrinking
Subscribe to Our Substack: Shifting Culture
Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@allnations.us
Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.
Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky or YouTube
Consider Giving to the podcast and to the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link below
Subscribe today at shiftingculture.substack.com for early, ad-free episodes and more!
Jesus didn't call just heads. He also called whole bodies, because Jesus himself was embodied, and, you know, touched people and loved people and ate with people. And so how do we bring our bodies into the understanding of Scripture, rather than keeping them separated? You Joshua,
Joshua Johnson:hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, you know so many of us feel stuck in our spiritual lives, and it's not for a lack of effort. We read the books, we follow the steps, show up to the practices, but something still doesn't shift. What if the reason you're spiritually stuck isn't because you're not trying hard enough, but because your soul is living in the wrong landscape? In this episode, I talk with Sid and Jeff holsclaw about spiritual formation through the lens of attachment theory, we explore how early relational patterns shape our view of God by one size fits all. Discipleship doesn't work, and how practices like silence, joy and scripture, reading form us differently depending on where we're starting from. We name the landscapes of the soul, the pasture, the jungle, the desert and the war zone. And talk about how to move toward wholeness, integration and secure attachment with God. We get into the nuances of spiritual formation, the role of community and healing, and how joy, gratitude and presence can move us towards wholeness. It's a conversation about meeting God, not just with our minds, but with our whole selves, bodies, emotions and stories included. So join us. Here is my conversation with Sid and Jeff. Holsclaw, Sid and Jeff, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on. Thanks for joining
Unknown:me. Yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks for having us for sure. You know,
Joshua Johnson:there's a lot of people out there and you've been in this, this faith world, as pastors and spiritual directors, and in your thinking about neuroscience and faith and all of this, and I know that there are a lot of people out there that feel kind of stuck spiritually, or they're going to be stuck spiritually, and they're trying to do all the right things To get to a better spot. Do you see people stuck? And if so, why do you think they're stuck?
Unknown:Well, I do see a lot of people stuck in my work as a coach and a spiritual director. That's actually one of the biggest reasons people seek out spiritual direction or coaching is just an expression of I feel stuck in my faith. I hear things like it used to work, and now it doesn't, or I used to feel some connection with God, and now I don't. Or even, you know, something happened at this church that I was at now I can't ever go back. Those are the kinds of things. And so, yes, I think there are a lot of people stuck. There's probably a lot of reasons for the stuckness, but I think one thing that I have found to be truly helpful in working with people, and the reason that you know Jeff and I do the work that we do, is that often understanding the way that we have been shaped in our early years can help us to get an insight into the ways that we interact with other people and the assumptions that we make about the world, and often when we can become more aware of those defaults and those strategies that we are using all the time that can give us some insight into why we might feel stuck in our relationships with God and in our relationships with one another. What do you
Joshua Johnson:think? Jeff,
Geoff Holsclaw:yeah, I think a lot of us experience being stuck between, especially in the in the faith world, like what we feel like we know about who God is, or what the Bible is, or what we should be doing, and then our daily kind of experiences, and then our frustrations and our resistance. And I think in our work, we're trying to help people kind of take the step back from what's that, that immediate thing that it presenting problem, you know, and then kind of helping them step back and be like, Well, maybe it's not just like that little thing you're working on, like, maybe the stuckness is about, like, this whole environment that you find yourself in, and how you see the world, and how you experience God and others in yourself. And so we're always trying to, like, take those steps back even further to kind of look at that stuckness.
Joshua Johnson:So then take us back, and how does this? How does attachment and attachment theory work with our relationship with with God and our stuckness spiritually, as you said, you know, when we grow up, there are some ways that we deal with the world, and we find that maybe we don't have safety and security at home, so we're going to try and deal with the world by avoiding things, or we're trying to control things, whatever it is that we're trying to do. How does that way of thinking early on affect our relationship with God?
Unknown:Yeah, well, we like to talk about how when you're young, it's like you're born as a little scientist. And so from your earliest days, you're running experiments all the time, sort of checking in on who is available to me, who do I belong to, and sort of running these experiments on how close can I get to people? How close do people want to get to me? How often are people going to be responsive to me? So that's sort of, we call that running experiments of intimacy. And then we're also running these experiments, of like, how far does our independence stretch? So like, how far away Can I go from mom and dad and still feel safe? Or do I have what it takes to go out into the world on my own? And so as we run those experiments, it's sort of like we're collecting data, and we're drawing these conclusions, and of course, we don't do it consciously, but unconsciously, we're forming what then becomes these sort of defaults that live in our in our nervous systems, and they affect the way that we perceive ourselves and what we're capable of and who we are, what it feels like to be me, and it also affects The way that we perceive other people and how reliable and available and dependable people are, and then it also affects the way that we see the world, whether it's a place of adventure and opportunity, or whether it's a place of danger and fear. And so the way that we sort of form those conclusions in our early years then cause us to develop strategies to be able to live within what we perceive about ourselves and other people in the world. And then, of course, that all translates onto what we understand about God and what we expect from God as well. And so the good news, though, is that strategies can be changed. So you might feel stuck in your current strategies, but becoming aware of those strategies then can give you the opportunity to try to shift those strategies into something different. I
Joshua Johnson:think one of the things that's really helpful in landscapes of the soul, for me, is thinking about attachment, attachment theory as different landscapes. Can you just give me an overview of what are these, these four places that you think that most of us reside in? Well,
Geoff Holsclaw:I'll jump in. And then Sid, can you fill out some of them? Just as a broad kind of kind of understanding is Sid brought up this idea we kind of have these capacities that God wants to develop in us, that we connect with being made in God's image, which is to pursue intimacy with others, but then also to practice independence. And those two things are supposed to be growing and integrating within us. And so when we are raised in a safe, stable environment, where our caregivers are available to us when we're in distress, but then also give us courage and encourage us right, give us that strength to go out. And so there's that movement of in and out, in and out, and where relationships are repaired regularly, then you have what's called a secure attachment, or what we call kind of the pastor, the pastor of peace and joy. And we're you're supposed to kind of think of Psalm 23 but in some caregiving environments there the caregivers are inconsistent, sometimes intrusive, where you end up long term, having to focus on your relationships primarily. You're always scanning the world to understand, is this a good moment to step in toward intimacy, or do I need to hang back? Otherwise I'll kind of get yelled at or punished or something like that. And so you're, you're you end up overcompensating with that one skill of relationships, social emotional intelligence usually comes out of this. People emphasize intimacy, and we call that the jungle, where relationships can be high and exciting that can also be terrifying. And so there's, like, a lot of relational inputs. And so that's the jungle other people for whom their caregivers were very dismissive of their emotions, primarily, maybe they just kind of rewarded you for external kind of behaviors, getting good grades, sitting still, being quiet, being seen and not heard, or something like that. Those people will kind of tend toward emphasizing the skills and the capacities of independence, so they're very self sufficient, and so Outwardly they seem very mature. They seem very put together, but really they're creating walls against intimacy. And so we call that the desert, where they're kind of living alone, the there's no relational water, and then the third or the fourth, rather. So it's the pasture where the intimacy and independence work together, the jungle where it's primarily intimacy, that the desert which is primarily independence, and then you have the war zone, where you just kind of grew up in a place of chaos, and you don't know how these things fit together. Sometimes you rapidly switch between conflicting strategies. You confuse yourself on why you do what you do. You confuse others. People don't know. They feel like you just switched personalities immediately on them. So that would be what we kind of call the war zone,
Unknown:yeah. And it's sort of like so the pasture is the intimacy and independence working together, and the war zone is almost like intimacy and independence in competition with one another, like neither. As soon as you get too intimate, it feels dangerous, so you switch to independence. But when you feel too independent, it feels dangerous, so you switch to intimacy, and it's sort of this, nothing feels solid.
Joshua Johnson:How do. Does this work in your relationship together? Because I know you do a lot of work together, but then you have independent work that you do as well. And so how do those integrate independence and intimacy, especially when you're working close, like you guys are?
Unknown:Yeah, that is such a good question. Well, we have to do a lot of I have to do a lot of checking things out, because I fall more commonly. My strategies lie more in that jungle place of a hyper vigilance about my relationships. And so, you know, the joke from our early marriage was that, you know, Jeff would stand with his hands on his hips because he's tall, and it was comfortable, and you can't tell visually right now, but he's about, I don't know, eight inches taller than me. And so he's standing there with his hands on his hips, and he's just standing there talking to me, and all I can hear, because I have this highly attuned, you know, to people's body language and tone of voice, I couldn't even hear what he was saying, because all I could read was, you're mad at me, or you're powering up and you're sort of dominating me right now. And then he'd be like, what? I'm not doing anything. I'm just comfortable. I'm just, it's just comfortable. So we started very early on in our marriage, sort of having to figure out, like, how much of the work do I need to do in my own, you know, understanding and saying, okay, that might be what I'm perceiving, but that might not be what he's actually intending. And how much does he need to just change the way he stands, right? So that kind of carries over into the work that we do together. So like, even in writing this book together, we just have to be really clear on I have to say things like, you know, the story I'm telling myself about what you're feeling right now is this, and he'd have to be like, That's not at all what I'm experiencing right now. And you know, here's what I'm really meaning. And then, you know, needing to do that communication work. And then for him, I almost have to give him hints of like, okay, I need to have a meta conversation about our relationship as we're writing this book. Because, without warning, he doesn't go back and forth from relationship and task and so like, when he's in task mode, he's in task mode, and I can kind of navigate back and forth, like I can talk about relationship as we're working on our task but for him and I to be like, Okay, no, this is a conversation about our relationship, not the work we're doing. Jeff, what are your thoughts on that?
Geoff Holsclaw:Yeah, I think we we needed different like, very clear road signs, like, so for me, like, she just kind of said, like, I need at least a five minute, if not a full day. Like, hey, we need to have a relationship talk, or we need to talk, or, like, for parenting, right? Because we've been parenting partners more than, much more than we've been ministry partners. But like, we need to talk about, like, what's going on with the kids, you know? And I can't just, like, go into that place in a healthy, integrated way. Like, I need, like, a good, I need a good long on ramp before I can get like, Okay, I'm gonna have a relationship conversation. I gotta, I gotta check with my emotions. I gotta be open to other people's emotions. I need to, right? Whereas, if you just, like, throw a problem or an idea or or a brainstorm at me, I'm like, right into it. I was like, let's go right? So in our working relationship. Sid's the opposite, though, like she needs a full day of, like, you know, tomorrow morning, we're gonna go out for breakfast and we're gonna have a business planning meeting, and we're gonna have goals, we're gonna have strategy, like, we're gonna or and so I can't just be reading a book and then throw an idea out her and have her, like, engage with it, like she just is, like, I'm not ready for that. Whereas the reverse, we're like, if she's just throwing like, some like emotional questions or like relationship advice, I'm just like, I'm not ready for that. So, so we kind of need different, like, lengths on ramps, depending on what the topic is that's we've struggled in getting to that. We used to get in a lot of fights, and we'd also overwhelm each other inadvertently. Whereas if we just given someone a five minute heads up and a little on ramp, then it would have gone much more smoothly.
Unknown:And so the thing that's been helpful is sort of understanding the strategies that we both operate in most often, so that I can have compassion for there's nothing wrong with the way that he sees the world or his way of doing things. It's more it's just different. It's as if I have all the tools I need to live in a jungle. He has all the tools he needs to live in a desert, but we need to be able to learn to live together in the same landscape. And so it's that awareness of the strategies that he's carrying with him that I can then respect and understand, and he can do the same for me. And then, of course, we've both, you know, because we've been doing this work together for a long time. We're both closer to the pasture than we've ever been, and so we're both, you know, working on integrating those tools more than we ever have. I think,
Joshua Johnson:as you're talking I mean, one of the things with with my wife and I, we work together from the very moment we started dating. And basically, and we were co executive directors missions organization, like we've done everything together, and we've been married, so marriage, parenting and work all together. And this is the first year where I'm off trying to do something else, and she's leading by herself, without me, and so now we're navigating a whole new dynamic and relationship where there's a lot more independence, and so we have to work harder on the intimacy parts, which we didn't have to before it was integrated, it felt more integrated. And so as as things shift and change in relationships. So this happens in in our spiritual life with God and others. This happens in our marriages. How do you continue to to navigate the winds of change when you're still trying to integrate both independence and intimacy in a healthy way, knowing where you have come from and where you want to go. Well,
Unknown:awareness is key. So first of all, being aware that things have shifted. You know, even just the fact that you were able to name my wife and I are doing something independent of each other for the first time, and having the awareness that this is going to be a huge shift for us, and then having some compassion right for we're going to have to figure out how to do things differently, and we're probably going to make some mistakes along the way. So that awareness and compassion together, I would say, and then also just using the thing that we really have, the thing that helps me a lot, is really looking through that lens of intimacy and independence. And then also we talk about these three defaults, of, are people available to me? Will my distress be alleviated, and how can I use my agency? And so those are always a really good grid for me to be evaluating when I'm running into things that feel different. Is sort of asking myself, what feels like it's at stake right now. Do I feel like it's the availability of another person? Am I feeling a lack of like hope in thinking that this distress is ever going to go away? So right now, I'm actually working on a doctoral project, and part of me is thinking like this distress is never going to go away, like it's just going to last forever, and so having to coach myself through, no, that's not, you know, having to use the tools of like, okay, I know that. That's what's at stake for me, is this feeling that it's never going to end. And so that's the work I need to do, is work on that default of not only is it going to end someday, but there are people who support me through this. God is with me in it. So I have the availability of people, and I can use my agency on a daily basis to just do the next step, you know, and then, similarly, you can use that intimacy and independence also as a grid of like, what's feeling threatened for me right now? Is it my relational intimacy, or is it my sense of being able to do things independently? And I think, you know, I carry that into my relationship with God too. So it's sort of like, you know, even just recently, I've been in a little bit of a season where I feel like I'm not as drawn to prayer as I have been in other seasons of life. And so sort of starting to ask myself, is that because I am avoiding intimacy, or is it because I'm feeling like I'm value like, what is it that's at stake for me here. And I think the, you know, as I'm sort of investigating that, I think I'm coming back to, okay, so I actually grew up with a little bit more of a war zone attachment, and so I think there's a little bit of this sense of, like, I know theologically, that God is available to me, but right now, in this season, it's hard to feel that availability. And so sometimes it's hard to go into a prayer time and sense that, you know, I'm getting more silence from God than I am getting, you know, engagement, and that feels different in this season. And we know from a long tradition of spiritual formation that that's not at all uncommon. And so sort of using that, that awareness of what feels like it's at stake for me is God's availability. So how can I be addressing that issue, rather than trying to be like, I just have to pray harder, I have to pray more often, I have to be more diligent. But it's more like, what is going on that's making me feel like it's not as much of a draw for me, and then doing that work of it's the availability. And so now I can focus on, you know, what do I need to do to remind myself of God's availability, even though he appears to be silent right now? So
Joshua Johnson:I want to know about that. So if we're looking then with spiritual formation and what it looks like to attach to God and have a healthy attachment to God and a walk with Him. It can be, if we're looking through the lens of these landscapes, our attachments, where am I? There can be a tendency, I think, to try and make God in my own image and really follow. Follow after him, and so my view of God would be with with all of my dysfunctions within my past, my life, and how I'm trying to seek intimacy, that he would be distant or he would be close. It does. It's feels like it's in my image. How do we navigate spiritual formation, knowing that God is God, and I am on a journey with him, like I How does all of that shake out in spiritual formation? Well,
Geoff Holsclaw:that's a that, that that's a great question, and it's, it's what we're all kind of struggling through. And I think you said it just right is the research has said this, you know. And the funny thing about, like, psychological research is a lot of times it's just kind of like a lot of money was spent for a no duh answer, right? So, so your no duh answer as a pastor and a missionary fits with, you know, all the research, which is something like at the beginning of our spiritual journey, we often are drawn to God to compensate for what we don't have, right? It's the God's shaped hole in our hearts. And so that's usually like, whatever landscape we're in. You know, God is there's something you know, like we are encountering God, the Holy Spirit, Christ, love of the Father. However, it might be for our spiritual journeys, that's filling in that thing that we lack, and so we're really drawn to God, faith, conversion or something like that, and it's usually somewhat dramatic or something. But then over time, I think you're right, is over time, those implicit kind of in our deep in our minds, in our nervous systems, the implicit ways that we understand the world, which Sid was talking about, those default kind of ways we see ourselves and others and the world God kind of gets sucked into that slowly, which is what you were saying, that we kind of make God in our own image. And so if I'm a desert kind of person, it's easy for me, maybe not consciously, but subconsciously this or implicitly, to kind of expect, well, you know, God kind of is like the way I expect the world to be. And so we slowly drag God. This is what the language we use in our in the book landscapes of the soul, we slowly drag God into our landscapes, even though, at the beginning of our spiritual journey we we loved the promise of new life, of being moved into the pasture, but slowly, it's like we drag God into the war zone or the jungle or the desert, and that the and then I feel like that's where the real work of spiritual formation is, and so that's where Sid and i Our heart is. Is that people kind of get stuck on that second part in their long road of their spiritual formation or discipleship? Is that that first step is like, wow, like, you know, like, God's available, God speaking to me, I see all these changes in my life, and then they it kind of plateaus, and they get stuck. And I think that's like that getting stuck is when we're we're making God in our own image, and it's after a while, it doesn't feel that good. It's kind of like, oh yeah, distant God who kind of just has left me on my own, is kind of how I've always thought and and you can find enough theology and enough parts in the Bible to kind of prove that view of God true, or to prove a different view of God, like the war zone God or or a jungle God who's kind of inconsistent is, you know, in and out is, we can't find God is disappearing on us, right? You can find that too, and you're right. So that's where, that's part of where we get stuck, for sure.
Unknown:Yeah. So if you take the example I was just using about, like, being in this season of feeling like God is more silent, you know, if I but as I'm aware of my own survival strategies, I can recognize I'm expecting God to be, like my caregivers, who, you know, there comes this like, I keep trying to get their attention, but when they're not responding, I kind of come to this place of like, all right, I'm just not going to try anymore. I'm going to wait for them to initiate, you know. And if we do that in our life with God, it's like, Okay, God might initiate. But there's also a sense where God says, you know, seek Me and you will find me. And so there is this sort of discipline that I need to be engaged in, of continuing to seek, knowing that he is available and he is accessible, he just might not communicate to me in the way that feels like, Oh, now he's, you know, really here, and so being aware of my strategy of, well, I feel like I've tried to access God a little bit, And he doesn't seem to be talking to me. So maybe I'll just give up knowing that that is a strategy for me and that that is a pattern, you know, in my caregivers, helps me to say, No, I'm actually going to choose a different strategy. Then I'm going to choose to remember that God is not like my caregivers, and God doesn't stop communicating with me. He just might be communicating in a way that I don't currently have a category for, or this might be a season where he's doing something in me that is good for me, but is surprising and unfamiliar, right? And so that sense of like doing that work, to be aware of the strategy I'm defaulting into. And be consciously shifting that strategy to continue to seek Him, even though my default would be, I've tried now it's your turn.
Joshua Johnson:I think for years, the church has given us a programmatic view of discipleship. And here's the program. You walk through this, and it's a one size fits all type of discipleship model. And
Unknown:if it's not working for you, it's your problem. Something's wrong with you
Joshua Johnson:exactly. So then how does this work? Knowing that we're all coming from different places, we're all different stages in our journey, and we all really need different set of tools to help us in a relationship with God. Then what does discipleship, disciple making look like if it's not a one size fits all
Unknown:well. That's what we are wanting to do, is help help people understand that it's not a one size fits all. But it is also interesting, because some of the same practices do different things depending on which landscape you're in. So as an example, Jeff, I'd love for you to talk about silence and solitude, because I think that you explain that well and how silence and solitude can do different work depending on which landscape you're coming from.
Geoff Holsclaw:And let's talk about Bible study too, then. But like so silence and solitude, for someone who is in the desert, who already, in a sense, has an inner solitude, whether they'd call it that or not, or kind of an inner withdraw, like their first experience of silence and solitude might be refreshing, or it's like what they already like to do. I can get away from people I'm physically now in a space where I emotionally already feel but if you do that long enough, especially kind of a strict silence as the spiritual practice used to be for someone who's in the desert, what's going to happen is they're going to actually start experiencing their body in ways and maybe even emotions. So people in the desert usually have shut off their own access to their body and emotions, as well as the bodies and emotions of other people. And so they're going to start feeling like, oh, like maybe I'm a little angry about something, or maybe I'm a little sad about something that I've been distracting myself from. And so they're going to make that movement toward more of the social, emotional, embodied kind of aspects of existence that they've been ignoring now someone in the jungle for whom the social emotional reality is very strong, they're picking up on everyone else's emotions, their own emotions. Maybe they don't even know how to regulate or manage their emotions when they go into silence and solitude. They're also, in a sense, going to feel refreshed at first, because they think that they're going to be escaping all those people. They're going to quickly find that they've brought them all with them, right, internally, so they've changed physical locations, but they brought all that kind of jungle with them. But the work for them is to be able to then say they're going to kind of go the other way, which is develop the skill of like, hey, what I feel and what's in my body isn't everything about me. There's this thing called, like, spirit or soul or mind that is connected, but different, and I can acknowledge my emotions and I can acknowledge my body, but then say there's more to me than that. There, you know, there's God or there's spirit, so there's actually that movement, not out of your body. And we, we have the Center for embodied faith, right? We want to hold these two things together, but so the same practice can do different things. And I think the same is with like Bible study. So as a desert person, oftentimes doctrine, the intellectual life like that, comes a little more easy. And so like, actually, just studying the Bible is actually quite refreshing, and comes to me fairly easily, and it's very enjoyable. But something like meditating on scripture or putting myself like Lectio Divina, or an imaginative kind of situating myself in the story that's actually more difficult. And there's studies to show that, like that imaginative life is actually lower for people in the desert. And so that work is kind of hard, whereas someone else, more in the jungle, will have those skills, like they actually love, like devotional literature, spiritual literature. You know what? US people in the desert are like, Oh, that's all that fluffy spirituality stuff, right? They enjoy that. And then they're often more skilled in kind of that contemplative reading, but then they're not as skilled or as patient with more of a doctrinal approach to Scripture. And really, we need to kind of be growing and integrating all those things, but not, not in a way that it totally throws us off spiritually. So I don't have to give up reading the Bible for like, you know, information, and just do some visualizations of Jesus and, you know, prodigal son or something. But, you know, I should probably be doing both in the same for someone in the in the desert or the jungle, rather well,
Unknown:in the way that we can really grow together be in a body of believers is, you know, you're pairing up with people who are coming from different landscapes, and you're bringing different things to the same practice and sharing what you're both, you know, experiencing what you're both struggling with, where you're both finding life in it, and then seeing sort of like, Oh, there's more to this practice than I would have guessed. Impressed or imagined, and sort of having that participation together can enrich the practice for for all of the people involved. But the way we present the practices isn't like this is how it should feel. This is how it should go, but sort of that revealing. As you do this, you might experience this, and this might feel really hard for you, or you might experience this, and this will feel like so easy and great, but just because it's easy for you doesn't mean it should be easy for everybody, and just because it's hard for you doesn't mean nobody, it's not important and nobody else should do it. Well,
Geoff Holsclaw:what are these different discipleship pathways? Because not there's not a one size fits all, which is part of kind of the heart of our work. But there is a sense in which there is something that the whole community can do, you know? And we always say, you didn't, you didn't get to where you were by yourself, and you can't get out of it by yourself, right? So there's only so much that you we can do as individuals. So the community is really important. So just the community sharing stories of how we're different, but we can celebrate and have compassion for those differences. And then I think this is where other groups, like life model works, and others have have done a lot of great work, where they focus on cultivating joy in communities and so and that goes back to, like infant research and how it is that we develop as social, emotional creatures. There's there's just basically a sense that when you can develop the ready skills of gratitude, Thanksgiving, and particularly of joy, that those end up creating, kind of this foundation that then these other things can get built on. So whether you're in the desert, war zone or jungle, everyone can practice more joy and gratitude as a way of, kind of helping shift our nervous systems, our bodies, our expectations, into a place of connection, rather than being closed off in our own protective kind of landscapes. So can we create kind of environments of joy that? So I think that's something we all can do together. And then there is some specific work, depending on which landscape you're on, that you kind of need to do to move toward integration and move toward that sense of secure attachment with God. But then there's also that work of gratitude and joy that we can all do together.
Joshua Johnson:Gratitude and joy, seems I would start to embody this, this path, this, this relationship with God, more than if I just intellectually assent to, you know, the path of knowing how to how to get there. But joy and gratitude does something. It shifts something in me. How do we start to cultivate then joy? What does it look like to move towards God and receive joy from him? And really, can you just define joy at the beginning? Because some people misunderstand it with happiness and all sorts of different things. Yeah,
Unknown:well, Joy is a relational emotion. It's something that really either requires the sort of internal memory of another person or actually being with another person or with God. And we know we borrowed Jim Wilder's definition of joy is the experience of being with someone who's glad to be with you. And so we carry that as an internal model, if our caregivers were glad to be with us when we were young, and that's part of what gives us the courage to go out into the world and be independent, is that we sort of carry that joy with us. But yeah, it's not happiness is circumstantial, right? Or what kind of mood you happen to be in. Joy is actually the awareness that someone else is glad to be with you. And that can happen in the middle of great sorrow and grief. And even, you know, we look at in he in Hebrews, where Jesus, you know, he he went to the cross for the joy set before Him. And so he wasn't feeling circumstantially happy, but it was that gladness of knowing that he was making a way back to the Father that brought him, you know, through that suffering. And so the joy is a withness. It's a gladness to be with one another. And so we can be glad to be with someone else even when we don't understand them. We can be glad to be with someone else when they're experiencing something very different than we are. We can be glad to be with someone in their grief. We can be glad to be with someone in their achievement, right? It's just, it's It crosses all emotions, and it's that gladness to be with that builds that foundation of that sort of what it is like to be me. Joy is actually very close to identity in the brain. I mean, we don't know, we don't know if there's a lot of mystery in the brain, but it seems that identity and the place where joy happens are very closely connected, and so that sort of the more joy you experience, the more understanding of sense of self you have, and then that joy also increases your capacity to be able to handle all the other emotions that are harder because you have that sort of internal sense that I'm not alone in this. Yeah,
Geoff Holsclaw:I think, you know, a lot of times people will talk about, oh, you need to belong before you believe, and that discipleship is about community. And that word belonging, and we want to create a sense of belonging like that can get thrown around a lot like a value, but this idea of joy connected to glad to be with you, it actually. Kind of puts it right at the street level, which is, you know. You know if you belong to somebody, when you walk into the room and you see on their face that they're glad that you're there, you also know that even if they say that you belong here, when you walk into the room in the church, or that Bible study or your in laws, and their face and their body says that they're not glad that you're here, you automatically know you don't belong, even if all their words are telling you, oh no, we love that you're here. We're so glad that it's like you we like our bodies know you're lying, right? So that's why we focus on like joy and the sense of delight in being with somebody. And we, you know, we go to to Luke 15, the story of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost sons, often called the prodigal son, where the whole point is Jesus is trying to explain to the Pharisees why he's dining with sinners. And the whole punchline of each one of those is all of Heaven rejoices when one of these come back, when one of these repent, all of Heaven is throwing a party. All of heaven is now glad that this one sinner has returned. And so that's, you know, that's what it means to belong, and that's how we have a sense of belonging. And so that's why we talk about joy and gratitude and thankfulness is because that's kind of like that ground level sense of belonging. And
Joshua Johnson:I think that's, it's necessary for our lives and our relationships, our relationship with God like that's that's pretty foundational, and it reminds me of belovedness. I'm a child of God, and that's where I receive joy in that and then that becomes my identity. That's who I am, and I could live then from a place of joy and identity in the world. And man, I feel unstoppable at that point, because, hey, God delights in me no matter what. And I'm a child of God, it's pretty amazing. You know, one of the things that our church is trying to figure out is we're in a moment of we want to focus, focus on what we're supposed to be doing, which is discipleship, disciple making, being disciples and making disciples. And for some people, it feels like there's two different distinct pathways of discipleship. One is towards the independence of making more disciples, obeying the commands of Jesus, just doing the work and just going out there. And for others, it is more intimacy. It is deepening your relational component with God, or your relationship with God, your intimacy with God, and then your intimacy with others, and being able to to be intimate with each other and have good relational health. And there feels to be like two different pathways, but in something like John 15, I feel like it's integrated, right? If you abide in My love, Jesus says to disciples, He will obey my commands. If you obey my commands, you're going to abide in My love. Like it feels symbiotic, and it doesn't feel like there are two pathways. How do we integrate then those two pathways for emotional, spiritual health as we move towards our relationship with each other and God,
Unknown:well, I think the first step is to say neither pathway is the best and neither pathway pathway is the worst, right? So in that sense of like we have these two pathways, there's a good reason they're there, because that's really all of that is Kingdom work. That's all really important. And so valuing the people who naturally want to get busy, right and go, like, I'm part of God's family business, let's get to work, and valuing the people who are like, I just want to be with God. It's sort of the martha mary paradox, but it's, I think that, that it's going to come to a point where we like to talk about, you know, God meets us through some practices and through some activities, and then he moves us through other ones. And so if you think about the things that are natural, that come naturally to you, that you say, this is how I want to live out my life with God. That's places where God is meeting you in the places that are already familiar or coming naturally. But then it goes, God also wants to move you deeper and further into the pasture by taking up your cross and following him into the things that are less comfortable and are you know harder for you or feel less important to you even. And so bringing those two pathways together, I think, at the base, requires each of the people who are being formed in discipleship to have a moment where they have to say, I do choose to die to myself and take on the things that are not going to be comfortable for me, because I know that God has more for me. And so part of the work of of discipleship formation is understanding that you know life, life can be easy and you can follow Jesus, but they don't always happen at the same time, right? Like life isn't going to be easy as you follow Jesus all the time. And so that sort of what is. Your level of willingness to say, you know, I will be uncomfortable for the sake of my Savior.
Geoff Holsclaw:I think one, I totally agree with what you were saying, that sometimes there seems to be a dichotomy, or some opposition between discipleship language and spiritual formation language. I see that quite a bit, and I think you're right that they do kind of tend toward, like, intimacy and independence. You know, Sid's a spiritual director. She's trained that way, right? And so she's more in the spiritual formation world, right? So she'll often talk about, like, well, what is God inviting us into? Right? It's very like open handed. It's very like intimacy producing, what's God inviting and then, you know, I come from independent Bible, Baptist discipleship, kind of models, right? And so sometimes I want to counter with like, Well, how do we just need to obey, right? You know, which is kind of goes more into that rules the law, and then my agency, right? Or independence, like, it's willpower, but those things shouldn't be opposed, right? Sometimes, certainly, Jesus is always inviting us onto the gentle way, you know, with his light burdens, and then other times, in the same way, he's also asking us to be obedient, right? This. So how can we bring those two things together? Sid, and I have we also kind of, you know, she's like, wants to focus on the human being, and we're not human doings. But then I'm also like, but, but we're supposed to do stuff, right, you know? So, so there is that tug of war, but really, I think you're right, there should be more integration, which is our goal. And so that's why we kind of rely on some of the attachment science. But then we also, you know, you see it all over in Scripture, we go back to being made in the image of God, that certainly we are made for intimacy with God and communion with God, and there's all that language. But then we're also made to be image bearers out into the world. We're extending God's kingdom in some fashion. We're heralds. We're royal representatives of God's rule and reign, and that we're partners with God, who kind of make a beautiful new world in partnership with God. And so how do we, you know, we're children of God, who's also, and Sid used this language already, who's been entrusted with the share of the family business. And the family business of God is bringing God's kingdom to the world, or in other ways that you were talking about in John 15 is, you know, extending God's love, like, how can we just be better lovers of all of God's creation
Unknown:together, and maybe like to boil it down to something really tangible and concrete would be like. So an integration of those two pathways might be like, Okay, how do we read Scripture together? Because the people that want to go and make disciples have to be able to communicate how we read the Bible, and the people who just want to be with Jesus are also hopefully reading the Bible, right? So if we talk about like, when we read the Bible, there are, there are different ways of reading the Bible, and we can actually do both some of those ways at the same time, right? So maybe even, okay, let's dig into this text. Let's look at all of the different patterns we see. Let's look at these words that are used and where else they're used in Scripture. Let's do all of that, but then let's take a pause, and let's consider, how am I receiving what I'm hearing right now? How is this affecting me? And what am I noticing, as far as like things that are getting kicked up for me, and where do I feel resistance? Where do I feel invitation? Where do I feel like this is good news that I can really absorb and sink in? And where am I really confronted by this? Like this doesn't feel good. And so allowing the study and the sort of logical, linear work of looking at what the Bible is saying, but then also allowing it to speak on another level of you know, Jesus didn't call just heads. He also called whole bodies, because Jesus himself was embodied, and, you know, touched people and loved people and ate with people. And so how do we bring our bodies into the understanding of Scripture, rather than keeping them separated? And so that would be one way to integrate just a simple thing, like, hopefully we're all reading our Bibles. Can we all be reading them on different in different ways, and not just in the one way that we
Joshua Johnson:that we know? It seems to me that within these these different landscapes, they could be individual, but they could also be family. They could also be a church. Landscape. The church is like this. It could also be our our city or community, and it also be our nation. Feels like there's different landscapes that we all like, gravitate towards, or we've we've been in this, this fear mode in America for a long time, and where things are based out of fear and a scarcity model, which I don't know why we have scarcity when we have really we have abundance. And there's a there's so much stuff that we have, but so how do we then break those cycles? Because it seems to me like all of these things then cycle into either the next generation or the. People around us. How do we break a cycle to move us all towards the pasture and not get stuck in the deserts or the jungle or the war zone?
Unknown:Well, I think the first thing we need to do is be explicit about it, right? So we talk about like, explicit. It's the things you can talk about. It's the things you know you know, or you know you don't know. And then there's the implicit, is the stuff that you're unaware of, or the stuff that you just sort of act impulsively out of. And so, you know, part of the way that, part of the way that we wrote the book, was to try to help people become more explicit or have better language or understanding of frameworks to understand how they're living out of defaults, because once you can bring that up into your level of awareness and be explicit about it and talk about it with other people in your community, so you're not just learning it for yourself, but you're also communicating with other people, saying, I'm noticing this about myself, and I'm learning this as my default, and this is my strategy, and being able to communicate about that, and then being able to intentionally say, but this strategy worked for me in the past, and I needed it, but it's not working anymore, and I don't need it anymore. And this strategy is basically me trying to protect myself in one way or another. And instead of protecting myself, I want to make the choice to learn to connect, right, to connect to God's joy, to learn to connect to relational joy. And so there's that sort of intentional shift. And without intentional shifts, we will pass on everything that we are living out of. And without intentionally trying to come up with understanding and awareness and like language around it, sharing that in community, making some intentional shifts and practicing those shifts that then they will sink down again into a level of implicit ways of being where we don't have to think so hard anymore, because it's like we've run new experiments, we've collected new data, we've drawn new conclusions, and now it's sort of like we've updated our strategies to make sense in the kingdom of God, rather than in the kingdom of self.
Geoff Holsclaw:I love, well, one I love. You know, the name of this podcast is shifting culture, and there is a way to kind of look at the big macro culture of like Western culture. And this is a whole nother kind of podcast, but it's created these lopsided discipleship programs, I think because in the West, we could say there's kind of been this kind of an entire desert mentality over rationalized, disembodied, kind of really pressed into the scientific, kind of reductionistic view of the world, you know, that's kind of created like a desert mentality with its own desert discipleship pathways that were kind of raised up as the way or leading us into the pasture, but they weren't. They were just lopsided. And then within that, of course, you have people reacting against that in a way that maybe overreacted. So then they just go to the jungle like, oh, it's not about, you know, the mind or the doctrine or truth, like, it's about feelings and emotions and experiencing God. And so then we kind of over corrected. And so I think there's a lot of church pockets that kind of went that way and kind of moved into the jungle. And I would say, as a whole culture, this is just my view, that in the last 50 plus years, I think our whole culture in the West is rapidly, like, headed toward the jungle, or we're just kind of like, but that's a whole nother thing, right? Which will kind of create its own other counteractions, counter reactions, right? And so I think just acknowledging that we've had a lot of reactions and counter reactions within the jungle and desert in the West that have created these very lopsided discipleship pathways that then create their own lopsided reactions. And so we're just trying to understand that and then say, I think, you know, the science and Scripture is saying there's an integrated way to move forward. And can we, can we do that together and be a little more generous and open handed and compassionate to one another and the different places we're all coming from, but then build off of each other's strengths while we support each other's weaknesses. Is, I think, kind of the hope that we have that's
Joshua Johnson:great, and we'll get into some ways that people can engage, that those the integrated things in things that you're providing, which is landscapes of the soul this book, and some other things that you guys could be doing. But before that, we have, I have a couple questions I'd like to ask at the end. So this is for both of you. If you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Geoff Holsclaw:I think for me, I think it would be to realize that it's good for me to be very like goal focused. But not everyone is like that. I think, like I brought into our marriage and then parenting, kind of like, if someone's like, oh, I have a goal. I want to do this, I was like, Okay, I will help you do that. And then I would get more excited about it than they were, and then I'd kind of ruin it for him, or something like that. So I think it's very that high independence side. I. Of me. That's kind of where I came from, and I had to round out the intimacy. So I think kind of maybe that would have been helpful to know a little more explicitly, a little earlier on. Yeah, so I guess that's off the top of my head. Maybe something else will emerge.
Unknown:Yeah, mine would be very different. I didn't know Jeff. I'm older than Jeff, so when I was 21 I was dating someone that I had no business dating. So I would have said to myself, quit, like, stop dating this guy right now. Don't waste another moment with him. And I also would have just said, just relax. Like, I think I had so much anxiety about my future and anxiety about relationships and just sort of overthinking everything. So I think I think I would have just wanted to say to myself, relax, you're going to be okay.
Joshua Johnson:Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you guys could recommend,
Geoff Holsclaw:you know, we really liked, is it called shrinking. So it's about their therapist is on Apple TV. Kind of just the everyday lives of therapists. That was pretty entertaining. We kind of like the light fare, because, you know, our lives can be very serious in our real life, so then we're always kind of looking for a little entertainment.
Unknown:I've just been reading a lot of fiction by an author that I just found recently who does a really nice job of doing really great character development, but then also integrates, like difficult faith issues that her characters are having I'm not usually a fan of Christian fiction, but I really like hers. So her name is Lynn Austin, and I've sort of been reading book after book of hers and finding just the way that she handles issues of faith to be really refreshing. Great.
Joshua Johnson:That's good. Sid and Jeff's new book, landscapes of the soul is available August 5, right? Anywhere you get, get your books. So go out and get this. It's a fantastic read, and it's helpful, right, to make things explicit so that we can start to talk about these things, navigate our landscapes, know where we're where we're from, know where we're going, and headed towards the pasture so that we could have a joyful attachment to God and to others in our relationships. It's a it's a great, great book. Is there anywhere else that you would like to point people to, anything that you would want them to know about? Yeah, you
Geoff Holsclaw:can find our podcast, my sub stack, and kind of all the trainings we do at embodied faith, dot life. Embodied faith is one word and then dot life, so that's kind of where you can find all the stuff
Joshua Johnson:that we're doing. Great. Sounds good? Well said, Jeff, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you for taking us into these different landscapes and helping us navigate what it looks like in spiritual formation, our interpersonal relationships and our relationship with God, it was fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed it. So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. You
