Episode 347 - Chuck DeGroat, "Healing from Within"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. In this conversation, Michael is joined once again by Chuck DeGroat—pastor, therapist, and author—for an honest and hope-filled exploration of what it means to truly heal from the inside out. Together, they discuss Chuck’s latest book, Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself and to God When You’re Wounded, Weary, and Wandering.

Diving deep into the heart of spiritual and emotional disconnection, the episode unpacks the journey of finding our way “home”—to our true selves and to God—especially when life’s wounds and weariness leave us lost or cut off from real care and love. Michael and Chuck reflect on their own experiences of brokenness and restoration, exploring practical wisdom from therapy, Christian spirituality, and neuroscience.

You’ll hear how our bodies, behaviors, thoughts, emotions, and relationships all tell the deeper story of our lives, often pointing us to places within that need kindness and attention. Michael and Chuck also reframe some of the most familiar questions in Scripture—not as interrogations fueled by shame, but as invitations from a compassionate God who pursues us with curiosity and love.

Transcript

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast. It is Michael. And today we are going to talk about another amazing book. One of my favorite things on this podcast is to be able to present to you the listeners, not just people that I highly respect, care about, and esteem as colleagues and or friends, but also the material that comes out of their lives. So Today we have Dr. Chuck DeGroat back on the Restoring the Soul program. Hey, man, thanks for having me back. Hey, you know, this is your second time, the third time you're on the program, you start to get Restoring the Soul frequent flyer miles, and you'll receive a quality pen in the mail for which we spared absolutely every expense. Yeah, well, I got a pen from a retreat that I was on with you a few years ago now, and I still use that. That's right. That was incredible. It was a blast to be with you. By the way, you have a standing invitation. Our next one is September. No, I'm sorry. October 2nd through October 5th. You always have a standing invitation to come and co lead a group. We've had some more friends back. I think you were there when Brad Jurcich was there, but Ian Cron now co leads a group every weekend. It's kind of like once you attend that and you get to see the transformation, you get the bug. And it's not frequently that that even I get to be in spaces like that where you see that kind of healing. Yeah. Oh, it's so good. Brad was there. Kurt. Kurt Thompson. That's right. Andy Gorn was there. It was such a good group. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming. And so we usually make a couple of books available to those men that we give as something to kind of equip them. And we're going to surprise them with your book coming up in October. And the book is called Healing what's Within. And I personally believe that subtitles don't get enough credit. So I'm going to take some time and talk about your subtitle. Here's the book Healing what's Within. And this book is about six months old. So this is your latest book, Coming home to yourself and to God. When you're wounded, weary and wandering. You covered all the bases there. Wounded, weary and wandering. That's all of us. And yet not all of us know that. Right. Yeah. That was inspired by an old hymn. I mean, when you read that subtitle, you can't not hear Henri Nouwen also. Right. That sense of coming home, coming home to myself, coming home to God. And so, yeah, It's a beautiful subtitle. As you know, we don't have a lot of control over titles. You know, there's this myth that we authors choose our titles, but we went back and forth. But I love that subtitle. Yeah, I do, too. As soon as I saw it, it just resonated with me. And interestingly, I'm wondering if that old hymn was prone to Wander. Lord, I feel it. And what's so important about that is that we immediately think exclusively in terms of wandering from God. But as you unpack in the book, over and over, it's that we wander from ourselves. And there's a fundamental disconnection there, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the disconnection that I tease out that you and I know as therapists is true about trauma, what we see in people's lives. But I think it's also true as I. As I tried to tease out in the book of a more primal story, a story that goes back to Genesis chapter three. One that is. That speaks to our disconnection, our alienation from ourselves, from God, from one another. And that's a story that keeps on restoring in our lives. I like to talk about it as the 1185 chapters between Genesis 3 and Revelation, chapter 20, and the story that we live in, too. And so that's, you know, when we as therapists and spiritual directors and others home in on what's going on in a person. I sort of assume beneath it all is some level of disconnection. Yeah. So you open the book, and the first sentence is the most important sentence in the book. Right. And every great novel begins with a first sentence. And part of my Asperger's quirkiness is that I memorize first sentences of novels, and I've done that ever since I was in high school. And your opening line is, 26 years ago, I was fired. And then you hit return, and there's a new paragraph. So it's not just a sentence, but it's a paragraph. So unpack the rest of that story in brief. And then why did you open the book with that kind of a felt sense of failure? Yeah. So what's really interesting is the book that came before this was when narcissism comes to church. And there's a story behind that. It's a really painful story, but it was not a story that I wanted to tell in that particular book. In fact, if people have read it, they know it's not a book about scandals at particular people or pastors or my story it's more of a general invitation introduction into narcissism and spiritual abuse. I was challenged by a number of friends, probably some people, you know, Michael, who said to me, I think it's okay for you to write a bit of your own story, and I think it would actually matter to your readers. Now, I don't go into it in depth, but the reality is, is that that's what happened in November of 2003. I was fired. That's what happened to me. And I lived in the bitterness of that, the resentment, the anger, all this stuff for years until I started doing some work in San Francisco. I had a therapist, an IFS therapist in San Francisco. I come in and I start complaining about all the people in my life. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, we're going inside. And he was the first therapist in my life who, without saying it, invited me to see the distinction between abuse and trauma. Right. Trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens within, as Gabor Mate says. And that was the turn for me. There was this thing that happened to me and I had to take that seriously. It was painful. And, well, the dynamics about that are in a previous book. But now how do we do the work around that lasting imprint of trauma within? So I want to read something that you wrote a little bit later in that same chapter you said. Insulated with activity and thick layers of self protective defenses, I lived chronically disconnected from any real source of care or love. I wasn't myself. And somewhere deep down I knew it. And I love that I highlighted it and I put a big star in the margin because I want to say thank you for stewarding in the same way that we steward our paycheck and we give you steward your brokenness and you steward that situation. And I think people will be really hopeful. And what I did when I read that sentence, you know, even though I've kind of been in the same place of decades ago, falling apart and continuing to fall apart, I exhaled and I said, oh, I have tremendous respect for Chuck. And he lived in a way where he was disconnected from any real care or love. There must be hope for me. And I think a lot of other people will feel that. So unpack that idea again of being disconnected from care or love. Because somebody might go, okay, a workaholic, you know, his head is down and he's not really paying attention. But really, you were disconnected from care and love. Yeah. And what's, what's strange about that, right, is I was in. I was in ministry in Pastoral ministry. I was a therapist. I was leading silent retreats. I was using the work of you and I beforehand were talking about Richard Rohr and Martin Laird and others like that. I was inviting people into that work, and yet I was scared of the silence. I had a lot of people in my life, and yet I was fearful of connection, real connection, the vulnerability. And so I stayed busy and produced and performed. I was out in San Francisco at the time and we were starting some things, a missional training center out there. And. And I was supposed to be the. The healthy anchor of it. I was, I was the pastoral care and counseling guy who is supposed to do the work of inviting people to connection while at the same time sabotaging connection at some level in my own life. And I was, I was in therapy. But as you know from the book, it took me experiencing a health crisis really to wake me up. I was on vacation in Mexico. My body had. The toll, had been growing in my body. We all know that the line, the body keeps the score now. But that's really what happened in Cabo, Mexico, of all places. I was standing in a shower one night in the middle of the night, hot water pulsing on my back in such pain that my wife finally said, we have to get you to the emergency room. I said, I'll be fine. And that was the monster I lived by. Even though, like you, I invite people to, into, well, to recognize the dishonesty of that. Right. But it was my wake up call landing in that hospital and you, you unpack that. And I want to come back to the body in a minute. But. But because you unpacked that story in the chapter about the body tells a story. And I love how you took the phrase the body keeps the score and you turned it a little bit to. It tells a story. And then it's so important that we talk about that. But first, the whole book is framed around three questions. And I knew the three questions because we had talked about it in a previous conversation. But what was so beautiful was how you contrasted how we typically hear those questions of God saying, where are you? Who told you? And have you eaten from the tree? We typically hear those as a shaming interrogation question. Like on the old Hogan's Heroes show, you would see them being interrogated with the light bulb, you know, hanging over them, and I'm busted and I'm in trouble. And you said, let's reconsider this. What if it was a pursuing question and a compassion question where God is showing up for relationships? So will you Contrast those. Yeah, Well, I grew up in a TR tradition, a terribly reformed tradition. I know I'm in spaces now that are described as more generously reformed, where these questions sound a whole lot more kind. But I grew up in a tradition where, you know, the Bible starts with God's anger. It doesn't start in the garden. It doesn't start with goodness, but it. But it starts with sin, and it starts with God's anger. And I heard those questions as a, where are. Where the hell are you? And what have you done? And lived in that. Lived in that story for a good number of years. And so that shapes the way. And you did such a beautiful job in your book of talking about God attachment, you know, the way our primal attachments to our parents shape the way we experience God. Right. But that's exactly what happened to me. God was not trustworthy. And so. And that experience of God really does shape a life after that. It shapes the way we behave, the way our addictions form within us. And so it took a good number of years, and it took, well, again, as you point out in your own book, the safety of people in my life, particularly men in my life, who sat with me with smiles on their faces, with hugs before and after our sessions, with kindness, to begin to get me to wonder, could God be that kind too? And it was in the early 2000s that that first question, where are you? I was leading a retreat in the early 2000s, and it struck me that actually may be a question of curiosity and compassion, not of anger, not of wrath. The two questions after that, who told you? And then that third question, have you eaten the tree? Which I've translated as, where have you taken your hunger and thirst? To me are equally kind questions that tease out that first question. But God begins as the, as I said in the book, as the compassionate witness. And as you know, as I know, in trauma work, what we believe deeply is that we're wounded in relationship and we're healed in relationship. And in the absence of connection, trauma deepens within us. And so to have someone, not least God, bear witness in the way that God does, moving kindly, moving compassionately toward Adam and Eve, I think is pretty profound and says a lot, speaks to the kind of work that we do as we bear witness to people in their trauma. Yeah, when I read those three questions and I saw the contrast with the, you're busted and, you know, you're in deep doo doo, and then versus the curiosity and compassion, I actually thought of being a parent and. And kind of being Away for the night and coming home, and there's a. There's been a party and, you know, certain child, which I will not name, was told not to have friends over, and there's pizza boxes all over, and there's a question about whether there's alcohol there. And rather than going, you know, losing it and going, I can't believe you did this, which is within my nature and my reactivity, instead, there's a sense of, you know, after everything gets cleaned up, sitting down, going, what was going on inside of you? Yeah. When you did this? And so God's curiosity is always about a pursuit. Right. That. That he wants to move closer to us rather than push us away or remove us. So I just thought it was so beautiful to see God's. God's compassion in that. And I think that's one of the things that therapists do so well, and especially you and people that have done deep contemplative work and exegesis around the scriptures is beginning to. To reframe a lot of the scriptures that for so long we've seen as, you know, God is dangerous. And C.S. lewis quote that God is not safe. You know, he's good, but he's not safe. Well, you can't have goodness and safety separated. Right. Because if you don't have safety. So I love that quote from Lewis, and I understand the meaning behind it, that he's always telling us to step out, but that. That's frequently addressed because people will be like, well, what about C.S. Lewis? You know, there. Yeah. C.S. lewis was not infallible. Yeah. So talk about in the body, you talk about. And I've never seen this broken out, this simply that the chapter is called Our Body Tells a Story. And then you broke it down to not how just our body tells a story, but our behavior tells a story, our thoughts tell a story, our emotions tell a story, and then our relational energy tells a story. Just yesterday, just yesterday on day three of an intensive, I was talking to a man, and he basically said, I had no idea, Michael, that these things that I experience affected me and my words to him short time later. And it was said, I think, with humility and kindness. But my words were something like, just based on the symptoms of why you're here, I could have predicted your story. And you tease that out in a beautiful way, not just in the relational energy, but unpack those different categories. And then I'd like to have you try to describe the diagram that you have with the symptoms in the middle and then the circle around it. Because I see in images all the time, and that'll stick with me forever. Yeah, well, yeah. The main image that I use of this is of a dashboard. Right. And on that dashboard that we live with as we're driving along in our daily lives are our thoughts, our emotions, our bodies, our behaviors, our relationships. And I'd probably add to that today what's stirring in our soul as well, spiritually. Right. But I think these are things that for us are early indicators. Much like on a dashboard, the brake light goes on. Early indicators. Why am I having intrusive thoughts these days? What's going on with that? Why am I constantly sad or angry? Why, why. Why do I have such extreme stomach pain or back pain? You know, these. These are indicators. These are the warning lights in the dashboard. And I talk about with my clients. Yellow lights, green lights, yellow lights, red. Red lights. Right. Sometimes my clients will say, it's just a. It's a yellow light. I've just noticed lately that I've been a little bit more sad than usual. At other times, it's a red light, you know, like I can't get out of bed. That's how sad I am. Or in our relationships, we'll notice. You know, I. I intentionally don't go to that grocery store because I know that so and so is going to be there, and so I avoid it completely. And so these are for us in the work that we do as therapists. These are those initial warning lights that get us curious about the deeper story of what's going on in the body. And talk a little bit about relational energy, telling a story. Because I think people will intuitively say yes, emotions, behaviors, thoughts, and even the symptoms in my body. But this is so important because out of those other categories of activation, we do develop a relational energy that we carry through all of life. And that's often where we encounter the problems. Right? That's where we hit a wall. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've had people on the one hand say my relational energy is perpetually oppositional and I'm just always looking for a fight. Or others who say I wake up in the morning thinking about who I can avoid or how I can stay away from people today. And I have others who say my relational energy is codependent. I'm a people pleaser, and I don't know how to have honest conversations with people. And so it's really important. Again, you were saying it earlier. For us in our work, those things say a lot about a person's story. The present reveals the Past, so to speak. Right. And it gives us fodder as we ask our next curious question with a client. And maybe a familiar way of just fleshing out this idea of relational energy is take your enneagram number, right? It's not just this description of who you are and saying I'm a two or you're a three or whatever, but saying there's actually an energy behind that that's related to my story. And that energy actually is telling a story about the past, so related to this idea of the body telling a story. And to go back to the subtitle, which I said, I love the subtitle in this phrase coming home. I've. I've experienced with people that when I use the phrase coming home, there's something that deeply resonates in them because we all know what it's like to come home. And for many of us, that coming home is not good. Therefore, the work is to help people have a felt sense of coming home. And they don't even realize that there's a reason why they can't just experience that, especially relationally with God and others and themselves. But. You use then the analogy, taking the window of tolerance concept and activation with our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, and you speak about being at home or experiencing a storm or experiencing a fog. And I love the simplicity of that and the color of the metaphor. Unpack that. Yeah. Home, storm and fog. It simplifies things because when you and I start talking to our clients about ventral vagal and dorsal vagal and parasympathetic and they get a little lost sometimes. Right. And so. But it's so impressive and they're so impressed. I'm so smart, right? Yeah. I love, you know this. In the spiritual tradition, weather patterns have been used for a long, long time to describe interstates. Right. And so as I sit with people now, I'm being prescriptive here. Storm is the language I use. I want to hear how other people experience it. Maybe, maybe they've got a different metaphor. But there are these states that we find ourselves in that are states of dysregulation, you might say storm, a sympathetic state, a constant churn within. We're not talking about what you're feeling on the surface. I have a lot of people who tell me I feel really calm. I'm a non anxious person. I feel peace all the time. Right. Underneath there's this chronic dysregulating storm or fog, which is in storm, by the way, I use the four Fs Fight, Flight, Fawn and find to bar the work of a couple of others. When we talk about fog, we're talking about parasympathetic state, a state of shutdown. Our body's going into sort of survival mode where. Where it's sort of like. We all know times like this where it's like the lights go out, we just. We end up staying in bed. We feel shut down. We feel we don't have energy. I call that fog. And there have been seasons of my life where it's like, I don't. I don't remember that. I don't. I don't remember a whole lot from that. Those couple of years there was. There's a lot going on, but I just sort of checked out of life. That's the fog. Now, coming home is really important because I learned growing up that there's nothing good in me and that I shouldn't trust myself. But humans have a homing instinct. In fact, there's this great book that I found a number of years ago that I was reading called the homing instinct. Sandhill cranes finding their way back by way of migration from Texas to the. To the bog that they were born on in Alaska. Right? Or sea turtles gone for four decades who returned to the same place where they were born. You know, this homing instinct. Humans have a homing instinct. And it's. It's spiritual, but it's also physiological. It's our ventral vagal system. It's our social engagement system. It's the reality that, as you talk about in your book, that we're designed for connection. That's home. And we know this is what I love about the work, is that we know that because people are image bearers, because, as I say in the book, they're made for worth, belonging, and purpose. We know that their deepest hunger is for connection, for home. And so for as far as we get from home, in storm, in fog, in chronic dysregulation, I know that underneath it all, underneath the pain of years of abuse, whatever the story might be, there's a quiet longing. And the beauty of the work that we get to do is we get to sort of find our way there. Sometimes to me, it's like this archeological dig that we're doing for the treasure underneath. And that's that beautiful moment when a client says, I feel it. Like I actually want that. But what we believe is that's actually natural. That's native to who you are. We don't have to conjure it up. We don't have to create it. The pressure isn't on Chuck or Michael. It's there already. Yeah. As Martin Laird says, and you refer to him in the book, both in the endnotes, the resources, and in the text itself, that we never need to acquire it or attain it, that we are like a person standing on the back of a whale but fishing for minnows. Yeah. That's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. So there is a part of the book that I think is important to discuss. And you talk about this. The energy sometimes that we're given, whether it's from a pulpit or our background of theology or how we were raised. Don't focus on yourself. And you've actually heard people, because your previous writing on narcissism say that focusing on yourself is narcissism. And narcissists are people that are really out of touch with themselves and don't focus on their inner life. So talk about the difference between healthy self focus and then unhealthy or pathological self focus. Yeah, I mean, I think you just touched on it. That's the important distinction to make, is that while we hear all the time that people who are self focused are narcissistic, the reality is they're radically out of touch with this core homing instinct that we were just naming it as. They're disconnected. I mean, I've worked with a ton of men in particular who are on the narcissistic spectrum. And while it might seem like they're self focused in the sense that they love the stage or the accolades or the likes on social media or whatever it might be, when you get to it and you ask them to tune in at some level in an embodied way to their emotions, to the sensations within, they're not quite sure what to do with that. They certainly don't like silence, quiet. They don't like sitting in a moment of silence in a counseling session. And so it's the slow work of shifting our posture to what's happening within. And in a beautiful sense, what happens is, as we do that, we become more and more anchored in what Christians for years have called the true self, which allows the true self. We know the attributes of the true self are not at all arrogant. From the perspective of the true self. We're talking about the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. We're talking about compassion and empathy. From the perspective of the true self. Well, from there, when we're connected in that way, we can live with a kind of abundance and generosity that is not at all Self focus. We've done our work, but now it allows us to live with joy and with generosity in a way that, that is deeply other centered. And so it's just a misunderstanding of what narcissism and self focus is really all about. Yeah. Thank you for unpacking that. I've often thought about, we would never say to a three month old infant, you're just focusing on yourself. Yeah, right. You really need to become more other centered and start thinking about your parents. And that's a cute way of thinking about it, but there is a. There is a very healthy and important way where it needs to be all about us. Because if it's not all about us like a parent to an infant, it will become all about us as we grow later in life. Right, that's right. And that's what people often think of when they think of a narcissist as somebody who. It's just all about them and that's what drives them. Yeah, that's right. So let's close with talking about my favorite chapter. And that was say hello. You. You do a little bit of artistry in your writing where you kind of set up, you know, you invited this person and you asked them if they wanted to sit in the front seat. And then you say, the strange thing about this is that I was talking to myself. Yeah. So there's a dialogue that is important for this healing process to come home to yourself and unpack that a little bit about. About how you began to. And learn how to say hello to yourself. Yeah. Well, it goes back really 22 years ago now. I was shuffling through the file CA at the seminary that I was doing some counseling supervision at, and I found a videotape with a guy named Richard Schwartz who introduced internal family systems. And I watched it. I thought it was brilliant. It was a very different way. I learned to do story work by Dan Allender and others. And it seemed to me, and I say this all the time, I felt like it was story work 2.0 or 3.0 or 5.0. Yeah. Because it was inviting. What it was inviting was, was a kind of attunement and attentiveness to these feelings and these sensations and going in, getting curious about what they feel like inside, how old they feel, what images come up. That's something that I began to do a long, long time ago. Continued in some my own therapeutic work over the years. But also a number of years ago, I was introduced to the work of Padre Gotuama. I won't say too much about him, he's just a lovely human being, a theologian, a poet, priest of sorts, who wrote a book called in the Shelter and who talks about his own work of saying hello to different parts of him that he'd disconnected from. Hello anger. Hello fear. Hello rage. Hello sadness. And I thought that's there's such a brilliant marriage between the two, right? That is a sensation comes up within you that you'd be apt to disconnect from. Just get busy, go on social media, whatever you tend to do, what would it look like for you to simply pay attention and say hello? Now, as you know, as I know, it's more complicated than that. And the work that we do around these parts of ourselves requires a little bit more training, you might say. But I do think at a very lay level, people who are listening to this right now, if there's an emotion, if there's a thought, notice how you tend to disconnect. And what if even right now, as you're listening, maybe you're feeling some resistance, you're just angry at Michael. What if you paid attention? What if you said, hello anger. What do you want to tell me today? Hello sadness. What's stirring within right now? We live in such a self medicated society, right? It's very easy to just turn on the Netflix show or take another pill or scroll a bit more or drink a little too much. And I think this is a very easy move, it's a very easy practice. Now, as you know, as I know a disclaimer here, it may lead to a bit of activation in you and if it gets too uncomfortable or if you find sensations or thoughts overwhelming, you stop and say goodbye for a little while and then take it to your therapist, right? But I think it's a really good posture for growing health and in human beings. Years ago, when I was working through before we called things complex ptsd, I was living in a high, high state of dissociation. And my therapist, well intentioned, said, you know, I want to talk to little Mike, who actually had another name, and I just shot through the moon with dysregulation and dissociated because I wasn't yet ready to do that and my nervous system couldn't handle that. So I appreciate the fact that you said, you know, there's times where we either need to get into a very, very safe space with somebody or maybe we need to start to read a book about that. But you know, it's fascinating how you do this and I do this, but we, we do take the Allender Story work. Integrate that with ifs. Integrate it with attachment. That's right. And then a trauma informed neurobiological approach. Approach. And the cool thing is that. And I know this about you. Yes, yeah, yeah. All of that stuff. And. And I've got a name for that. Integrated clinical soul care. But the cool thing that I've seen about you. Can I steal that? Pardon me? Can I steal that? I like that. That's. So it's a book I'm writing. Right. Right now. Okay. To the, to the public. There it is. Icsc and we've called it that around here. But I'm. I'm finally putting it into words. Good. But what I. What I've seen about you in the videos that you do in your reputation, in your books, and then working alongside you at the weekend is that you do that seamlessly. And a good therapist doesn't take off their ifs hat and put on their trauma informed hat and then put on their storytelling hat. It's a way of seeing a human being. Yeah. In this kind of holistic way. And my final shout out for your book is that somebody can read your book Healing what's Within and feel that weaving that you've done of all these different things. Because you didn't say, now in this chapter I'm going to discuss ifs instead. It's like a normal part of spirituality is you say hello to yourself. It is a normal part of spirituality. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know the work of Elizabeth O'Connor and her book Our Many Selves? I know the name, yeah. So Elizabeth O'Connor, this brilliant pastor of spiritual formation at Church of the Servant back in the late 60s, this Washington, D.C. church that, you know, Vietnam anti war protests. It was this incredible place of formation. She was doing this in spiritual formation retreats. It eventually became a book that's out of print now. I've tried to get Harper to let me be involved in reprinting it, but she was doing this in soul care retreats back in the 60s. You know, this is. Richard Schwartz didn't come up with this in a. You know, he was just. It's a particular modality that he uses. But you and I, I think probably in the way that we think. I love the way you describe it, Michael, because I think it's so integrated. When you've been doing this for a long time, it can't help but become just integrated within you. So whether it's contemplative. Contemplative sort of move that you make or an attachment move or a staying Present to a sensation or getting into a story. It's pretty seamless work. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I appreciate the fact that you said Schwartz didn't invent this. He's brilliant in terms of how he brought it together and popularized it and then trained people. However, we know a bunch of people who have gone to the scriptures and more and more they're starting to say, here's where you see this and here's where you see this. And it's, yes, it's taking a modern paradigm, but we all do that. I mean, the very first Martin Luther exegete looked at scripture and used the paradigm from that time. I'd love it if you closed us using one of the exercises first. Let me do another. Shout out. Another great thing about the book is at the end of every single chapter, you list resources, so you don't have to go to the back of the book to appendix. And then you have exercises and practices, and in one of them you talk about breath prayer. And I've talked about breath prayer on the podcast, but one of my favorite prayers, I pray it every morning, is St. Patrick's breastplate goes back to the fifth century. And will you just close us by saying those words in the form of a breath prayer? Yeah. So if your listeners could just maybe take a moment to breathe, get comfortable, grounded in whatever way you can. Let's just take a moment with these ancient words. I'm going to invite you to inhale with me and exhale with me. I'll give you cues. We'll just use the words of St. Patrick, this British missionary theologian of the fifth century, and just sit with this for maybe about three or four minutes. So we're going to begin with an in breath. Breathing in Christ with me. I'm breathing out Christ before me, breathing in Christ behind me, breathing out Christ in me, breathing in Christ beneath me, breathing out Christ above me, breathing in Christ on my right, breathing out Christ on my left, breathing in Christ when. I lie down. Breathing out Christ when I sit down, breathing in Christ when I arise. And then finally on the out, breath Christ and everyone I meet. Can I just say one more thing. About that as we end, Please, Chuck? Yeah, yeah. You might be familiar with open focus work. Les Femi's work F E H M. I really taught me how to envision space. The space above the space below, the space to the left. We're so narrowly focused nowadays. And part of embodiment in the world is imagining ourselves in space. And so I just encourage and I didn't say this beforehand, and I should have for people as they engage that prayer, to imagine the space above, space below, the space to the left, space to the right, the space within really just helps in that embodiment work that is a lifetime of work, as you know, as I know as someone personally was very disconnected from his body and continues to do that work of experiencing that space outside and within. So, yeah, thanks for letting me do that. Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you for that prayer. Thank you for the words and thank you with deep, deep gratitude for the work that you do, both your writing and your pastoral work and your clinical counseling. You. When I ask, when someone asks me what, what is the role that a professor is to be, I think of you and I think of the people at Western Seminary where you are, because you're not about just giving people information and saying, now go do it or live this life. You're about transformation. And also just a huge shout out to your program there, the new DMIN program, the different degrees that you're offering. So bless you program, a new clinical counseling program. That's exciting. What's the website? Www.westernsemsem.edu? How can people find Chuck DeGroat? Chuckdegroat.net I'm on the interwebs, as you know. But, Michael, I'll just say this. I was mentored into intensive work in the early 2000s by a woman. I learned everything not to do, let's just put it that way. I don't know if you and I have ever talked about this. No, I did a little bit of intensive work and didn't do it for about 15 years after that because it was such a bad experience. I often say, you know, I started doing it again in 2015, 16, something like that. But you and your team are the gold standard in that work, and I'm so grateful. And this new. I'm so intrigued by this integrated soul care. What is it? Integrated soul care, integrated clinical soul care. ICSC feels to me like that is. That's the next step, right? Like we. We're doing this trauma work, this relational, this interpersonal work, connecting it to the tradition in ways that are integrated, like we talked about. So I can't wait for that book. Thank you. Thank you for those words. I hope that our paths cross sooner than later. You have a standing invitation to our weekend, and I'm going to shoot you some dates for further out because I know your travel schedule fills up and you're busy, but blessings to you, my brother. Appreciate it. Bye.