Emotionally streching

The Christian Spirituality Program I am doing is emotionally stretching. Both courses I am doing, The Discernment of Spirits, and the Pre-Practicum (which is about how to do spiritual direction) constantly ask us to notice our emotional responses to well, pretty much everything.

Each day we have reading to prepare for class the next day. And rather than just know the content, which I find I do fairly easily, we have to come with a written prepared "Horizon Analysis", where we answer two questions: What are you attracted to in this reading (and why), and what do you feel resistance to (and why). Noticing resistance, naming it and processing it challenging.

We all manifest resistance in our daily lives: we put off that awkward phone call or that difficult task. We don't want to watch a film / read a book which might bring up difficult memories, etc.

So constantly attending to this is actually hard work. Some people here seem to have genius-level emotional intelligence. My room mate Kevin has ninja-level empathy skills (for a man, at least).

We are also doing spiritual direction with some volunteers from the first year of the program. We then write up verbatims (transcripts of a section), and have to note alongside each line of dialogue what we are feeling at the time (which means paying attention throughout the conversation). We take these write ups to class and have supervision where we go through each other's verbatims and check in or challenge each other on how we responded, particularly if we miss an obvious cue or seem to be steering the conversation towards our own agenda or bias in some way, thus revealing our own resistance to the content of what the directee wants to talk about.

I'm learning.....