Believe Big Podcast

66-Kristi Gaultiere - Caring for Our Souls and Our Emotional Health (part 1)

• Ivelisse Page & Kristi Gaultiere • Season 2 • Episode 66

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Have you ever thought about the importance of caring for your soul?  Have you ever hit a wall and just felt you needed to shut down for a little while?

It’s probably something that may have entered your mind at some point and then you quickly dismissed it because of the fast-paced world we live in.  But, caring for our souls so very important!

Join me today as I chat with Kristi Gaultiere author, spiritual director, counselor, coach and co-founder of Soul Shepherding.  We get to tap into the significance of caring for our soul amidst life's challenges, including cancer.

Kristi shares about breath prayers; the roles of spiritual directors, counselors, and coaches in soul care; as well as the stages of emotional and spiritual development
(C H R I S T).

Connect with Kristi Gaultiere at Soul Shepherding:
https://www.soulshepherding.org/

Suggested Resource Links:


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Ivelisse Page:

Hi, I'm Ivelisse Page, and thanks for listening to the Believe Big Podcast, the show where we take a deep dive into your healing with health experts, integrative practitioners, biblical faith leaders, and cancer thrivers from around the globe. Welcome to today's episode on the Believe Big podcast. My name is Ivelisse Page, and I am so thankful to be with you today. When we are busy with our work, family, ministry, and for so many of those listening, cancer, it can be hard to fit in caring for our souls. This can lead to stress, overload, discouragement, relational conflict and even hitting the wall. That was my story, reaching burnout at the beginning of the summer, and was blessed with the opportunity to go on sabbatical. I found the book, Your Best Life in Jesus' Easy Yoke, which led me to work with an amazing spiritual director from my guest today's non profit called Soul Shepherding, and it truly transformed my life. A little bit about Kristi, she is our guest today. Kristi Gaultiere is an expert in leading people to understand and care for the health of their souls. She has co authored a new best selling book with her husband of 35 years called Journey of the Soul, a Practical Guide to Emotional and Spiritual Growth. Kristi is a doctor of psychology and has dedicated her life to serving Jesus. She has three grown children and is a grandmother of two. Kristi enjoys speaking, training, teaching, consulting, counseling, and retreat leading with Bill, as well as recording their weekly Soul Talks podcast. Welcome Kristi to the show.

Kristi Gaultiere:

Thank you so much, Ivelisse. So happy to be with you and with all of those that are joining you in this health journey through Believe Big.

Ivelisse Page:

Well, it is an honor to talk to you today. And before we get into caring for our souls and the importance of our emotional health, our listeners are always interested in discovering what our guest's favorite health tip is. What would you say is yours?

Kristi Gaultiere:

I would say it's prayer and all kinds of different aspects of prayer. I don't pray just for my health. I pray for many reasons, but it is incredibly impactful to my health. So whether it's a breath prayer, where I'm breathing deeply and doing that deep belly breathing, which has so many health benefits, but also at the same time doing it with praying the scripture, because I inhale in those deep patterns of breathing, and it helps me just connect to God, or whether it's prayer that I'm doing in a time of extended solitude and silence where I'm really pushing away all the temptations and anxieties and competing interests of the world to just be alone with the Lord and really enter His rest deeply in prayer. And whether it's prayer that's with somebody else that's actually connectional and turns on my relational centers more and helps me to appreciate that presence and God's presence in them. So many different aspects of prayer are so helpful to me and my health, even just in being able to cast my cares on the Lord and not internalizing those and causing greater toxicity in my body. So yes, prayer is my biggest health tip.

Ivelisse Page:

Well, I can definitely agree with that and I love that sometimes we hear, well, pray. And sometimes people just feel like, okay, I have to do it a certain way. And I love that you at Soul Shepherding give people guides of ways that they can incorporate in prayer. And you mentioned one of them that I used during my sabbatical time, and it was breath prayers. Can you explain a little bit more about what breath prayers are for people who have never heard of it?

Kristi Gaultiere:

Yes, a breath prayer is where you are pairing your breathing pattern with a simple phrase, or we like to use scriptures. We also call it abiding prayer because it's a way that you can be turning over a scripture over and over in your head. So let me just give you an example right here. So, Jesus prayed this prayer on the cross, Father into your hands I commit my spirit. And we can pray that as breath prayer where we actually before we take a deep breath, we get hungry for that breath. We hold our breath and we're realizing how desperate we are for our next breath. And as we realize that and feel that in our body, we can realize we're this desperate for God. We're this desperate to depend upon Him. And then as we breathe in, we can pray. So I would pray as I breathe in, Father. And as I breathe in deeply, just filling my belly, my whole body with air and the grace of his oxygen, I would just be so grateful for receiving that. I have a father who loves me, who cares for me, who provides for me. He's with me now, who hears me. Just the grace of that as I'm receiving the fullness of the breath, which is a gift from him. And then as I exhale, Into your hands I commit my spirit. I'll just release all my worries, all my cares, all my ways of trying to secure myself, all the things that I'm uptight about and holding on to, to get a fuller release and relaxation into the reality of God's great love for me and his sufficiency for me. And I'll I'll pray that over and over again, repeatedly with each breath, that pattern of waiting to breathe and really putting my mind on my need for God. Inhaling, receiving grace and just receiving the grace into my whole body through the gift of that deep breath and all the health benefits. And then oftentimes I'll think about what I need to release, what I'm holding on to, that I'm grasping, that I'm knotted up about, that I'm anxious about, and then, Into your hands, I commit. Sometimes I'll name that thing I'm committing. Sometimes it's a person I'm worried about. So I might pray, Father, into your hands I commit each person listening right now to this podcast. And as I pray that I'm trusting that God is with them. He loves them. He's going to speak to them. It's not all up to you and I.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. It's so powerful because it's a visual, but breathing in general is so important for our health, deep breathing. But to add in that was very powerful for me. And sometimes I'd be in the middle of the day and I would have a feeling, emotional feeling that would come over me or I feel like I had to do a certain task that felt overwhelming. And it was just the simple of breathing in Jesus name, and then breathing out, not my strain. And it's just those simple things, no matter where you are, it's free. You can do that before a test, or you can do that as you're entering the hospital room or in the quietness of the morning. And it's just really powerful. So I encourage all those listening to just try that and see how it just truly blesses you. And tying into that, I feel like I've broken free from this emotional cocoon I was in for the last three years. And it was actually the first time that I had worked with a spiritual director. Can you share with our audience the difference between a spiritual director and working with a counselor or a coach?

Kristi Gaultiere:

Yes. Such an important and good question. And all three are really great ways to work on your soul. You know, God has entrusted us each with a soul, an eternal soul, and how we get to steward what he's entrusted to us and each of these are great means of doing that. Certainly I am all three. I'm a counselor. I'm a licensed counselor. I have my doctorate in psychology. I'm also a spiritual director and also a coach. So I do all three and there are differences between them. As a counselor, we're trained mostly to treat mental health disorders. So that would be the specialty of when you would want to see a counselor, especially if you're dealing with personality disorder, or if there's been a diagnosis, something where you're looking at something of a severity or something where there's maybe some long term, even genetic component, even though counselors don't prescribe medicine they can recognize when that might be helpful and refer for a medical doctor or psychiatrist for that. But when it's specifically a mental health issue, a counselor is someone who will diagnose and do a treatment plan and work in that regard and is very knowledgeable about mental health disorders such as anxiety or a depression that's long lasting, that's quite debilitative. Also, there are counselors that specialize in relational like marriage or conflict resolution as well. The coaches and spiritual directors don't have the level of training and understanding about mental health and mental health diagnosis and treatment, some of those kind of things. Spiritual directors and coaches can still do a lot of work that's very helpful, even in mental health, for our mental health. Things like listening, holding a space for someone, giving them an opportunity to be able to come and practice catharsis, just being able to hear themselves process, say what they're feeling, get in touch with what they're feeling. There aren't very many people that have a safe space to just speak unedited and to be heard and listened to. And then we train our spiritual directors at Soul Shepherding very intentionally in holding that space and listening, but also listening and responding with empathy. And this is something that we learned in our work as psychotherapists. And when I say our, I mean my husband and I, who are the founders of Soul Shepherding. And then, I mean our staff. We've got a staff of 60 that we've trained that work with us now, because Bill and I couldn't be there for everybody all the time. So we were blessed God enabled us to raise up others to do this work, but we train very specifically in listening with empathy, which is so important. We all need empathy. In fact we say emphathy is oxygen for your soul. It enables us to be able to release and to let go. Empathy is a grace. It helps us to receive and agree with God's grace. So certainly coaches and spiritual directors, if they understand that they've been trained to listen and respond with empathy, that can facilitate this healthy catharsis and processing because often times, if we're not trained in that, what we do is we go too quick to encouragement and cheerleading and that's great. But if we move there first, we often will shut down some of the other emotion that needs to be discovered and come out. Or sometimes we'll move real quick to sympathy. Oh, yeah, I experienced that too. And we want to start talking about ourselves. Which is good to know we're not alone, but it also can shut down the person in their process of getting in touch what they feel and turn the attention back on you. So there's reasons, many other reasons to advice giving can shut down emotions. So we always want to lead with mercy and empathy and that can be done well in any of the three modalities. But we really focus that in our training the spiritual directors and coaches and counselors. And then another distinctive is spiritual directors are trained specifically, and they're called not just trained to really, as they're listening to their clients also primarily listen to the Holy Spirit. Where's God at work here? What God might be saying, um, How can I assist you, Jesus, in this person's life right now? What spiritual disciplines are we calling experiences? Because we, we like to think of spiritual disciplines as being experiences or even medicines that our soul needs, our sick soul needs. And for what spiritual discipline, what spiritual exercise, what medicine, spiritual medicine might you have for this client that would be helpful and healing for them that I might guide them in or lead them in. So that would be something in spiritual direction. Sometimes we will lead in a specific spiritual experience or discipline or coach somebody towards that, or just even be prompted to ask them, you know, you might experiment with this this week or in the coming weeks. But we're journeying with someone and it's intentionally for their growth in Christ-likeness and the spiritual health and emotional health and relational health. At Soul Shepherding, we add on the relational and emotional health piece to the spiritual piece. Other spiritual directors sometimes are trained only in the spiritual, but we really believe in every aspect of our soul needs to be addressed and healed. And so our soul, it includes our mind, our thinking, includes our emotions, our feelings. It includes our social relationships. It includes our body, of course, and then as well as our at the very core our heart, our will, our spirit. This is the things that we train in and that we really specialize in in spiritual direction. And then with coaching, especially a coach that's been trained in these other modalities, can also use some of these, but in general, most coaches work more short term with a client with a very specific goal that the client has. And so they're coaching the client how to reach a specific goal and that goal within our work with Soul Shepherding, our coaches are trained to really help them with goals in the area of spiritual, emotional health or work. Oftentimes people will engage with coaching for help with their work, with goals, responsibilities, opportunities, visions, dreams around work.

Ivelisse Page:

Well, I can't say enough about that. It was truly incredible to see the difference from the beginning of the summer to the end of the summer. And so I will put in the show notes a link for people to find out more about what you guys do at Soul Shepherding. But I also want to share that it's great for all ages and you also have spiritual directors that are trained in different areas, so one may be more on emotional healing and burnout, and someone may have more specialty in sabbaticals, and so you can really select who you feel might be the best person to work with you. Another aspect for me that I liked is that I could go at the pace that I felt I needed. So it didn't have to be a set weekly. It could be monthly. I did every other week in the summer cause I felt I needed a little more, but now I'm speaking to my spiritual director once a month and it's just like a check in and to see how things are going and it's amazing. It really is life transformational. So I can't say that enough about what you guys do. One of the things that you share in your books is the stages of emotional and spiritual development. Can you talk about that for a moment?

Kristi Gaultiere:

Yes, well, in one of our books, Journey of the Soul, we do talk about our stages of emotional and spiritual development because we find that it's so helpful to understand that we grow and we develop in stages. And so often in our work with people, we would have people come in and they would be talking about what they were experiencing and they were feeling really disoriented or a lot of shame around their experience because it wasn't what people around them were experiencing, or it wasn't what they had experienced in their earlier stage of development. And as we grow in different stages, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, our development all goes along with that. And we're able to build on the things we've learned and our experiential knowledge in the past, but sometimes the things that have worked for us very well at a previous developmental stage, stop working. And we can start to feel like, gosh, am I failing? What's wrong with me? And especially in Journey to the Soul, we talk about as part of our normal natural development, we often will hit a wall in our development. And that can be very disorienting, very discouraging, very frightening for people and people don't have this understanding that that is actually normal in our development and actually can be a grace because God uses it because he has so much more for us. After the wall, if we will do the hard work at the wall, that is an opportunity and invitation for us. We talk in Journey to the Soul about six types of walls. It can be a personal crisis, like a health crisis, like many of your listeners. It can be a burnout, like you included in your experience from overwork, from doing too much, from just having a lot of stress for a long time. Too much opportunity, even. We see a lot of work with a lot of people in ministry that burnout, even from just all the great mission and work that God has entrusted them and given them, but they don't know how to set healthy boundaries. They're so busy caring for everybody else's soul, they don't know how to care for their own soul. Doubt, hitting a wall of doubt. We hear it called a lot in our culture, deconstruction of our faith. This is a wall, but it's a wall that actually, if we understand it rightly, is an opportunity for a healthy reconstruction. Sometimes we need to take some unhealthy bricks that have been built into our wall out because they don't belong there. They're not healthy. They're not good. And it's a time when God will help us to reorient and understand him anew and do some work of clearing up our image of him. And working through those doubts can be a really important work in that as well. So there's different kinds of walls. That's one of the stages. Did you want me to go through each stage briefly?

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. Yes. And I'd also like you know, if you could offer any guidance to those who find themselves at one of those walls, like what are some things that they can do about it?

Kristi Gaultiere:

Oh, absolutely. Yes. So in Journey to the Soul, we write about each of the stages and each of the stage, there is a unique, each stage of development, there's a unique temptation that we experience, because we have an enemy trying to take us out wherever we are in our development. So there's unique temptations at each stage. Understanding those can be really helpful in being able to be strong to resist those. And then at each stage there's a unique grace, something, a movement of God that he's wanting to do in our life, that if we know that, we can open to it and participate with it and receive it more. And so that can be really helpful. But let me just walk you through the stages. We use the acronym for these stages of Jesus's. He is the Christ. So these are the C H R I S T stages of development. And also because Jesus is our model. He went through as a human being, every single one of these stages of development. And we unpack that in the book too, and show you Jesus's journey through these stages, the Apostle Paul's, Abraham, mine, other people's, but to help us understand our journey through the stages. The first stage in that C acronym of the C H R I S T stages model of emotional and spiritual development is C Confidence in Christ. It's when we're first coming to be born anew from above and to trust Jesus. And we're receiving, we have a symbol for each of the stages and the symbol for the C stage is the church because we usually come to Christ through his body, through his family. And then, we usually come and get involved in a community church where we're coming to receive some of the early graces like communion or baptism. But what our temptation in the C stage is, is that our our soul has been split. It's been damaged by sin. Because sin is soul-splitting. And we are really torn between two worlds in the C stage. We see this where we're divided between our old life apart from Christ and some of those habits and relationships and our new life in Christ. So somebody in the C stage may look very different when they're at church with their Christian friends than they look when they're at work or at school with our non Christian friends. We see this big division, a lot of hypocrisy in the life of someone in the C stage, and that's normal. We don't want to judge that. We want to be empathetic and understanding and winsome, like Jesus is, to help them grow and receive the grace of the stage, which is his sticky love to really come into a secure attachment relationship with Jesus, which we write a lot about in Your Best Life in Jesus' Easy Yoke, but that's the C stage. And then after some years in the C stage, those are usually, that can start as early as sometimes three years old or as late to late adulthood. My grandfather in law didn't start in the C stage until he was in his 60s. So God is always willing and inviting us. It's never too late. And then the H stage is help and discipleship. This is where after we have been walking with Christ for a while, we come to realize we need some help in understanding the scripture. We recognize there's some things that God asks us to do, and we may not know how to do that. So we need some discipleship. We need to learn from others farther on in the journey who have experience and knowledge that we don't have. And so that is really important. So God's Word is a grace we need in the H stage. We may need help learning to understand scripture and reading the Bible, getting involved in a small group, learning how to pray. These are things that we're often learning in the H stage. And one of the roadblocks or temptations in the H stage is our tendency to misinterpret or misunderstand scripture, because we don't have a lot of knowledge yet in it. And so we we need to be careful for that. But the symbol for the H stage is the Bible because God's word helps us grow in our discipleships and helps us get that knowledge and understanding that we need of our life. After some years in H stage, which is usually about seven, age seven into adulthood, and this is because cognitively, what's happening in this stage of development is very much a black and white thinking, understanding all good, all bad, understanding truth versus sin, grace, some of these concepts we're, we're getting to understand. And then we moved after some years in the H stage into the R stage in the C H R I S T stage acronym, and that's Responsibilities in Ministry. The grace in this stage is that we come to understand God has given us each special gifts. We call them joy gifts in Journey of the Soul, but because it is a joy that we are realizing, wow, God's given me this unique and special gift. And he's calling me to team with him and others in the body of Christ to do ministry in his name and what an honor, what a joy. And so we're learning to grow in these gifts and that's the grace, but there's a little temptation too, because as we get the excitement and the symbol for the stages is a medal because it was, we came together using our gifts in concert together, we're able to make big wins for the kingdom of God, and we see those and we're excited about those and we're improving in our ability to, to use those gifts. and achieve greater impact. But the temptation can often lie in that too, and the temptation is a false identity. We can get our identity overly focused on I am what I do, and we can get into even an earning mentality in our relationship with God of thinking that he's only as happy with us as we are successful in ministry or as we're making a big impact for him. Or we could get over identified with I am what people think of me because we tend to get a lot of praise or criticism in this stage for what we're doing, or we can over identify with I am what I have, in terms of I am with how many gifts I have or how many resources I have to work in with and responsibilities in ministry for pastors and leaders. We often find that this is a temptation for them that I am as successful or as important or, my identity around how big my church is or those kinds of things. So these are temptations, like I said, unique at each stage. And then, after some years in these early stages, the C, H, and R stage, the R stage usually starts around age 13 to adulthood, that's when we're starting to actually be able to take on and steward more responsibilities. We're able to understand a little bit more of grace and receive and be trusted with more responsibility and leadership and experimenting with that. But then after some years in these three stages, we usually will hit a wall. We found over half of Christians in America hit the wall and bounce back into one of the earlier stages and assume this is all there is to the Christian life. And they tend to just kind of get stuck there, maybe just dutifully, or start to just lose some of their passion, some of their motivation, they get maybe kind of bored, or they could start to really hit that sense of doubt and start to deconstruct and doubt some of the things that they were believing. Because we say, we are more than just a brain on a stick. We are a whole soul in Christ and our life a lot in the early stages are think, do, think, do, think, do. But we often then at the wall, we'll begin to get in touch with our emotions, and emotions, especially that we've been repressing and avoiding, even maybe sometimes with all of our busyness for God, even doing good things. We sometimes are doing that to deny our emotions, not to be honest. And so at the wall, there's a real transition here where we are being honest, emotionally honest, about the temptation of distrust for God. And the grace is to receive God's empathy there, right there in the doubt. Like we see the Psalmist with emotionally honest prayers, praying about his doubts. And receiving God's empathy, that God's with him, such that then he's reoriented and responds with faith again, renewed confidence. And that's, if we, at the wall, what we find is if you will do the inner journey work, which is the I stage, the next stage, that wall is an invitation to do the inner journey work. And if we will take courage to do the inner journey work, we will get through the wall into the second half of the journey, which are the I, S, and T stages. So the inner journey stage, the symbol is a shovel. Because we need to allow God to take the shovel and soften up the hardened soil of our soul. It's gotten kind of hard. Our heart's gotten kind of hard. And then we need to let him open up our soul and breathe his breath and aerate the soil of our soul. And we need to let him pull out some parasites. Some parasitic sin that might be in there. Even uproot, maybe a really fruitful tree that we're really excited and even proud and attached to how fruitful it is or how beautiful it is. He may need to uproot that because there's something new. There's a new work of his spirit he wants to do, or he just needs to make space for our healing and we need to receive, this is a quiet stage. It's a time where we learn to practice some of the new experiences like solitude, silence, stillness before the Lord to let him. Let the doctor of our soul, the soul doctor, really bring that healing, that restoration of soul to us. So the temptation now at the inner journey is to deny our emotions and try to secure ourselves and keep functioning in that believe-do mentality. But if we will lean in and do this inner journey work and get emotionally honest, we can receive the grape of a deeper experience of God's love and a restoration of our soul. Oftentimes there's a lot of work we do here. Breath prayers are a great discipline in this. Spiritual directions are great discipline to engage with in this season. Sabbaticals a great discipline to engage in at this season because we need to set boundaries on other things in our life to make space to do this inner journey healing work.

Ivelisse Page:

Before we go on to the next two, I want all of our listeners to hear all the different steps and stages. And so we're going to actually do a two part. We're going to continue on in our conversation and finish the last two, and then I'm going to continue with some other questions in our next episode with you as well, talking about some of the things in relation to our emotions. So, I have so many questions for you and I just want to make sure that we get them in before our podcast ends. But can you share with us those last two before we close out this part one?

Kristi Gaultiere:

Yes, really quickly, the last two are Spirit led ministry and Spirit led ministry, the symbols of sailboat, because we have learned to be able to venture out deep into the waters of God's oceanic love and to be still there and to rest there when it's calm and to enjoy the beauty of that and the peace of that. It's the easy yoke stage from our easy yoke book. But we've also learned that when the wind of the spirit blows to adjust ourselves and to move with his spirit. And we are very active in ministry in the spirit led ministry season, but it is different than the responsibilities in ministry stage, because in the responsibilities in ministry stage, we're very busy for God. In the spirit led ministry stage, we've learned to do all that we do with God in his kingdom, by his power, for his glory. And so that's a distinctive between the two. And there are great surprise blessings for us in that. And then the T stage. The symbol is wedding rings. We've walked along with God. We've been faithful to God through many ups and downs, consolations, desolations, our journey. And we've learned to be faithful through them all. We've learned to trust his love, even when we're not experiencing it in ways we want to. We've learned to trust his goodness along the way. We've also learned his compassion, His universal love and compassion for all people. We're able to suffer in love, able to bless those who curse us. It's the wedding rings because of that fidelity, because of that union with God that we've come to achieve. It's like Bill and I, we've been married now for over three decades, and so often we think each other's thoughts, or when we're not together, we know what the other person would think or do. There's that union that remains. There's no longer a Kristi without Bill, because we have grown so close, and that's the way it is in our relationship with God, as we've walked with him long in these developments of emotional, spiritual growth.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah, and before we close out this part one, what guidance can you offer for someone who's right now dealing with cancer? And they may be in different parts of that C H R I S T stages that you just talked about. Can you share some guidance for someone right now who's struggling in one of those stages with a cancer journey?

Kristi Gaultiere:

Absolutely. It's going to look a little bit different at each stage. And that's one of the reasons why we wrote Journey to the Soul is because discipleship isn't one size fits all. And so your response to this cancer diagnosis and journey is going to be different based on the stage you're in. Your experience of God is going to be different. Your ability to make use of what his body, his community has to offer. You may actually be hurt by people that are in a previous stage of spiritual development from you because they don't understand what you're going through or because they're defended against it because they don't yet have that maturity to understand. Understanding these stages will help you to extend grace to them and not take it personally and to be able to forgive. Understanding that God will use this cancer experience for you for your good to grow you spiritually and emotionally. And you haven't done anything wrong to cause this. He doesn't shame you. He doesn't blame you. He's working for good in your life. And these stages are just ways that will help you to be able to open and understand that more and respond and participate to that more fully.

Ivelisse Page:

Well, thank you for explaining that to us. And again, we will put a link in the show notes if someone is interested in getting help in walking through those stages or processing their emotions as they're going through their cancer journey. Or maybe you're just someone who's just hit a wall in your life and your family or in your work, and you just need some guidance or a coach, please contact our friends at Soul Shepherding. They'd be willing to help and encourage you through the season and get you to the other side. So Kristi thank you for being with us today. Really appreciate you. And I look forward to sharing more next week with you to our listeners about the importance of emotional healing in our health.

Kristi Gaultiere:

Oh, thank you. It's such a joy and honor just to share the blessings God's given us and things that have been helpful to us with your community.

Ivelisse Page:

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