24: Resilience (Series Compilation, Part 1 of 2)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail podcast. Guess what? We’ve been on the trail together for two years – two years this week. And for those of you who are just joining us, we are so happy to be here with you. Thank you for being on the trail with us.

And I have a special announcement. We have been talking all year about the Freedom course that we are so excited to launch. Well today is launch day for the Freedom course. So if you want to take your next step on your freedom journey, we invite you to check out the course. I’ve got details in the description, including a special discount just for on the trail listeners. That coupon code will be in the description as well.

Thank you for being on the trail with us. Now for today and our compilation episode, this is revisiting the Resilience series. It’s a little longer and it’s a really good one. Part one of two. Well, this new series into a new year we’re talking about emotional resilience. And I was thinking of this episode topic and the series topic with twofold inspiration. And first we have a free conference coming up at the end of the month. You, Father, are being joined by the man, the myth, the legend, John Eldridge of Wild at Heart to talk about Resilience. How epic is that?

[01:23] Marcus: Yeah, it’s pretty epic isn’t it? John’s material really inspired me when I first discovered it. In fact I remember reading the preamble of Wild At Heart, and it suggested going out in nature someplace to read it. So I went down to the local park and I started to read the book. I had this strange thought when I went to open the book which was, “I dare you to touch me.”

And I’m like, “Where did that come from?” It was like something inside of me was not happy that I was reading this book. And I swear within three pages I was crying, and  began to realize that it was touching on something I needed at a heart level – realizing how important it is to take care of our hearts and to make sure that our hearts are connected with Jesus.

Ever since then I’ve been sort of an “Eldridge fan” and I like connecting with him. So this will be the third time I think he’s spoken with us, but this will be a little different. He’s going to be the featured speaker for this conference, January 27th and 28th. And last year we had a free warfare conference. This year we have a free resilience conference. He has a new book out called Resilient.

And his approach to resilience is a little bit different than the one I’ve been teaching because his is focused almost entirely on our connection with God, which is good. That’s just one of the four things that we focus on. But it’s really important because as Christians it’s the one thing we can do that other people can’t do.

So in this conference I’m going to be teaching on some things that we’re going to cover in the podcast, like neuroscience and what is emotional capacity. What is available to people who aren’t Christians and what is available to us as christians that we need to take full advantage of. So I’m excited about it. It’s going to be Friday night and then Saturday afternoon eastern time, January 27th and 28th.

[03:21] Stephanie: Yeah, it’ll be a nice well rounded conference. I’m looking forward to it. And building bounce has also been on my mind. So some people like to choose a focus word for the year and I do it sometimes, it can be fun. Last year my word was hope, and boy did I need it, 2022 was rough on me in a lot of ways. I determined months ago that my word for 2023 was going to be margin. And Jesus has just been lovingly whispering to me for a long time about my need for this. I have just stubbornly plowed ahead, constantly overcommitting, and feeling like I have too much going on to cut things out. Part of why 2022 was so rough is that I just really maxed out on a lot of things.

[04:38] Marcus: So this isn’t your full time job?

[04:40] Stephanie: No, I’m a full time graduate student, also Deeper Walk, and other things because I’m a crazy person. It’s okay because God’s got me. I’ve been dwelling on this and trying to process and validate myself, wanting to figure out word pictures for how I’ve been feeling. Okay, can I submit my two word pictures?

[05:12] Marcus: Sure.

[05:13] Stephanie: My first word picture that I came up with was a weightlifting word picture, which we will see is actually very apt for emotional capacity. I have been feeling especially through grad school that I have been weight lifting and pushing through each rep, it’s been hard, but I’ve been doing it. I felt recently over last summer break that I was able to put down the weights. I had the feeling of my muscles trembling like, “Wow that was a really hard rep and now I’m resting.”

And then the school year started up again and I had to pick up the weights, and I wasn’t ready. My arms were still “trembling” (metaphorically speaking) and I had to do the next rep, but I wasn’t ready for it, but I had to do it anyway. And so I’ve just been feeling like that.

And then the other word picture is from this story. I helped with tea at a wedding right before Christmas break, and it was lovely. We had  loose leaf chai in large stew pots that we would ladle out for people but you would have to let the loose leaves sink to the bottom of the pot. There was all this wonderful chai and everybody wanted to come get some, but by the end of it, we were getting to the bottom where you’re getting all the loose leaves.

My roommate and I were both helping with this and we were just straining trying to get the chai out. There was still plenty of chai to be had but we had gotten to the dregs and it was really hard to get the good stuff out, because we were at the bottom of the bucket. And I’ve just been like, “Yep, that’s how I’ve been feeling in my life too.”  There’s still more to be had but I’m getting into the dregs and I don’t have the capacity for this. So my word for 2023 is margin. I’m taking strategic steps to build more of that and you can be on the trail with me, I’m on the trail with you.

[07:21] Marcus: Exactly, don’t we all need margin? Very few people are good at it, right? And some of my heroes are the people who are the best at margin. They seem to be really good at saying, “No.”  Which is still something I’m trying to master.

[07:36] Stephanie: I am not good at saying, “No.”

[07:10] Marcus: It reminds me of my favorite emotional capacity picture. A donkey is hauling a cart and the cart just has too much stuff on it and the donkey has been lifted up into midair, and is just hanging there. So you show people this picture of the donkey hanging in midair because he’s just carrying too much weight and saying, “Does this donkey need a pep talk, no, not really.” “Does this donkey need their emotions validated, no, not really.”

They actually need to get rid of some things and get some weight off of them because it is more than they can handle. I think a lot of us are in a situation like that. We have more weight we are carrying than we know what to do with and sometimes we need help. We need more hands carrying the weight and we need to get rid of some of the weight. Because the answer isn’t always just growing more capacity, sometimes it’s getting help and sometimes it is getting rid of some of the weight.

[08:38] Stephanie: With that in mind, do you want to give us a quick definition of what emotional capacity is? When we talk about this, what do we even mean when we say that?

[08:46] Marcus: Let me give you a couple different pictures. First of all, the simple definition of emotional capacity is the ability to handle emotional weight. Some things are just hard, they’re heavy. I think of Back to the Future when they ask, “Is everything heavy in the future, is something wrong with the atmosphere?” Anyway, in our case we’re saying there are some things that are just hard because they’re weighty on us, and we can’t handle them anymore.

So what happens when we can’t handle anymore is we either snap, shut down, blow up, or melt down. We don’t act like ourselves, we turn into a different person and we get overwhelmed. So when we talk about emotional capacity, it is this idea of how do I grow my ability to handle weight? So there’s a lot that goes into this. That’s just one definition, the ability to handle emotional weight.

From a technical perspective, Neuroscientist Daniel Siegel calls this “flipping the lid.” He talks about your window of tolerance. So a window of tolerance is that window of what you can handle emotionally. Now for some of us that’s a pretty small window. We can only handle a very tiny amount of emotional weight before it’s overwhelming to us. And so our goal is to grow that window of tolerance.

To be even a little more technical, we’re talking about the ability to keep your higher level brain functions online, when the lower level brain functions get triggered. So for example, if the amygdala level of my brain gets triggered and the fight or flight reaction gets triggered, the question is, “Can that get triggered and I still act like myself, and remain relational?”

So let me just dive into brain science just a tad here because I think it will help. There are four levels of brain function that Jim Wilder teaches that I’ve helped to explain in a couple of our books. The first level is attachment. Second level is assessment. Third level is attunement. Fourth level is action. The higher levels of the brain are the action level and the attunement level.

And so you think about this way, that attunement level is the level at which I am able to remain relational, because that’s the part of me that reads you. If I’m reading you properly I can tell when you’re overwhelmed and you need a break, or I can tell when you’re interested in continuing a conversation, but I can also misread. So level three is related to remain relational. Level four is the “act like yourself” part of your brain, right? That’s the part of my brain that remembers who I am, who my people are, and how it’s like me to act.

So when I say my higher level brain functions stay online then I’m able to remain relational and act like myself. This is a good way to summarize that. The lower level functions in attachment happen when I shut down and my attachment light shuts off, I just don’t bond to anybody. When it’s on all the time I’m afraid I’m going to miss out on something.

When it’s irregular and going haywire or when at the assessment level I get stuck, because things are too bad or they’re too scary, it causes the higher level brain functions to not be as completely in charge of who I am. So that’s the very technical part, that’s the brain science part. That’s kind of what we’re doing. And I’m going to explain more of that at the conference. I’ll dive into the neuroscience of this a little bit more.

[11:47] Stephanie: Huzzah. So in your book Building Bounce, you and Stefanie Hinman talk about building emotional resilience in an analogy to building your body’s immune system. Instead of bubble wrapping our emotions or putting on a hazmat suit for our emotions, we need to learn how to experience the germs of life, the negative emotions, and then return to joy from them. And so that’s a little bit of what you were talking about with those four levels.

[12:45] Marcus: Stefanie Hinman, for those who don’t know her, she’s a certified Christian counselor from the Kansas City area. She teaches Building Bounce as a course for Deeper Walk on a regular basis. So usually about twice a year we offer a group course on building bounce that Stefanie teaches and she’s very good at it. The idea of building your emotional immune system actually came from Stefanie. It came not from her career as a professional counselor so much as it came from her job as a mother. And she was really worried about her daughter.

And she tells the story in the book about being concerned and praying, “God, I don’t want my daughter to feel pain, I don’t want her to feel this.” God sort of corrects her a little bit saying, “Actually, isn’t it better to strengthen her emotional immune system so she doesn’t have to be afraid of what she runs into?”

When I don’t have emotional capacity the germs I am afraid of are actually my emotions. When I don’t have emotional capacity I’m afraid of emotions that are going to overwhelm me. In fact I’ve heard Dr. Wilder say, “The only thing anybody really fears is an emotion they can’t handle.”  We tend to think its pain, but in a sense attachment pain is an emotion.

A lot of people go through pain and don’t get traumatized by it. It’s what the pain means to them and the emotions that come with it that are traumatizing. And that’s really kind of been eye opening for me to realize that most of us are spending our lives trying to avoid certain emotions. What we’re talking about here is what would it look like if instead we grew our capacity to deal with those emotions, so that it didn’t overwhelm us?

[14:27] Stephanie: That’s good. I have two thoughts which are very tangential. One was that I’ve been reading a book with Ben, my brother, and there are some soldier characters who are having to deal with lots of pain. And one of the things they say frequently is, “Pain is just a memory, we’ll get past it, and it will be in the past.” That’s not always true for people when the pain comes back to revisit them.

And the other thing, talking about Stefanie Hinman, when I was editing Building Bounce (I’m the publishing coordinator at Deeper Walk) I literally started misspelling my own name, because I was so in tune to making sure Stefanie’s name was spelled correctly. Her name is with an “F” and mine is with a “Ph”. And I literally signed something once with an “F” and was like, “No, wait.”

[14:50] Marcus: She would appreciate that, Stefanie’s great. She does a great job not only teaching this but also her specialty really, was helping traumatized children who didn’t know how to live with joy. She began building this and created a curriculum. She’s written another book called Building Bounce with Kids, that is really focused on that. What she’s found especially when she’s taught this is that a lot of the adults actually prefer the Building Bounce with Kids, because they like doing the kids exercises and all that stuff. She’s very good with that.

[15:50] Stephanie:  It’s a good book. Every time I revisit it I’m like, “Oh wow, this is a great book, good job.” So on the topic of children, do you want to go into the five stages of maturity and how they interact with capacity?

[16:04] Marcus: Sure. So when we talk about emotional capacity they directly interact with the five stages that we learned from Life Model, infant, child, adult, parent, and elder. And the idea here is pretty straightforward. So an infant has almost zero emotional capacity. Right. How much stress does it take for an infant to lose it? The answer is not much. So the infant needs somebody else to take care of their emotions for them. We don’t say to a six month old kid, “Pull it together.” “Come on now, this is not that overwhelming, it’s going to be okay.” We have to actually hold them, hug them, connect with them and their emotions nonverbally. They are completely dependent upon us to recognize the emotional distress they’re in and to meet them, and to comfort them.

So the challenge here becomes, “What if I don’t get that when I’m an infant?”  If people are not recognizing where I’m at in my emotional need and they don’t help me grow, I can remain an emotional infant for as long as I live. And what that means is it doesn’t take much to overwhelm me for one, and two, I can’t get myself back to joy from there and I am stuck. Somebody else is going to have to recognize where I’m at and come rescue me. Well, that gets really old right? If you have to go rescue your 60 year old husband or your 40 year old wife constantly, it wears on you and creates compassion fatigue after a while.

So we have to take some steps to grow our emotional capacity. So that’s the infant stage. At the child stage I should be able to handle a little bit more weight before I lose it. I am also at the child stage learning how to name the emotion I’m feeling, how to recover from it, and how to bounce back from it. The goal is that by the time I’m like 13 years old, I’ve had a lot of practice bouncing back from upsetting emotions. And if everything goes perfectly I’m not afraid of these emotions. And when I’m not afraid of these emotions then life becomes an adventure, because I know I can go face anything and be okay.

But again if I get a trauma, the kind of trauma that comes from missing out on things, the absence of the good I need, I could get to age 13 and I’ve never actually gotten good at bouncing back from any of these emotions. Or maybe I’m good at some of them but not others. So if I’m good at a few but not at the others then I’m going to, without even realizing it, create an approach to life that avoids the emotions I don’t handle well. My world gets smaller.

And so that’s what we’re talking about. Parents should be able to take care of babies and they should be able to teach their kids how to do this. And elders are stepping into the community level and saying, “Here’s an adult who missed out on this. I can step in and I can be a surrogate parent to this adult.” There’s a lot of other things that go into it. That’s the five stages of maturity in a nutshell.

[18:36] Stephanie: Thank you. I mentioned earlier about pain being just a memory, except for when it’s not. How does trauma affect capacity?

[19:17] Marcus: So “B” trauma is what we’re talking about here and that is the bad stuff that happens to us that still brings up pain. So we say there’s three things that go into building our emotional capacity. One is repairing the damage of the past. There is a place for emotional healing. And that’s why we teach understanding the wounded heart. It’s why we teach spiritual warfare. It’s why we teach the REAL prayer process. There’s some things that need to be repaired especially when it comes to “B” trauma. When we talk about resilience we tend to put the focus less on the repair.

So the idea of building bounce is like, how do I actually inflate this ball so that it bounces? How do I actually grow my capacity so that I am bouncing back from these emotions? So that’s a little bit different set of skills that we’re focusing on, rather than just patching the ball. So think of patching the ball is repair, and filling it with air is resilience. And those are really the two main things that we’re trying to do.

And then the third thing is rest and you mentioned this with your workout analogy. Muscles actually grow while you’re resting in between the weight lifting. So people who are constantly pushing and pushing, doing more and more weight, they break down their emotional capacity, they don’t grow it. They’re breaking down their physical capacity if they do that in the weight room, not actually growing it.

[20:42] Stephanie: And we’re going to talk more about that in the next episode. We are going to talk about rhythms.

[20:46] Marcus: So we talk about repair, we talk about resilience, and we talk about rest. Those are the three key things that are involved here.

[20:54] Stephanie: So what are one or two small things that I or one of our listeners could do or not do, to start building more capacity today?

[21:06] Marcus: Let me give you two things. Number one is five minute breaks. It’s a good idea just to take five minutes where you detach from everything else. Your problems will still be there when you get back. So take five minutes, close your eyes, and breathe deeply. “Breathe, in a box” where you inhale for 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, and exhale for 4 seconds. You know, “breathe in a box” for a minute of that five minutes. Then find something happy that makes you smile and focus on that, whether it’s in your future, whether it’s in your past, or whether it’s in your present. And just take five minutes twice a day doing that, and you can begin growing your capacity just from that.

[21:48] Stephanie: Would the Wild at Heart Pause App be for this?.

[21:51] Marcus: Yeah, it does a lot of those things. So the Wild at Heart Pause App would be a good recommendation for a structured way to do that. The other thing I would recommend has to do with rhythm. (And we’ll talk about this I’m sure at some point.) And that is Doctor Wilder’s analogy of Joy camp and Joy Mountain. And the idea here is making sure that we set a rhythm to our lives where we stop working at a certain point in the day, and we quiet ourselves. We get some space and try to end the day at a place of relational joy if all possible.

Now, I know some of us live by ourselves and that’s not an option. Some of us have other issues there. But if at all possible you want to end your day in a space of relational joy. I know some people who can’t do that, and they look at videos of kitty cats that make them smile. It helps them like, “Oh, I’m feeling happy about this cute cat.” But that’s not bad, right? Because the goal here is to get some of that happy juice going in your brain before you go to sleep.

Getting some rhythm into your life and making sure that you set some boundaries around when you get up and when you go to bed. And then also the idea of taking five minutes, those would be the two main things I’d suggest.

[22:44] Stephanie: All right, mission accepted. So next week we are going to be talking more about building capacity through rhythms of joy and rest. But for now, any final thoughts for this episode?

[23:25] Marcus:  I think sometimes we look at resilience as a bonus thing that would be nice if you could afford it. Maybe you can’t afford it, you know, I’ve got too many things to do, to work on this. What I found is that if I lose my resilience then everything else collapses pretty quickly after that, and I can’t afford to. It’s the classic sharpening your ax thing, right? It’s attributed to Abraham Lincoln I think, but  if I have 5 hours to chop down a tree, I’m going to spend the first four hours sharpening the ax. I’ve heard it said differently all the time, but you get the idea. Sharpening my “ax resilience” is really about keeping my capacity to deal with life fresh.

It’s like the difference between playing basketball with a ball that actually bounces, and playing basketball with a ball that only comes halfway up when you try to dribble it. If you’re going through life and your “emotional ball”  bounces halfway back up, that’s no fun. It’s exhausting and it’s like, “What’s the point?”

So this is really crucial to who we are and how we live. Especially as we’re kicking off the new year, a lot of people are making commitments about what am I going to do? How am I going to get more margin, how am I going to get more resilience in my life? So that’s why we want to launch the podcast this way and help people get off to a good start.

[24:16] Stephanie: So in this episode we are looking at the rhythms of joy and rest. Both joy and rest are so important. So let’s talk about joy first and just make sure we’re all on the same page on what we mean here. So what is Joy? Let’s start from a brain perspective.

[24:33] Marcus: So from a brain perspective again, last time we talked about the four levels of brain function and all four levels are kind of related to joy. That attachment lights up when I see potential joy or potential fear, but it’ll light up. Then my assessment center will figure out is this potential joy, or is this potential fear, or is this potential bad?  It can only give one of three analogies, this is good, this is bad, or this is scary.

Then it goes up to the third level which is that now I’m reading this person, and are they happy to see me? And I’m looking for someone who’s happy to see me. You can see this in babies a lot, right? They have their eyes locked in and what they’re looking for is somebody who’s happy to be with them.

If all that goes well or if it falls within my window of tolerance, then I will get to the top level of my brain function and it’ll be the easiest for me to act like myself. And so because all of that is anchored in attachment we say relational joy is relational happiness. I’m looking for someone who’s happy to be with me. So the brain science of this boils down to something very simple, what my brain craves and what it’s looking for, is the joy that comes from someone who’s happy to see me. And we just call that relational happiness.

[25:44] Stephanie: So joy and happiness, not the same thing or same thing?

[25:49] Marcus: Joy is a subcategory of happiness.

[25:51] Stephanie: Okay, all right.

[25:51] Marcus:  I have heard pastors my whole life say that they are not the same thing and they make a big deal that happiness is related to happenstance, but so is joy. In the Bible the Hebrew word for joy and happiness are the same word. So it talks about when the harvest is abundant. When I’m feeling the joy of an abundant harvest that’s the same as feeling happy because of an abundant harvest. They aren’t that different. So people have tended to over spiritualize joy, and make it like something that can only happen when the Holy Spirit fills you with it. But that really isn’t the point of the fruit of the Spirit.

The point is if the Holy Spirit is operating it should bring joy. But that doesn’t mean that somebody without the Holy Spirit will never feel joy. This is a characteristic of what we should be looking for. I would say again that evangelicals through the years have tended to overemphasize this difference between joy and happiness, and partly because we try to reduce joy to a choice.

We try to reduce it to something that is only created by the Holy Spirit. But from a brain perspective and I would say even biblically, the way the Bible talks about it is that joy is a subset of happiness. It is the happiness that comes when I am with somebody who’s happy to be with me, or I’m thinking about somebody who’s happy to be with me.

That’s why even now we can sit here and think about a good friend and feel happy, because you’re just thinking about them. It’s like, “Oh, it would be so cool to see them again right now.”  That’s joy, right? As a grandparent, if a little kid comes wandering into the room you don’t have to say ,”Oh, it’s my grandkid. I better choose to be happy.” It’s like there’s this instantaneous thing that comes up, this relational happiness and that’s what we mean by joy.

[27:38] Stephanie: So talk more about the biblical perspective.

[27:41] Marcus: So the biblical perspective of joy is going back to the Old Testament, and   we see it the most in the idea that there is an abundance of harvest. So David could even say, “That my heart is feeling happiness or joy in your presence, God, the way that I feel at the harvest time.” That’s his analogy.

But he also says something interesting in Psalm 16:11 in English it says, “There is joy in your presence, O Lord”, but the Hebrew word for presence is actually face. So it’s like, there is joy in your face O Lord. Well, that fits perfectly doesn’t it? Because that’s where we’re looking, I’m looking in your eyes to see if you are happy to see me or not?

So David’s saying when I look in your face I am seeing someone who is happy to see me. You go back to the ironic blessing of numbers, “May God’s face shine upon you,” which is a joyful beaming face. I don’t think he’s saying may I have a Moses experience, where I’m glowing afterwards.  I think he’s saying that there is a joy of shiningness that comes on us because of that. And in the New Testament at Gethsemane when Jesus goes into the garden he asks for three of his closest disciples to go with him, and they let him down.  But why did he even want them with him? He wanted the added emotional resilience, the emotional strength that comes from being with people who are happy to be with you.

When I go through hard times, when I’m going through difficult things, one of the things that gives me resilience is being with other people who are happy to be with me, even as I’m going through the hard thing. And so this connects to God as well. If I have a God who is happy to see me even when I’m going through hard things, I will have more resilience to deal with the hard things.

But if I look at God as somebody to be afraid of or if I think God’s upset with me, because I’m not going through this properly or something like that, then I am going to miss out. I will miss out on the emotional resilience that would otherwise be available to me because of that connection with God. The Bible when it’s talking about joy tends to have this relational happiness idea to it. And it is this thing that we find in the face of God and others.

[30:00] Stephanie: As you’re talking about the harvest, I just had two thoughts. One being that the  harvest is communal, a community event and there’s lots of relationships happening there. And also, I think it was Stefanie’s phrase that she would use throughout her book Building Bounce. Calm, safe and secure or is it calm, safe, connected? But the idea is that we return to safe and secure. The harvest is a bounty of safe and secure and you’re doing it in a communal way.

[30:34] Marcus: Absolutely, it’s a party. Why do we like parties? We like parties because they boost our emotional capacity. When I am really happy it’s harder to bring me down. That’s the whole point of Pharrell’s song, “Happy.” It’s like, yeah, “You can’t bring me down, I’m too happy right now.”  But there is something to that. When I have a lot of happiness I can handle more emotional weight than when I am lacking it.

That’s one of the things that these harvest festivals have in common. And it’s interesting because when God tells the people to take a week for this festival and a week for that festival, the word that he uses there is, “And have joy, do this with joy.” So you can tell that’s not a command like, choose to be happy. It’s more of, I’m throwing a party, I want you to be happy. Be with people you love and eat good food. So I don’t think we need to separate joy and happiness. Look at joy as a subset, I think it helps.

[31:31] Stephanie: Cool. So related and possibly the same answer, I don’t know. So we talked about brain science and we talked about the Bible, is joy in brain science and joy in the Bible the same?

[31:47] Marcus: Most of the time, yes. I would say that because the word joy in Hebrew and the word joy in Greek can have a broader semantic range than the way we use it in English, it can get a little tricky. Like when it uses Chará or Char’en versus Shama or Sama, I forget the Hebrew word at the moment. Those are going to have slightly different semantic ranges. And so because of that they can be translated as joy or happiness depending on the context. And what we’re talking about here is really the use of the English language. So I would say for functional purposes, there’s no significant difference between the way they get used. If there is any difference it would be based on the contextual use of the word. Shaimcha, that makes sense. Okay.

[32:35] Stephanie: All right. That has been Hebrew with the Warner’s.

[32:38] Marcus: So it’s the advantage of having a seminary student.

[32:43] Stephanie: I had to double check myself there. Let’s talk more about joy. What is the role of joy in emotional capacity?

[32:53] Marcus: Yeah, that’s a good question. So the role of joy in emotional capacity is not the idea that I’m happy all the time, but that I can actually grow my capacity for joy and my capacity for happiness. I heard stories of people who adopted kids from these Eastern European orphanages where their physical needs were taken care of, but not their emotional needs. And what would happen is the babies and toddlers in this place just learned to stop crying.

So everybody assumed they were okay. They’re not crying anymore so they must be okay. What they learned was that their brains were learning  there is no point in crying, they just shut off. And it’s what we would call a dismissive attachment that was formed. And also what happened was that their brain’s capacity for joy didn’t grow. And so when they get adopted people assume that I’m so happy to see this new face, and that they’re going to grow leaps and bounds, but they don’t. And they don’t understand why.

[33:54] Stephanie: All they need is my love.

[33:56] Marcus: All they need is my love, right? And they don’t understand why that isn’t enough. And the answer is because their capacity to receive it doesn’t work. So it’s a little bit like pouring too much water on a dry plant, it overwhelms it. Or why somebody who’s starving can’t just have a feast and be done with it. You actually have to grow your capacity for food, you have to grow your capacity to absorb the water. In the same way we’ve got to grow our capacity to experience joy, especially if we didn’t grow up with a lot of it.

[34:21] Stephanie: When you talk about how you can misread things, somebody could be giving love and it could be misinterpreted as something else, because the wiring or the reading needs help.

[34:34] Marcus: Yeah, because a lot of people who grew up without that foundational joy in their life only know transactional relationships. And so they will misinterpret your attempts at unconditional love as you must want something from me, because that’s the only category their brain has. So that’s going to have to be grown and it’s going to have to be developed over time. The relationship of joy to emotional capacity is actually at the heart of our analogy of Building Bounce. So we would say that for the ball to bounce it has to be filled with air and that air is joy.

And so we need to make sure that we are constantly growing the ball’s capacity to hold more air, and then it can bounce more and more. And so you know, the metaphor breaks down at some point because we don’t want a ball bigger than Mars. Our emotional capacity grows the more often that we experience joy, then being upset, and then get back to joy, and then being upset and then get back to joy. So the more often that our brains go back and forth between those the stronger our capacity gets.

[35:42] Stephanie: Can you give me an example of how I might feel a negative emotion but still feel relational happiness?

[35:48] Marcus: Yeah. So let’s just say that I’m feeling anxious about something. I can be with you, or Ben, or my wife Brenda. Being with somebody who’s happy to be with me can help. And it’s got nothing to do with counseling the anxiety. It’s got nothing to do with anything else but the emotional happiness or the relational happiness that we have. That gives me a little bit more capacity for dealing with that.

So the same thing if I’m very sad, like I’ve lost something, it can still be helpful to be with somebody that I know is happy to be with me. And so the relational happiness that comes with the joy of that connection increases my capacity to deal with it. This is one of the reasons why when people grieve, it’s not usually a good idea to just go be alone and be all by yourself, not constantly anyway. You need to be around people who are happy to be with you.

[36:44] Stephanie: Yeah. Well, I’m just thinking several thoughts on this. I’m just thinking of Grandpa Warner’s funeral which is a time of lots of grieving. But there was also so much joy and laughter, people being able to be together and reminisce. And be happy for him frankly, because he was very happy to go to heaven.

[37:08] Marcus: Yeah. It’s been almost a year since he passed and it was really remarkable because we didn’t even have an “official funeral.” We had sort of a come and visit thing and 400 people showed up. For a man who was 97 years old, you just realize how many lives he touched and how much joy those people had in being around each other. And that’s a good example.

As a former pastor I’ve done a lot of funerals and there’s as much laughter usually as there are tears at funerals. Because you’re remembering all of the good things. You’re remembering the happy times. And it can be helpful in anything we’re going through to have people around you who help you to remember what there is to be happy about. And what is happy in the midst of all of this anyway.

[37:52] Stephanie: Yes. And even just today I was having some struggles and my wonderful parents came and listened to me. They validated me and gave me a plan for the future to say, “Look, it’s gonna be okay,” and got me back to joy.  I’m very close to this emotion right now because I was feeling very overwhelmed. I had many mixed strong emotions but I also felt genuinely happy to be with my parents through it, I was able to feel that relational happiness.

[38:27] Marcus: Yeah, we’ve all been there. There is something stabilizing about knowing you’re not alone. So I’m glad we could be there today.

[38:39] Stephanie: Yes. Thank you, thank you very much. Very good, so let’s move on. Let’s start easing our way toward rest. So I’ve heard you say the flip side of joy is peace. So talk about that.

[38:52] Marcus: So joy is a high energy emotion such as, “I am so happy to see you and it fills me with energy, this is awesome.” But after that I am quiet. I’m still happy to be with you, but let’s be quiet together, let’s just be at peace. So peace is that feeling like everything’s going to be okay. I may not have solved any of my problems but I just have this sense of, “I’m going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.”  I can rest and I could be happy to be with you in a low energy state. So when I’m happy to be with somebody in a low energy state we call that peace. So our peace comes from God.

Again, not because he’s the only source of peace in our lives but because that’s the nature of who he is. That when we’re around God he brings peace. Jesus is the prince of peace. He helps to let us know, “Trust me, trust in the Lord, it’s all going to be okay. I will take care of you and you can rest.” And that’s why as we transition from joy into peace and then into this idea of rest, we see that rest in a biblical idea is almost an act of worship. In resting we are trusting that if I am not super busy all of the time God will still take care of me.

[40:12] Stephanie: And trust is just innately relational?

[40:14] Marcus: Trust is an innately relational word, yes. In fact, I remember talking to people who are like, “Where’s attachment in the Bible?” One of the odd things to me is that the word relationship doesn’t actually occur in Greek or Hebrew. So there are metaphors for it but they don’t actually just have the word relationship. And yet we’re constantly talking about how relationship is at the heart of our faith. And it’s true but that’s not the word.

So I’m looking for where do we see attachment, where is that? And I think some of the stronger words are trust, know, and love. Right? God says, “Love the Lord your God.” Well, that’s a bonding word, right? And he says, “Trust me.” Well that’s  an attachment. Trusting, attachment, safe, calm, and connected. And this idea of knowing somebody is the idea of intimacy that I know you well.

[41:08] Stephanie: Don’t forget walking with God.

[41:09] Marcus: Yeah. So walking with God is also the classic metaphor which gave name to our ministry right. A deeper walk with God is a deeper relationship with him. And that’s kind of the core metaphor that we go with here.

[41:25] Stephanie: Where are some places where you see rest as a major theme in the Bible?

[41:29] Marcus: I start with Genesis one. Genesis one is really a redemption story about how a world that was formless and empty was given form and was filled. So it was no longer empty, it was blessed and brought to a place of rest. And so in that sense it’s a redemption story because it went from chaos to rest. And so you see that God is, in a sense, setting us up. There is a pathway to rest and blessing in your life and it’s me. So trust me, obey me, let’s walk through this thing together, and I will get you where you need to go.

And so rest starts in the creation story and then it goes into the Torah. And what was God’s mandate? If you’re my people you’re going to rest on the Sabbath and that was a really foreign idea. You are not only going to rest 52 sabbaths a year but there’s three other weeks you’re going to take off of work, and you’re going to rest. So he had 70 days of rest built into a calendar, which is exactly 20%. And there’s just other rhythms of rest that are built in here. I think the very fact that the day started in the evening and ended in the evening was a way of modeling rest. Like, okay, your day is over now it’s time to start going into quiet so that you can get up.

And I like the way Dr. Wilder puts this in the book Pandora Problem. He said, “You had a chance to join God within his work.” And so we see that God is the one who is always working, not me. He tells me to rest partly because he wants me to understand that he’s not there helping me get what I want out of life. He is at work and I am joining him in his work. I love the way Henry Blackaby put it, “Where are you at work God and  help me to join you where you are already at work.” And that’s core to this idea of rest.

[43:27] Stephanie: One of the things that struck me just this past fall semester was the land resting. And how many times throughout the Old Testament we see the importance of, “And the land found rest. The land was at rest.” Or, “Do this so that the land can rest.” And I remember in one class that my professor hadn’t even taken us into the preaching mode of, “How does this apply to me?” We were just talking about agriculture in the Old Testament and it was just like Jesus was sitting beside me just chilling, with his arm around me looking at me like, “Do you hear this?” “Do you hear this?”

And I was like, “I hear you, I’m sorry.” All these rules about do not milk this land for all it is worth. Do not, you know, cut all the corners of the field. And some of that is for the land’s sake. And some of that is for taking care of the people who are less fortunate and taking care of the community. But it was just like, yeah, do not milk the land, let the land rest.

[44:41] Marcus: That’s where gleaning comes in. It’s one pass across, don’t get every last grain you can and don’t harvest the corners. And it is perhaps the best picture of margin  in scripture, the idea of gleaning. The idea here is that margin is necessary for me to be able to take care of other people. If I am at my max just taking care of myself then I have nothing to give other people. And so in this rest is also God’s desire for us to take care of others. We can also separate out the child level maturity thing here. A child can only take care of one person at a time. So usually I can take care of myself and not you.

But sometimes in reverse maturity or upside down maturity you have a child who can only take care of other people’s needs, and can’t take care of their own. At the Adult level maturity when we’re talking about rest and all this, there’s enough for me and there’s some to share. I can take care of me and there’s something left over to take care of you too. And that’s why margin is so important, and why rest and rhythm are so important when it comes to living with peace, which is that low energy side of joy..

[46:00] Stephanie: So let’s start bringing them together unless you have more to say about rest. What does a rhythm of joy and rest look like?

[46:10] Marcus: So a rhythm of joy and rest. I love that there was evening and there was morning day one, that the day starts at 06:00 p.m. I think one of the things that really brought this home was the show The Chosen, that was about the Sabbath. And you saw the ladies all going to market on Friday afternoon and everybody getting things ready. There was a sense of anticipation, it’s almost six, it’s almost six, it’s almost the Sabbath.

[46:35] Stephanie: Do you see the first star in the sky?

[46:37] Marcus: Yeah. “Do you see the first star in the sky?” So what it does is it creates the joy of anticipation. It creates a relational connection because you’re expecting to have a communal dinner with other people, which means I’m not alone and I’m with people who are happy to see me. There’s going to be a connection with God and there’s going to be a day off from work, and there’s going to be rest. And then you get back to 06:00 p.m. the next day and you’re starting to prepare for the next day. I got to start getting everything organized and ready so when I wake up in the morning I can just go.

And that’s a good model of rhythm, right? That’s a good model of how this works. I think sometimes when we think of starting our day in the morning or starting our day at midnight, those things are not actually that helpful, when it comes to creating rhythm to the way that we live. So here’s a story I got from How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. He talks about Charles Schwab who most of us know the name because of the brokerage. But the person Charles Schwab, back in the early days of the 1900’s was brought into a high end corporate setting and he says, “Let me meet with each of your managers”. “I’m going to give them one tool and when we’re done you can pay me what you think it’s worth.”

So the next week the owner sent him a check for $10,000 in 1920s money. So that’s like $100,000 or more today. And his one tool was simply this, he told every manager that before they left work to write down the top six things, in order, that they needed to get done the next day. What’s number one? What’s number two? The top six, that’s it. That piece of paper is sitting on their desk when they leave.

And I think that there’s a picture there. So when they get there in the morning they’re not trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their day. They already know I’ve got to start my day getting this done and knocking these things out. I think that’s also a picture of rhythm, a picture of rest. Because I’m prepared and I know what I have to do I can now rest knowing that I’ve gotten some preparation. That’s why sometimes when I have trouble sleeping it’s been helpful to make a to do list, just to list out all the projects. This is why I’m having trouble quieting my brain because I’m trying to hold on to too much. So those kinds of rhythms I think can be helpful to us. Obviously there’s a whole lot more we can say about it but that’s the start.

[48:55] Stephanie: And we are coming toward the end of our time here. You mentioned last week about joy camps.

[49:01] Marcus: Yeah.

[49:01] Stephanie: And I don’t know if you’re going to be talking more about that at the conference?

[49:08] Marcus: We can touch on this multiple times. This core concept of maturity and emotional capacity I learned from Life Model and Jim Wilder. His core illustration that I first came across was Joy Mountain and Joy camp. And the idea here of a joy camp is that when you go camping the first thing you do is you set up the camp and you get everything ready. Then you give instructions to people. So you tell the children,“You can’t go anywhere your parents don’t take you.” To the older kids and the teenagers you might say, “Okay, you can go to the lake but that’s as far as you can go.” And then to the adults, you’re like, “All right you can go wherever you want to go, just be back by eight.” And so the idea is that by eight everybody is back and they’re in the camp.

And in some ways it doesn’t matter whether you had a good day or a bad day, you’re going to be together with people who are happy to see you. And whether you’re telling stories of how everything went wrong or whether you’re telling stories of how everything went right, you’re doing it with laughter, with people smiling, and with people commiserating with you.

The only thing that’s really going to ruin it is if it gets to be like 8:30 or 9:00 and somebody’s missing. And part of joy camp is that we want everybody to be there with us. We want our family, we want our friends, and we want everybody to be back in joy camp at the end of the day. And it’s hard on us when they’re not. So the best we can do sometimes, is make sure that we’re there.

But we also want to do everything we can to make sure, especially in our families, that everybody is okay when they’re  getting ready for bed. So I love that analogy. The idea is that I go out on Joy Mountain, I overcome obstacles, I have adventures, I do things, and I come back to be with my people at the end of the day. So the best analogy I’ve seen of this was Duck Dynasty. And so while people sometimes tend to roll their eyes at me, in Duck Dynasty every show ends with multiple generations of people around a single table, laughing and happy to be together.

It doesn’t matter whether they had a good day or a bad day, they know they’re going to be with their people at the end of the day. And I think that was part of the attraction of that show, people longed for that. They’re like, “I wish I had a family like that where multiple generations could be happy to be together on a daily basis. That’s a really cool thing.”

In doing research for the books on joy that I’ve helped to write, one of the things I found was that the happiest cultures in the world are the ones that have this rhythm built in. They have a relational rhythm built in where the people know that on a weekly basis they’re going to be with extended family, and they’re going to be with a multiple generation of people who are happy to be together.

So that’s like that Sabbath thing we were talking about, where every week you’re going to be with extended family and friends who are happy to be together. That’s kind of built into most of the cultures that have a strong sense of emotional resilience. One of the problems in America I think is that we’ve lost that in most segments of our culture. And so as a result we have tended to put all of the onus on being an emotionally resilient person on me as an individual. And we don’t understand the importance of a generational community for building that resilience.

[52:10] Stephanie: So much.

[52:11] Marcus: There’s a lot there.

[52:13] Stephanie: Next week we’re going to start talking about the ABC”s of Building Bounce. But for now, any final thoughts for this episode?

[52:20] Marcus:  I’m looking at the cover of the book Building Bounce: How to Grow Emotional Resilience that Stefanie Hinman and I wrote. Looking at the fact that we have an old beat up ball that is bouncing in a splash of water, and I know you added the splash of water which I thought was a nice touch to the picture. But the old beat up ball was important because we didn’t want it to be a brand new shiny ball because a lot of us feel kind of beat up. And the question is, “Is there hope for me who’s had kind of a beat up life? Is there hope for me to still have joy?”  Or does the fact that I went through so much abuse and that I went through so much trauma that I didn’t get what I needed, does that mean that I’m doomed to live the rest of my life without joy?

And the answer is no. And that’s the good news that your brain can grow the capacity for joy for as long as we live. There are specific skills that grow into specific habits that create that level of joy. And so we want to introduce what those are and how we do them. And then as Christians, we have the added benefit of being able to do them with a family of believers and with God himself, who is the ultimate “happy to see you person.” And so that’s kind of where we’re going with this. We want to help people understand that there is hope. Even if I have been living a low joy life until now there is hope for building these skills moving forward.

[53:40] Stephanie: That was good. I think I had said before that I was going to report on my building bounce practices. And as Juni Felix likes to talk about, “tiny habits” and “little things” I started small and downloaded John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart 1 Minute Pause app. 

I’ve just been doing one and three minute pauses every day, twice a day, and that’s been really great. I always try to be appreciative all throughout the day and in my prayers. I was really intentional while I was gone to find things even when there were things that were triggering me negatively, I was like, “Okay, Lord, I’m going to look at my surroundings and find things to appreciate, even about a negative thing.”  Asking, “How are you using this Lord?” “How can we redeem this?” or “Thank You, Lord.” And anyway it was good.

[54:31] Marcus:  It is good, isn’t it? I’ve used that Pause app too and I’ve started another one that Max Anders put together for renewing your mind. That has been helpful too. It’s good to have habits that help build these things.

[54:44] Stephanie: It’s so funny. I can’t remember if he does it in all of them, but in the 1 minute pause John ends with, “That’s good, that’s enough for now.”

[54:54] Marcus: That’s good, that’s enough for now. It’s like permission.

[54:57] Stephanie:  I finished doing a project earlier today and I had his voice in my head say, “That’s good, that’s enough for now.”

[55:06] Marcus: Sometimes we just need that permission that it’s okay to quit, you can do something else.

[55:12] Stephanie: So funny. This week we’re starting a sub series within our larger Resilience series. And that is a look at what you call the ABC’s of bounce. So we’re gonna take at least one episode on each of these or maybe a couple. But why don’t you set us up with a quick overview? What are the ABC’s?

[55:31] Marcus: So the ABC’s are appreciation and quieting. We kind of pair those together because they are the flip side of the same coin. Appreciation and quieting. One’s high energy and one’s low energy, but we call it appreciation. “B” is beliefs. That is, it’s hard to be quiet when your mind is racing, it’s hard to be quiet when you’re believing toxic thoughts. So beliefs is the second one. And then “C” is connections. And this has to do with connecting with people and connecting with God. So those are the ABC”s, appreciation, beliefs and connecting.

[55:58] Stephanie: Very good. So you mentioned you have quieting and appreciation as two steps in one. Why did you combine them?

[56:07] Marcus: When you’re teaching infants to live with joy and peace, teaching them that they’re never alone in any of the big emotions that they’re going through. And so you play Peekaboo. Right? You know, “Ah, peekaboo.”

You’re looking at them and they smile, they giggle, and you laugh. But you realize that there comes a point when baby’s had enough, right? You can’t just do that forever. So you have to be in tune and in sync with them to know. okay they’ve had enough, it’s time now to quiet together. The appreciating isn’t really done until you’ve gotten to a place of quiet. Sometimes you have to quiet first and then you can appreciate, so the two things always go together. I am quiet so that I can appreciate, but all appreciation should lead me back to a place of quiet when I’m done.

[56:53] Stephanie: So can you go a little deeper into that and maybe give an example of when you would need to quiet first?

[57:00] Marcus: If I’m feeling anxious and really full of anxiety, that’s a high energy thing.  If I go straight from anxiety into, “Okay, I need to appreciate something,” that can be really hard to do, so it helps take a deep breath. To kind of calm myself a bit and then go from there into appreciating and then back into quieting. So that would be an example.

Chris Coursey, in one of the books that we wrote together, mentioned a story of he and his wife Jen (very early in their marriage) at bedtime. It was common for Jen to be still high-energy and Chris would just lay his head on the pillow and fall asleep. So what they found was that if they did some appreciation for about 10 to 15 minutes before they went to sleep, that Jen slept much better. It helped her quiet to do some appreciation first. And that’s another example of how these two things go together.

[57:59] Stephanie: Yeah. And they were really intentional in that it was three things they appreciated.

[58:04] Marcus: They call it “three, three, three.” It’s three things you appreciate about God, three things you appreciated about the day, and three things you appreciate about the person you’re with.

[58:13] Stephanie:  Nice little tool. So I’m good at saying, “Thank you.”  Is that enough?

[58:21] Marcus:It’s enough to get the task done but it’s not the same as appreciation. And so I say most of us are pretty good at saying, “Thank you.” It’s a  left brain skill, we can do it without any emotion to it at all. Like, “Oh thank you for the water.  Thank you for that… That was thoughtful of you.” That takes half a second to 2 seconds to do. Whereas appreciation is actually evoking an emotion – evoking a feeling inside that you can stay in for a couple of minutes. So I’d sometimes say it’s the difference between noticing that there’s a pretty sunset and actually sitting down for five minutes and watching the sunset.

Or it’s the difference between saying, “Thank you,” for your cup of coffee and taking the time to take a deep, nice deep whiff of the coffee and saying, “Ah, this is really nice.” It’s entering into that. Same thing, when I’m remembering an experience and I go back into the past thinking about a day at the lake. It’s one thing to remember, “Oh, it was fun to be at the lake with my friends,” it’s another thing to sit there for a few minutes and just remember and live in that memory again. And so the nice thing about the brain is that it can actually pull back up the same chemicals and hormones bringing them up in the present from the past, just by living in that memory for a little bit.

[59:34] Stephanie: So some of this feels a little like contentment to me. So what is the difference between contentment and appreciation?

[59:42] Marcus: ure it’s a good question. Contentment I tend to associate with peace. It’s this idea that everything’s going to be okay and I’m okay. And sometimes the only reason I know I’m okay is that I’m with you. When you’re a little kid and there’s a storm sometimes it’s enough to just snuggle up next to Mom or Dad, and you know you’re going to be okay simply because you’re with somebody who’s safe and secure.

The mistake a lot of us make is that we don’t think we can be okay until we understand everything that’s going on, and we know how it’s going to be okay, we can figure it all out. That’s not the same kind of thing. When Jesus wants us to have peace it’s always because “I am with you, now don’t be afraid because I am with you.” And so it’s that connection piece.

So contentment has a lot to do with peace. Joy is a higher energy thing and appreciation is a higher energy thing. What I’m trying to do is to remember things that made me smile. So it should lead to contentment and should increase our contentment. So I can understand why you’d connect them.

[01:00:39] Stephanie: Capacity is something we want to work on while we have it. Many of us find ourselves having to triage our capacity because we didn’t do that enough. How can appreciation help us grow our capacity, both in the stressful time and in those times when we do not need to draw on the capacity so much.

[01:01:01] Marcus: We’re talking about routines and habits, right? And that is, it takes your brain about 30 days to build a habit. The way I look at it is that 30 days is the amount of time that it takes for white matter to start forming in my brain. So white matter happens through repetition.

So, for example, in sports, if I want to get good at ping pong I’ve got to play a lot of ping pong. The more I do it I begin developing white matter in my brain around the habits. And so what happens is that white matter allows me to simply react. So you can understand when they’re playing ping pong and some of these shots are coming 100 miles an hour with spin on them and angles and curves, you don’t have time to think about it, you have to be able to just react.

Well, the brain can only process things at that speed if I’ve got a habit developed. And that’s what white matter is all about. So our goal here is to practice appreciation on a regular basis for a couple of times a day for months, so that when it gets stressful, I do it automatically. It becomes a habit and it’s like I’m not even thinking about it, it just comes out of me now because I’m reacting. And that’s what we’re after.

We’re trying to build our reaction time so that instead of reacting into panic we react into appreciation and calm much more regularly. It’s not that we don’t feel the big thing, but our brain knows oh, that’s not where I’m gonna stay, I’m gonna stay down here, and connect in this other place.

[01:02:29] Stephanie: Would that relate to fear mapping versus, like, joy mapping?

[01:02:32] Marcus: Sure. They are related because the opposite of appreciating is fearing. Am I going to live in joy or fear? If my brain is fear mapping then it’s developed the habit of looking for whatever is a problem or whatever there is that might cause me pain. And I’m completely fixated on, “this could be painful or this could be a problem” versus training my brain to look for those things that there are to enjoy and for those things to be grateful for. I remember my parents often said, “Every good, every perfect gift comes from above,” quoting James. And it was this idea of anytime you enjoy anything that makes you smile, that’s a good gift, it’s a gift from God. So let’s be appreciative toward God for that.

[01:03:17] Stephanie: Beautiful. I keep thinking of one of our favorite stories about the missionary who was complaining all the time. Do you want to tell that story as an example of the effectiveness of appreciation?

[01:03:29] Marcus: Yeah, it was interesting. I got invited to a reentry retreat for a bunch of missionaries who were coming off of some intense work overseas, and transitioning back into the States. And there was one lady there in particular who was just so joyful, I mean it was so obvious. Maybe you’ve been around people who are so happy it’s fake, but she wasn’t that kind of fake happy. It was like there was something seriously joyful about this person to the extent that I asked, “What’s your story here?” “I’ve never met anybody who comes across quite the way you do.”

She said, “Well, it wasn’t always that way.” She said, “When I first went to the mission field I actually almost got kicked off for my bad attitude. I complained about everything. The food was no good, the people were untrustworthy. I didn’t like this and I didn’t like that. I got called in. They’re like, if you can’t change your attitude you’re going to have to go home.” And so the path she chose to transformation was that she kept a daily journal and every day she’d write one page of what she was grateful for, for that day. And she’s now got stacks of journals of gratitude, daily appreciation. And now that’s her habit, right? She doesn’t default into the complaining, the critical, and the bitter. She defaults into what there is to appreciate.

Now Grandma Eileen had a similar habit. And she showed me her stack of journals that she had from years of being a single missionary in Africa where she wrote every day. She would take the time, which really is five to ten minutes, to just write out appreciation. One thing I found is that when I write things out, it tends to be more of a left brain experience for me. So to give it the most impact, if I can write it out and then read it to somebody that’s where you get the real home run. Because it’s in sharing it with somebody else that activates a different part of your brain than just writing. And so I find the two things together are really good.

[01:05:32] Stephanie: Yes, everything is exacerbated which is the negative term. I’m looking for the positive. Amplified, thank you, that is the word I was looking for. Everything is amplified in a relational context.

[01:05:48] Marcus: I always think of Chris Coursey when I hear amplify. I just see him up there going, “The brain is an amplifier.” It will either amplify joy or will amplify fear. So we’ve got to train it.

[01:06:00] Stephanie: They’re fabulous. So kind of going back to the contentment question. A lot of times when we talk about appreciation it can feel a bit self centered at least to me. Because we’re talking so much about what am I appreciating and how are things affecting me? So sometimes I feel like we might swing too far in talking about that. I wanted to bring God into the conversation more directly. How can we interact with God in our appreciation, and how can we practice appreciating God himself?

[01:06:33] Marcus: Those are both good things and they’re all separate. So depending on where people are at, is where you start. For example, a lot of times this building bounce process is with people who’ve gone through high trauma. And so some of these highly traumatized people don’t like God or they’re scared of God, or they have trust issues, at least with God.

And so for them it’s actually easier to start the appreciation without reference to God at first, just, what is it you enjoy? Then after a while you help them to cross that bridge to realize that when I’m feeling appreciation, I’m actually worshiping. When I’m feeling appreciation I’m actually acknowledging that this was a gift from somebody.

[01:07:16] Stephanie: That is good. Appreciation is worship.

[01:07:18] Marcus: Yeah. So it’s true. It’s why we “Enter into his courts with thanksgiving and into his gates with praise.” So part of the gratitude toward God has to do with meditating on his qualities. Sometimes you do this as pros and cons. For instance, it helps me to think about what the pagan gods are like and then contrast that with what God is like. And you realize, wow, you are so different.

When you look at the options you think of King David. He’s looking at the options of the Philistine gods,the Canaanite gods, the Egyptian gods, and the Mesopotamian gods. And then he’s looking at his God Yahweh, and he’s like, “Oh, my word you are amazing.” Especially in comparison. Not just in power and grandeur but character of trustworthiness, morality, and caring. Whereas the other gods were much more transactional, you do this for me and I’ll do that for you. Why don’t you explain the Latin there of Do ut des?

[01:08:15] Stephanie: I give so that you will give.

[01:08:18] Marcus: In pagan Roman society they would sometimes do this at meals. They would scrape a little bit of their food into the fire and they would say the latin phrase, “Do ut des.” I give so that you will give.

And it shows the transactional nature of paganism basically. And so there’s a lot of us who are tempted to do that with God, right? We want to turn our relationship with God into something transactional, where if I give you my tithe then you’ll bless me. Or if I go to church this many times, you’ll take care of me. If I do this, then you’ll do that.

That’s a transactional relationship. We really want to anchor our relationship in appreciation and appreciating God’s quality. Then whenever we appreciate anything in life reflecting on the fact that it’s a gift from God, it turns into worship.

[01:09:05] Stephanie: That’s so beautiful I love it. So next week we’re going to be looking into some of the practical appreciation things like going through the acrostic, G.A.M.E.S. I’m very excited for that, I love that acrostic. But for now, (we’re making good time in this episode) any final thoughts?

01:09:24] Marcus: Any final thoughts? Well, the ABCs came out of working with Stefanie Hinman, she had developed a curriculum for highly traumatized children. And you’re looking at as a young child what do they need to begin building the capacity for joy, it starts with the connection.

You have to have safe, secure, connection. And so even as an adult if I am isolated or I’m in toxic relationships and I don’t have that safe, calm and collected type of connection in my life, then it is going to be harder. I’m going to have to work at this more. I’m going to have to set aside more time for it because I’m not getting the reinforcement from other places. I wrote a book several years ago of how to grow joy, a little pamphlet really. And two of the things it says is, “I have to have a ‘happy to see you’ God and ‘happy to see you’ people.” And I find that a lot of us are looking for eyes that light up when we walk in the room, like, “Oh, it’s you, yay.”

But for a lot of us we don’t have that view of God. We actually have a fear bond with God. And so part of the practice of appreciation is beginning to turn our fear bond with God into a joy bond. Learning to see God as somebody who’s happy to be with us and happy to see us. When I feel like I live my whole life in the presence of someone who’s happy to see me, it gives me a whole lot more confidence and a whole lot more security. It’s just easier to live with peace and less anxiety.

[01:11:05] Stephanie: So today we’re continuing our look at the first of the ABC’s of bounce and that is appreciation. So, Father, do you want to give us a recap of appreciation? Anything from the last episode that you want to clarify or expound on before we unpack our acrostic?

[01:11:21] Marcus: Yeah. At the heart of the idea of building bounce is when we talked about the image of a depleted ball that’s lacking air. The air that really fills up the ball that allows it to bounce is joy, and  if we don’t run on joy, we’re going to run on fear. The more fear we run on the more deflated our ball gets, right. You can have a ball that doesn’t bounce quite right, you can also have a ball that just goes flat, and it kind of splats when it hits. And I’m sure we have listeners in all categories, right?

People who are bouncing around  like life’s an adventure, this is all good. We have people who are just sluggish and it’s not bouncing back quite enough. And people who feel like, yeah, somebody punctured my ball and it’s just laying there, it needs repaired and it needs refilled. And so what we’re talking about here is, are there practices we can do and habits we can develop that keep our ball more filled with the air of joy? So that’s kind of what we’re focusing on here.

[01:12:20] Stephanie: All right, and how does appreciation factor into this?

[01:12:22] Marcus: Appreciation is the fastest way for the brain to grow joy. If you want  an injection of joy, appreciation is the fastest way to get there, with the possible exception of hugs from a toddler. The  feeling of being in love is actually joy too.  I have so much joy and I’m so happy to see this person and they’re so happy to see me.

[01:12:48] Stephanie: Relational happiness.

[01:12:49] Marcus: Relational happiness. Right. So there are ways to get those infusions but we’re talking about things you can control, like on demand. Appreciation is one of those things where we can kind of choose to do things to enter into that place of appreciation, and not have to wait for something to create that reaction in us.

[01:13:08] Stephanie: Very helpful. So one of my favorites of your acrostics (you have so many acrostics) is the word G.A.M.E.S. Gratitude, Anticipation, Memories, Experiences, and Singing. What a fun combination of things.

I’ve drawn upon this acrostic when I’m alone as a means of finding appreciation, and also when I’m in a group helping with Deeper Walk seminars, or women’s retreats and such. I know I’ve heard of some people who will go around at their Thanksgiving table and go through each letter as a family or as a group.

So sometimes this is a nice exercise to do. I’ve helped lead some of these at the Deeper Walk seminars as we’re coming into the session or as we’re leaving the session. It could be good for a small group as well.  Anyway, I’m babbling, but there’s so much good potential here.

[01:14:05] Marcus: It’s a podcast. You’re supposed to babble.

[01:14:06] Stephanie: Okay. Good. So if you want to talk about how you came up with the acrostic, that’s always fun.

[01:14:16] Marcus: Sure. This particular one came when I was asked to do a webinar on Thanksgiving and they wanted me to teach on appreciation. I just started listing off the ways that you could practice appreciation. I started with past, present, and future and I was just going to go with that.  What is appreciation of the present? It’s gratitude. What is appreciation in the future? That’s anticipation. And in the past is memories. All of a sudden I had G.A.M. I had just learned from Dr. Wilder that singing was one of the best ways to bring your right and your left brain together, so now I’ve got G.A.M.S, and  I didn’t want to go with GAMS. Now in my generation that meant one thing, but I don’t know if it means anything today.

So you realize that there are things that I can do to create experiences. I can plan some things. Maybe I’m going to do crafts, or I’m going to do gardening. I’m going to do some things that create joy. So all of a sudden G.A.M.E.S  was just sitting in front of me, it was pretty easy to put that together.

Gratitude is, “what is there in my present?” Anticipation, “what’s there in my future?” And I look at it this way, “what is in my present that made me smile in the last 24 hours?” What am I looking forward to that makes me smile thinking about it? In fact, one of the things you find  when people are really struggling with depression and despair, is they often can’t think of things they’re looking forward to. When they go back into their memories they can only remember the bad stuff about their memories, even the joy is almost painful, because it’s not there anymore.

So what you have to do is, (and let’s quote Juni Felix here again, right?) – you have to use these “tiny habits” sometimes and get “tiny wins” instead of looking for the big win. Because too often we’re looking for something that’s going to change my whole demeanor or change my whole outlook on life. This is going to fix everything, I won’t be depressed anymore and I won’t be anxious anymore.

It’ll all be over if I can just have a good enough experience of appreciation right now. That’s not what we’re talking about, that’s not realistic. What we’re talking about here is having little wins, little celebrations, little things that we can do along the way, this begins to train our brain that pain isn’t the end of the story. That there’s something else going on here that’s so good.

[01:16:33] Stephanie: Yes. And Juni would definitely encourage celebrations anytime you do a small little win.

[01:16:44] Marcus: And for those who don’t know, Juni Felix is on the Deeper Walk speaker team. She is a radio personality in the Moody network and she’s written a book called, You are Worth the Work. And she is a friend of the family.

[01:17:00] Stephanie: She is one of my prayer partners, I love her very dearly. So let’s settle into gratitude and this appreciation in the present. Could you give us an example of an average person who is not struggling with deep depression and is not just bouncing off the walls. Just like a normal day of gratitude?

[01:17:23] Marcus: So like right now we’re sitting next to a window. Looking out the window  I see that it is a perma, gray sky. Some people may look at that and they’re like,  oh no, not another gray sky, I can’t be happy on a gray day. But for me it makes me think of Scotland and Ireland and fires and whatever. I like the ability to look through the branches of a tree when the leaves aren’t there. And there’s just a feel to it that makes me feel like, Okay, I can’t wait to make a fire.

And so in my present I can appreciate what there is. Plus, there’s a pine tree and other trees. Then maybe I look more closely at the tree and I’m like, you know I’ve never really noticed how symmetrical this is, or how that leaf does that. You study things.

And what always pops in my mind when I talk about this is a scene from The Last Samurai. Where, what’s the guy, the leader of the village? Anyway, I can’t remember, but the leader of this Samurai village is about to go into the battle of a lifetime. He’s on the verge of losing everything but he’s taking a walk among the cherry blossoms and he’s studying them, looking for the perfect cherry blossom.

But the idea here is that what he used  to calm himself in the midst of all these big things going on in his life, was the practice of appreciation in the present. Being focused on that there’s something here that is good.

In the midst of everything else, look at the beauty of this one beautiful cherry blossom. So whatever that is for us. If you need a jumpstart you can pick your favorite food, like, “I’m gonna get a piece of cherry pie here,” or whatever it is. And you say, ”Oh, I just really like this,” allowing yourself to kind of settle into that and stay with it for a little bit. That’s the idea of gratitude in the present.

[01:19:22] Stephanie: It makes me think of when I was in junior high or early high school that I got to write and publish some devotionals, and they asked for our bio. I’m like, what do I put in a bio? I’m a high schooler?

[01:19:44] Marcus: I climbed Mount Everest when I was ten.

[01:19:45] Stephanie: But I wrote something in that bio that surprised me when I wrote it and has just felt right and has stuck with me. “I enjoy finding the epic in the ordinary.” I think this is the first time I’ve really kind of connected that to gratitude in the present.

Yeah, just like you were saying as you were describing the leafless trees, being able to see the sky through the trees is one of my very favorite things. And I love gray skies and clouds, I get giddy with happiness. I’m a weirdo but yes, I love to find that epic in the ordinary. I also like to find the ordinary and the epic, figuring out how things come together. Anyway, there we go.

[01:20:36] Marcus: Well, that’s true, that’s what appreciation and present is all about. Finding the epic in the ordinary is such a great catchphrase. That’s kind of what we’re doing, looking at what there is and finding that there’s always something to appreciate in the present if we’ll just focus.

[01:20:52] Stephanie: Very good. Do you want to then talk about gratitude in the more desperate situations?

[01:21:00] Marcus: Well, if I’m desperate enough, I’m not gonna get there. What I need in the more desperate times is what we call extreme quieting. Extreme quieting is when I have to shake up my nervous system a little bit. I will just throw out a list of things that I’ve heard people do. Keep your head still, take a deep breath, and blow out like 5-10 times.

Then with your head still put your eyes up towards the ceiling and then down towards the floor. Then turn your eyes to the right and then over to the left and just repeat it. Moving your eyes but keeping your head still. And part of what that does is it distracts your brain out of that thing.

It can also be jumping jacks or exercising can help. You want to do things to distract yourself out of your anxiety and get your focus on something else. One of the things that I like to do is, I’ll sing “Happy Birthday” to myself. “Happy birthday to me,” right? It always makes me laugh.

There are different things that you can do. The key thing here is that I’m trying to distract my body out of the state that it’s in a little bit, so that I can then go into the regular quieting things of soothing, tensing, and releasing. Trying to win the battle of my mind from, what is it that I need to be thinking of here, instead of what I am thinking about that’s driving me nuts.

[01:22:29] Stephanie: Very good. So let’s move on to anticipation, appreciation for the future. I’ve been gone from Kentucky for a month now and I’m about to go back to start my  final semester of grad school, mind blown. I have many happy things to anticipate, but what keeps making me smile right now as I’m anticipating the future, is there are three little dogs who live above me. They are so cute and so happy. And I just know that if they’re out anywhere and have any freedom to roam when I get home, they are going to be racing to the deck greeting me as I am walking into my apartment. Yeah, that just makes me smile.

[01:23:23] Marcus: You can already feel the joy now as you think about waiting for it and that’s the beauty of anticipation. And you talk about people planning vacations and how often the anticipation of the vacation is actually the most joyful part of it. And there are times when I can anticipate something that doesn’t even happen, but I still had the joy of all the anticipation while I was looking forward to it.

And talking about dogs, I know I’ve heard of psychologists who actually prescribe to people who are struggling with their depression to buy a dog. Because it’s both calming and they’re always happy to see you, so it’s a really cool connection on both fronts.

[01:24:04] Stephanie: Well, and I can just continue pushing that connection because the dogs are owned by two very wonderful people, who just have a very peaceful, happy, loving home. And so there’s that relational joy of, “Oh, I’m coming home and I walk into my apartment and my roommate might be there.” She has a cat whom I love and I get to see my roommate for the first time in a month in person. And anyway, lots of relational joy.

[01:24:27] Marcus: Exactly, and this is why we separate this out. It’s important to have things to look forward to. So I tell people to stop thinking in terms of what am I looking forward to in the next 24 hours? It doesn’t have to be life changing just something that’ll be pleasant and that’ll make me smile.

Something I’m looking forward to this week, next month, or later this year. We all have things. And I know people who got through work because they kept dreaming of retirement. But having something to anticipate with joy helps. The more of those you can layer on top of each other, right?

[01:25:01] Stephanie: Yeah. I can say that in my first semester of undergrad I had severe attachment pain. I literally sometimes felt dead inside. I loved the people I was with, I loved that I was there, and it was all good, but I was just depressed. I was like, “What is happening?” And at that point I think Mom was working at the library and she had Thursdays off, so almost every Thursday that semester she drove up to have lunch with me.

And then I think we eventually got to the point where we would just talk on the phone, but she would drive up to have lunch with me. There were times when I was just fixated on, Mom’s coming, Mom’s coming. And I would just anchor onto that anticipation of relational joy and the attachment pain getting helped. And so there’s an example of when you’re a little bit more desperate, but having that anticipation would help fuel me.

[01:25:56] Marcus: It’s a good example and it’s something we could all relate to. I remember when I was alone in grad school and I had left all my friends back in another town. It was the same thing knowing that I’m going to go back and see them in two weeks, that was a big source of encouragement. Having that to focus on could help to renew the joy.

A lot of times thinking about the future actually triggers memories of the past. You’re thinking, “Oh, Mom’s coming,” but then it can also lead into memories of joyful times when you were with her. Just like anticipating seeing the dogs can bring memories of the times with the dogs. And so it does branch us from the gratitude in the present to the  anticipation of the future, and memories in the past. I have talked to people who have said to me, “I have no happy memories.”  I have talked to somebody who said that it wasn’t that they had no happy memories, it was too painful for them to revisit because they were gone. They weren’t around anymore.

There is often some pain in going back in the past even in the happy memories. Sometimes we have to acknowledge the fact that not everything about this is happy, but here’s the part that was happy and focus on that. I know somebody who had terrible Christmases, but they could still remember two times when there was just pure joy at something that happened on a Christmas.

We could go back and say, “You know what, out of 50 Christmases in my past only two of them were happy,” and it can turn into this misery reflection. Or you can say, “But there were these two that were happy.” Then the question is, “How do I develop being able to focus on those things that did make me smile?”

[01:27:53] Stephanie: It’s like fear mapping the past versus joy mapping the past. The great thing about memories is that they’ve already happened, so we can collect them and we can rolodex through them. And I know the Coursey’s will talk about naming them so that you can quickly pull up a memory.

I have one that I call, ”Can we keep him?” When I was a senior in high school my little brother came in with his puffed winter coat and was cradling a kitty cat in his arms. And he said, “Can we keep him?” We did, and long story short, he was one of the greatest gifts ever. And so now that memory is just slightly booby trapped because we lost him in 2022. And so I have some sadness now associated with that memory because of the loss, but it still makes me happy.

[01:28:47] Marcus: Yeah. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about. Some things bring back nostalgia and that’s still okay. Going back to nostalgia is a little bit like going back to a peaceful thing when it was a “good old day”.

So you can’t always remove all of the sadness out of all of those things. For me, for example, I was big into Bible quizzing for a while. One of my default memories that I like to go back to is that I remember being at a tournament one time, and everybody was getting really tense. We had a big quiz coming up and if we won we were going to the championship round. And so everybody was like, do we go cram, do we study some more, what do we do?

I was like, “Let’s go back to somebody’s house and watch Rocky.” We had like 2 hours till our next thing  and we went back and watched Rocky. We all came into the next thing going, “dun dun, dun, dun, dun, dun,” Everybody’s doing their best Rocky pose and there was just joy and happiness.

I can re-feel that joy just by going back. There’s memories like that, right, that we have. That’s what we’re talking about, are there things where you go back and it’s like, that was so fun, that was just the best thing ever. And I can re enter into that memory and re-experience the hormonal change in my body just from going back and being in there for a while.

[21:13] Stephanie: Memories are so good. So let’s move on to experiences and we can cycle back if we want. This kind of moves us out a little bit of our present, past, future, paradigm. Although experiences could still be something you’re planning for. And like you said, the thing doesn’t even have to happen that you’re planning for. You could just plan the experience. Talk to us about experiences.

[01:30:12] Stephanie: Memories are so good. So let’s move on to experiences and we can cycle back if we want. This kind of moves us out a little bit of our present, past, future, paradigm. Although experiences could still be something you’re planning for. And like you said, the thing doesn’t even have to happen that you’re planning for. You could just plan the experience. Talk to us about experiences.

[01:30:34] Marcus: Some people find a lot of joy in gardening, or they find joy in crafting, or they find joy in planning vacations, or they find joy in designing houses, there’s a lot of things. So part of this is knowing what kind of things bring you joy and to plan it into your day or your week, to make sure you get some time to do those things. So if you love to play basketball, make sure that you carve out some time to get a chance to do that. And then that becomes something you can anticipate, and eventually it becomes a memory that you can then go back and visit again.

And so that’s just part of it. It’s like if you don’t have something you’re already anticipating, create something. That’s the idea of experiences. Once you start going down this path you begin to realize that there are way more things to appreciate in life than to be afraid of. But we have to train our minds to go there.

[01:31:29] Stephanie: Yeah. And find the safe people that you can create those experiences with. Okay. I could go off, but let’s go to the final of our acrostic, singing. So specific father, but I love it. Explain why singing and then we can talk more.

[01:31:52] Marcus: Again, singing came from something Jim Wilder said and I think it was actually a conversation. He just said that – ”Singing is one of the few things that brings the right and left brain together, it synchronizes them well.” We’ve known this for years sort of intuitively. We were just talking about The Sound of Music.

[01:32:16] Stephanie: “A Few of My Favorite Things”.

[01:32:17] Marcus: Yeah, “A Few of My Favorite Things.” I started to sing, “whiskers on kittens.” But that was just good advice in that song. Everybody knows that learning to set your mind on the things that you like and then turning it into music, putting a little dance to it and singing, that there is something life giving about that.

Sometimes even going through YouTube and finding some of your old favorite songs from the past, taking a little time to do a trip down memory lane and actually singing along, creates engagement. That can be very helpful.

[01:32:52] Stephanie: Yeah.

[01:32:53] Marcus:  And then of course singing hymns or praise songs.

[01:32:56] Stephanie: Sometimes especially when I’m alone I’ll actually just sing prayers to God, because of the left and right brain coming together. It just feels like there are pieces of me that when I sing, everything kind of comes into focus, and it taps into creativity. It just helps me feel more relational with God sometimes.

I have a friend in undergrad that I used to drive down to the airport all the time. It was always very stressful like, “Oh, there’s construction, something’s gonna go wrong” or it’s just a long trip. And without fail by the end of our car trip she would be singing hymns every single time. It would help distract her from her anxiety and also help her focus on God. And that always just stuck with me. And so sometimes I’ll do that too when I’m feeling some anxiety, I will sing.

[01:33:55] Marcus: You know it triggers a memory for me too. In my early twenties I got stranded in downtown Chicago at a train station. I found out that I was at the wrong train station and had to walk six blocks through a really not a good neighborhood to another train station. To the point where a guy started walking toward me from the other direction, saw me and ran away.

I don’t know what he saw, but it’s like everybody was a little nervous in this neighborhood. But I remember singing hymns about the faithfulness of God and things like that. And there is something comforting about it. It’s like what Paul and Silas did when they were in the Philippian prison, there’s something anchoring about it.

[01:34:42] Stephanie: : Indeed. This has been such a rich discussion and I hope you can see why I love this acrostic so much. Good job. It’s like your spiritual gift is acrostics.

[01:34:53] Marcus: Yeah, it’s in Romans I think, the spiritual gift of acrostics.

[01:34:56] Stephanie: Next week we’re going to continue on going deeper into the ABCs with a look at beliefs. But for now, any final thoughts on this episode?

[01:35:06] Marcus:  You know, it’s interesting because I find that you can beat yourself up about almost anything, right? So when you start saying, “I’m going to do a better job of building joy, I’m going to do a better job of building this habit.” When you miss a day or you miss another one, or you do it and it doesn’t seem to be working, what we really are talking about is creating a habit over time.

Something we have to learn is to celebrate the little wins along the way and to show ourselves some grace as we’re going through this journey, because it takes time. If I’ve never studied piano I’m not going to sit down at the piano and suddenly play Rachmaninoff. Right? I just want to say show yourself some grace as you’re going through it, it’s going to be okay, and it will get better.

[01:36:05] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, and share with a friend. Do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.