Lament + Light

Episode 5.5: Your Body Is Not Your Enemy: What the Psalms Actually Do to Your Nervous System

Most of us were taught the Psalms as inspiration. Beautiful, ancient poetry to lift us when we feel low. But David was not writing inspiration. He was processing. He brought his fear, his rage, his grief, his abandonment — raw, unfiltered, completely unpolished — and he voiced it to God. Not the cleaned-up version. The real one. And what modern neuroscience is now confirming is that what David was doing in those Psalms was not just spiritually significant. It was physiologically significant. He was metabolizing his pain — moving it through his body and his soul with God — in a way that actually changed him from the inside out. In this episode, I am sitting with something that surfaced powerfully in the last two Seen in the Wilderness sessions. Many of the women in that room could not name what they were feeling. Some felt shame about that. And I want to address it directly — because what was happening in that room was not a spiritual failure. It was a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. We are going to talk about: * Why so many of us disconnected from our bodies in the first place, and why that was never weakness * What actually happens when your body starts to wake up during healing, and why it feels like your body is attacking you * The theology underneath all of this: Incarnation, embodied resurrection, image-bearing, and why your spirituality cannot be separated from your physical body * What your nervous system actually needs to heal, and why thinking your way through is not enough * Why the Psalms were written to be sung, not just read, and what music does to your nervous system at a cellular level * How a contained music practice became one of the most faithful things I did for three years of my life Your body is not your enemy. It never was. This episode is for the woman who has been treating it like one. Books: * The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk * The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce D. Perry Scripture References (NASB95): * Psalm 22:1 * Psalm 42:1 * Psalm 62:1 * Psalm 139:13-14 * Ephesians 5:31-32 Work with Paris: Storyline: Seen, Known & Restored — a 9-week trauma-informed formation journey for women ready to do the deep work of healing, story, and reconnection with God. betweengriefandglory.com/storyline Instagram: instagram.com/betweengriefandglory Website: betweengriefandglory.com You do not have to keep carrying this alone. Storyline: Seen, Known & Restored is a space for women who are ready to stop performing their healing and start actually doing it — in their bodies, their stories, and their faith. Learn more at betweengriefandglory.com/storyline

Episode 5: When You Don't Know Where You Are — Finding Solid Ground in the Disorientation

💌 Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠Notes from the In Between⁠⁠⁠ [https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/notes-from-the-in-between] ✞ Learn more & go deeper: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Between Grief & Glory Website⁠⁠ [https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/] You are at the wall. But which one? Because not all darkness is the same. And if you have been treating your wall like something it is not — applying remedies that don't fit, wondering why nothing is working — you may have been wandering in the right territory with the wrong map. In this episode, Paris walks through the six types of walls that show up in the Christian life — burnout, spiritual burnout, blowout, personal crisis, faith crisis, and the dark night of the soul — and why knowing which one you are in is the beginning of knowing how to stay. This is not a clinical checklist. It is a pastoral map. And it might give you the first language you have had for something you have been carrying alone for a very long time. You are not lost. You are going deeper.

Episode 4.5-- You Were Not Made to Find God Alone: How Your Attachment Story Shapes the Way You Experience Him

You know attachment theory. But have you considered that the same patterns shaping how you relate to people are also shaping how you experience God? In this bonus episode — a bridge between the Wilderness series and the Dark Night of the Soul — Paris explores how our early attachment environments form templates we then press onto God. Why you can believe He is good and still not feel it. Why prayer can feel like talking to a ceiling. Why some of us deconstruct, some of us stay angry, and some of us quietly settle into the belief that warmth from God is simply not available to us. Drawing on Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw's framework from Landscapes of the Soul, and grounded in the theology of the Imago Dei, this episode makes the case that healing your relationship with God requires more than better theology — it requires being seen, known, and held by safe people. Because you were not made to find Him alone.  → Storyline: Seen, Known, and Restored: ⁠https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/storyline⁠ [https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/storyline] → Pre-Evaluation: Attachment to God Inventory: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccVjB_CYwyzUOZSes6BfVks5iqHTAlKLrSCcb46Rsww8saxQ/viewform?usp=header [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccVjB_CYwyzUOZSes6BfVks5iqHTAlKLrSCcb46Rsww8saxQ/viewform?usp=header]  → Pre- Evaluation: Loneliness & Community https://forms.gle/xNFyg5vBK6bPtZr79 [https://forms.gle/xNFyg5vBK6bPtZr79]

Episode 4: When God Goes Quiet — What the Church Forgot to Tell You

🤍 Join us for ⁠⁠⁠Seen in the Wilderness — May 13 & 14 ⁠⁠⁠ [https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/Seen-in-the-Wilderness](free, live)  💌 Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠Notes from the In Between⁠⁠⁠ [https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/notes-from-the-in-between] ✞ Learn more & go deeper: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Between Grief & Glory Website⁠⁠ [https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/] If prayer has felt hollow lately. If Scripture feels like words in a foreign language. If you have gone through the motions of your spiritual life for months — feeling nothing. Not peace. Not warmth. Not the quiet assurance you used to know. You have not lost your faith. You have hit a wall. And the church largely forgot to tell you this was coming. In this episode, Paris opens a brand new series — Through the Wall — exploring one of the most disorienting seasons in the Christian life. The season where the old ways of praying stop working. Where God feels distant or worse — unkind. Where trying harder only makes it worse. This season has a name. It has ancient company. And you are not failing. The shepherd does not remove the valley. He walks through it with you.

Episode 3.5: I Am Still in the Wilderness Too: On Triggers, Trust, and Learning to Stay With Yourself

A bonus episode before the series continues — because too many messages have been arriving that could not wait. In this episode, Paris gets honest about where she is right now — not from a place of having arrived, but from the middle of something tender and unresolved. She talks about what it actually looks like when a trigger hits, why the spiral of "I should feel differently by now" is not the same as faithlessness, and what it means to learn how to name your pain without collapsing into it. This conversation is for anyone who has found themselves reacting before they could think, spiraling into self-accusation, or wondering why God feels far when their body feels loud. Also: one final invitation to Seen in the Wilderness — a free, live, two-day guided experience on May 13th and 14th — before the next series begins. Not fixed. Just further. And further is enough. → Register for Seen in the Wilderness: https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/Seen-in-the-Wilderness → Between Grief & Glory: betweengriefandglory.com