27. Being Seen: Seeing Ourselves and Others with Eucharistic Eyes

One of the deepest desires of the human heart is not just to be noticed, but to be truly seen.

In this solo episode, I reflect on a recent silent retreat at the Sacred Heart Retreat House and share how healing often begins not by doing more, but by allowing ourselves to be fully seen by God.

Together, we explore what it means to be seen by the Holy Trinity, how the Eucharist teaches us to see ourselves and others rightly, and how Catholic coaching creates space for deeper healing, renewed identity, and transformation.

If you’ve been stuck in performance, burn out, self-doubt, people-pleasing, comparison, or fear of vulnerability, this episode is an invitation to let Jesus meet you there.

When we allow Christ to heal the lens through which we see, everything begins to change.

In This Episode I Discuss

• Why one of the deepest human desires is to be truly seen
 • The difference between performance-based identity and identity rooted in Christ
 • What it means to have “Eucharistic eyes”
 • How the Eucharist transforms the way we see ourselves, others, and God
 • Why renewing the mind is essential for healing and spiritual growth
 • How Catholic coaching helps uncover false beliefs and create lasting transformation
 • The power of compassion, forgiveness, and surrender in relationships

Scripture Mentioned

• Psalm 139:1 — “Lord, you have searched me and you know me”
 • Genesis 16:13 — Hagar: “You are the God who sees me”
 • John 4 — The Woman at the Well
 • Luke 24:30–31 — The Road to Emmaus
 • Romans 12:2 — Renewing of the mind
 • 2 Corinthians 5:17 — A new creation in Christ
 • Matthew 9:36 — Moved with compassion
 • 1 John 4:19 — We love because He first loved us
 • 1 John 4:18 — Perfect love casts out fear
 • Psalm 51:10 — Create in me a clean heart

Catechism References

• CCC 2567 — God calls man first
 • CCC 1324 — The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life
 • CCC 1327 — Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist

Invitation for Time in Adoration

Sit before the Blessed Sacrament and pray: "Lord, please look at me with Eucharistic Eyes." Allow yourself to soak in His loving gaze.

Reflection Questions to Consider in Adoration

• How do you see the Lord?

• How does the Lord see you?

• What is making it hard for the Lord to see you?

• What spiritual blind spots are present that make it hard to see others as Jesus does?

• How would my life transform if I allowed myself to be fully seen by God? What would that require of me?

• What is one step I can take today to see myself and others with Eucharistic eyes?

Resources Mentioned

Sacred Heart Retreat House

Coaching Invitation

If this episode resonated with you and you feel God calling you into deeper healing, clarity, and renewal, Catholic Coaching may be the next step.

If you’re feeling stuck in self-doubt, confusion, fear, or old patterns that no longer align with who God is calling you to be, I’d love to support you.

Book a Catholic Coaching Clarity Call here to see if we’d be a good fit to work together—with Jesus at the center of it all.

Follow Carrie on Instagram @livingwholeandholy

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Living Whole and Holy podcast, where the Catholic faith and intentional living come together. I'm your host, Carrie Jane, a recent Catholic convert and Catholic coach, here to guide you toward a life that's rooted in Christ, centered in his love, and aligned with God's call. Whether you're a convert, revert, cradle Catholic, or simply exploring the faith, you're in the right place. Join me each week to hear inspiring conversations including conversion and reversion stories, timeless wisdom from the church, and practical Catholic coaching tools that help you deepen your faith and intimacy with Christ, cultivate Christ-centered habits, and be transformed through the renewing of your mind. If you're ready to discover and align to the beauty and richness of a fully integrated Catholic life, you've found your home. I'm so excited you're here. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

I was really inspired to talk about the topic of being seen. And I was really inspired from a recent retreat that I was so grateful to be a part of. I went to the Sacred Heart Retreat House in Alhambra. If you are in Southern California, I highly recommend this retreat. It's a weekend women's silent retreat. So life-changing, so beautiful. We had a lot of time and adoration. We had time listening to some beautiful talks from a priest. There was time for confession and just time for silence. So it was a beautiful experience. And it got me thinking a lot about the concept of being seen and the beautiful women that I've been working with in my coaching practice and how learning to be seen can cause such a breakthrough in our lives, especially when God is calling us to pursue something with Him when we're in transition, when there's a big change in our lives, when we just want to renew our thinking. So I just wanted to talk about this on here today with you all because I thought it was such a powerful lesson. I thought it was such a powerful thing that we did that we discussed in our retreat. And there's a lot of wonderful scripture and passages in the catechism that go along with this as well. So let's dive in. One of the deepest desires of the human heart is not just to be noticed, but to be truly seen. But many of us live exhausted, trying to prove, perform, be who we're not, fix, and earn what God has already freely given. And I just want to invite you to think about what if healing begins not by doing more, but by allowing ourselves to be seen? And what if learning to see ourselves and others rightly begins in the Eucharist, where we encounter love himself as a person. So during my retreat, we reflected deeply on what it means to be seen by the Holy Trinity and to see others through the loving gaze of Eucharistic eyes. So today we're going to talk about being seen, seeing ourselves rightly, and learning to see others and even God with Eucharistic eyes. Let's start with scripture. Psalm 139.1 says, Lord, you have searched me and you know me. So before we even learn to see with Eucharistic eyes, we must first realize we are already fully seen by God. Whether we like it or not, whether we hide from him, whether we resist him seeing us, he already sees us. He already knows us so personally. He knitted you in your mother's womb before you were even born. So he knows us so intimately and so deeply. To be seen is to be vulnerable. It can be risky, it can feel uncomfortable. We can doubt his goodness and his love for us. But the more we allow God to see us with his eyes, we can see ourselves and others with Eucharistic eyes. And this allows us to live a more fully integrated Catholic life. The beginning of our healing really does begin by being seen by God. One of the deepest human desires is to truly be seen. Think about your most fulfilling relationships. There are those relationships where it's not about being validated, it's not about just being acknowledged, but you are fully known and loved by those people. It's just easier. It just feels very complete and it feels very fulfilling. But many women today are living in what I like to call a performance-based mentality or performance-based identity rather than their identity rooted in Christ. And what happens is we end up on a hamster wheel of trying to be enough or fear of being too much, trying to prove our worth and what we do, what we have, and what our reputation is. We try to hold everything together. We try to be everything to everyone. But God is not asking for performance. And there are two women in the Bible who really are examples of this. So the first is Hagar in Genesis, in the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis 16, 13. She says, You are the God who sees me. Even in her pain, rejection, and her wilderness, God saw her. And Jesus does this constantly. He doesn't just heal our symptoms, he sees our hearts, he heals our wounds, he forgives sins. And John 4, the woman at the well, everyone knows this story pretty well. Jesus saw the woman at the well. Jesus saw her whole story before she even explained herself. And instead of shame, he offered encounter and compassion in her vulnerability. So because she was willing to be seen, because she was willing to be vulnerable, that's where the healing happens. In the Catechism 2567, it says, God calls man first. Man may forget his creator or hide far from his face. He may run after idols or accuse the deity of having abandoned him. Yet the love yet the living and true God tirelessly calls each person. We have a God who sees us first, a God who pursues us, a God who loves and truly delights in us first. And this got me thinking a lot about Catholic coaching. And this is where Catholic coaching begins, from a place of God seeing us and also being seen by someone who's sitting with you in a loving, compassionate presence. It's not about fixing, it's not about rushing, it's not about performing or doing more. Rather than resisting his gaze and wanting to hide, we are invited to create space to be seen. Healing truly begins simply because we decide to have the courage to let Jesus shine the light on our lives and ask some questions that we may not have thought to ask before, such as what is really going on beneath the surface? What wound is driving this pattern that I keep experiencing? What lies have I been believing about myself and others? What emotions do I keep pushing away or refusing to feel? Are the results I'm experiencing lining up with who God is creating me to be? Coaching allows us to get lovingly curious about these questions with God at the center of it all. And most importantly, being seen by God creates peace, true confidence, and safety. And these qualities are what create transformation and the ability to expand into what God is calling us to be in Him and through Him. So the Eucharist and Eucharistic Eyes, I just loved when the priest introduced us to that concept. And the Eucharist is so special to me and something that really was a huge part in my conversion. It's what really made me want to become Catholic. And the Eucharist is where we encounter Jesus most intimately in his body, blood, soul, and divinity when receiving communion or when adoring him in the blessed sacrament. So, what does it mean to have Eucharistic eyes? You might be wondering. To have Eucharistic eyes means allowing Jesus to transform our vision, the way we see things, the way we think about things. It means seeing ourselves and others with love, truth, mercy, tenderness, compassion, eternal perspective or a heavenly perspective. We're not seeing with worldly eyes, with wounded eyes, or with fearful eyes, but with Christ's loving gaze. It's a gaze that removes shame, a gaze that restores dignity, a gaze that gives hope, a gaze that restores identity, and a gaze that notices the rejected and the forgotten. And there's countless examples in the Bible where Jesus restored healing through this gaze in all these different ways. And what's really amazing to think about is that when God became man, he saw us with human eyes. He wanted to see us from eye level. He wanted to see us eye to eye. In Luke 24, 30 through 31. This is another example of how the Eucharist really opens our eyes. Jesus reveals himself to two disciples on the road to Emmaus by taking bread, breaking, and giving it to them. Their eyes were opened to recognize him just before he disappears from their sight. So the two disciples recognize him when he broke the bread, just like he had promised in the Last Supper. Do this in remembrance of me. Disciples recognize him when they saw him breaking the bread. And the catechism 1324, it says the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. It is the ultimate. And the catechism 1327 says our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist. And the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking. So everything flows from the Eucharist. It's so beautiful. And the Eucharist teaches us how to love because it is a total self-gift. And when we receive him, we are invited to become like him and we are invited to see like him. So how do we see ourselves rightly? This is where our mindset in renewing our mind really comes in. Many of the women that I work with are believing lies like I'm not enough. I'm behind. This is impossible. I can't do it. I have to prove myself. I have to earn love. I have to be everything to everyone. But God invites a different narrative. He says, You are chosen. You are my beloved daughter. You are mine. In Romans 12, 2, I mention this over and over again, and I'm going to mention it again. It says, Do do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's really hard to move forward in our lives. And it's going to be hard to see ourselves and others with Eucharistic eyes if we don't begin renewing our thinking. We cannot heal what we refuse to look at. And Catholic coaching often starts here with identifying our false beliefs, our lies, replacing those lies with truth, and renewing the mind and identity through Christ. It's a beautiful, beautiful tool. 2 Corinthians 5, 17 says, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. So when we begin to renew our thinking and our vision, we begin to realize we are not our past, we are not our wounds, and we are not our failures. We are who God says we are. We are his beloved children. Seeing others rightly, this one is a little bit more tricky, but once we allow God to see us and once we see ourselves with more loving eyes, we can see others with Eucharistic eyes more easily. There are qualities and patterns like people pleasing, bitterness, comparison, resentment, unforgiveness, division that often come with this distorted vision and are the result of sin as well. And when we see others with Eucharistic eyes, we remember this person is also deeply loved by God. And I think back to another conference I was at with Father Jim Blunt, and he was mentioning that when he was a child, he was watching something on TV with his mom and his brother, and they were showing a news segment about a serial killer. And the first thing Father Jim Blunt's mom said was that serial killer used to be someone's baby. And his point was that all of us once were someone's newborn baby, we were someone's child, and we were really loved and adored. And God loves and adores us in the same way. And when we see others with Eucharistic eyes, we are able to step back when we have that realization. You know, it doesn't excuse sin, it doesn't remove us having to have boundaries with some people, but it changes how we view people. We feel less desire to control them, change them, or wish they were different. And I will tell you from myself and the clients I've been working with that it brings a whole new level of freedom when we are not in this cycle of wanting to control and change and wish someone was different. Instead, God lovingly invites us to surrender our opinions and judgments toward them, forgive them, and intercede from them. Once you start becoming aware of your own thinking, you start realizing that some of the thinking you have about other people is judgmental and it's not helpful. Another verse that I think is really valuable is Matthew 9.36. It says, At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with compassion for them because they were troubled and abandoned like a sheep without a shepherd. So this type of compassion comes from the Greek word splagnizoe to mouthful. This implies a visceral, gut-level feeling of sympathy, not just a passing emotion, but a feeling of being quote unquote gutted. So it's a little bit deeper than compassion, but that's how it's translated in the Greek. And that's why it's really valuable to know some of the translations in the Bible in Greek or Latin. Jesus is inviting us here to have the heart of a good shepherd. And 1 John 4, 19 says, We love first because he loves us. We love others best when we first receive his love ourselves. It's very hard to love other people when we hate ourselves. It really does start with God first, and then us looking at ourselves more lovingly, and then we are able to see others from a more loving lens. So, how about seeing God with Eucharistic eyes? Many people relate to God through fear, performance, spiritual perfection, or scrupulosity, not trusting him, wanting to hide, not wanting to confront him, feeling like our sins are so deep that there's no way he could forgive us. But the Eucharist reveals a God who draws near. Someone who wants a true and lasting relationship with us that feels safe and unconditionally loving. And 1 John 4, 18 says this perfectly. This is the kind of love God has for us. It's a perfect love. Fear cannot lead where love is meant to. Healing begins when we stop seeing God as someone to hide from and start seeing him as someone who loves all parts of us and delights in nothing more than fixing his Eucharistic gaze on us. One of the things that the priest encouraged us to do in adoration was to simply sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament and say, Lord, look at me with Eucharistic eyes. No agenda, nothing. Just allowing yourself to sit there and let him lovingly look upon you. So I want to encourage you this week to make time to do that. And I also have some questions that after you've given yourself a good five, 10, 15, 20 minutes to just let yourself soak in his gaze of you, I invite you to bring a journal. Or if you're not a writer, you can also just have a back and forth dialogue with the Lord. These are some questions that may be helpful for you to think about this concept of being seen and seen with Eucharistic eyes. So the first one is how do you see the Lord? How does the Lord see you? What is making it hard for the Lord to see you? What spiritual blind spots are present that make it hard to see others as Jesus does? How would my life transform if I allowed myself to be fully seen by God? What would that require of me? What is one step I can take today to see myself and others with Eucharistic eyes? I will include these in the show notes for you to take to adoration. And I also wanted to invite you to meditate on Psalm 5110. Because the Holy Spirit, the way the Holy Spirit sees us is he searches us. And this psalm is create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. So the Holy Spirit really can search us and know us more and reveal to us all the places in our heart that need renewal. Healing often begins not when circumstances change, but when our vision does. When we let Christ heal the lens, this is where transformation begins. If this episode resonated with you, if there was something that stood out to you, if you are someone who has had a hard time being seen, and maybe God is calling you into a new identity, the next version of who he's creating you to be. Maybe he has put something in your heart that feels impossible, that feels like, oh my gosh, if I do this, I have to be seen. That's how I felt when I started this podcast. That's how I felt when I became a Catholic coach. And I want you to know that you are not alone. You have God always by your side. And there is support as well. If you are stuck in self-doubt or confusion, or maybe you are believing lies that are no longer serving who God is calling you to be. Catholic coaching may be the space where God wants to bring clarity and healing into your life. Sometimes the first step is simply allowing yourself to be seen. And I would love to be the person to support you in that with Jesus at the center of it all. You can book a Catholic coaching clarity call through the link in the description to see if we might be a fit for working together. I hope that this episode blessed you, and I hope that you have a wonderful week and God bless. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Living Whole and Holy podcast. If you're ready to dive deeper into life coaching from a Catholic perspective, I have a few spots available for one-on-one coaching. This is an amazing opportunity for you to work with someone who will empower you and support you to dream again with God, find more alignment, peace, and confidence in your life, and be the greatest version of who God is calling you to be. I would be so honored to support you on this journey. Send me a DM on Instagram at LivingHole and Holy for a free one on one call to learn more. If this episode blessed you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share with a friend. And remember, instead of doing what makes you happy, do what makes you holy. Until next time, God bless.