Editor’s Note: Teresa Romain will offer Scarcity Patterns in Spiritual Direction: Catalysts for Spiritual Growth for Sacred Ground on Saturday, March 1. Click here for more details and to register. To see Teresa describe the experience on video, click here.
Have you ever experienced a time when you met someone for the first time and you knew that this was the beginning of something very significant and wonderful in your life? That is exactly how I felt when I met Teresa Romain, about eight years ago. Teresa was leading a workshop in Chicago that I was attending, and as soon as she was done, I made a beeline to the table of offerings to find out what else I could hook up with. I was a fairly new business owner with a direct sales company, and I knew that she could help support me to grow my business, but even more so, I had a deep sense of knowing that she could support me to “grow myself”. This was the beginning of an eight-year period of intensive personal growth and development. It was a time I look back upon with deep gratitude because of who I have become in the process: the same me, but with much more FREEDOM! Namely, I have become more balanced and authentic, and live life with a greater sense of health, wealth, ease, fulfillment, well-being, and JOY! That’s a big whaa-hooo, and a whole lot of Grace!
I have always had a passion for personal and spiritual growth. Working with Teresa Romain, I was supported to open myself to and explore how my thoughts, especially habitual thoughts, were keeping me trapped and blocked. With support, I was able to see how my thoughts were often rooted in lack, limitations, or scarcity, which always by their very nature bore fruit of (guess what!) lack, limitation or scarcity! Working with Teresa, I was able to get in touch with disempowering beliefs lodged so deeply inside of me for most of my life, that I didn’t even know they were there, yet were operating on a powerful, subconscious level. What we think truly creates our reality. How often do we question our thoughts? How often do we challenge our habitual nature? Not easily and not often without support.
Even though I’ve always considered myself to be a happy, content, spiritually grounded, and well-integrated person, during my work with Teresa, I was constantly surprised to discover limiting beliefs lurking around inside my head. We all have it. Call it mind chatter, shame, gremlins, static in the attic, brain rats, you name it. We’ve all got it! Or sometimes it felt like finding disempowering beliefs lodged on a cellular level, or in deep inside beyond my conscious recollection. Wherever these places of unfreedom were, I detected that there was more inside me than I realized, holding me prisoner to a less than amazing and empowered, joy-filled life. Teresa’s giftedness, and my constant desire to grow, continued to move me to new places of interior freedom, authenticity, and consolation. Saint Ignatius would give this work “two thumbs up”!
Teresa’s unique ability to find interior emotional and spiritual “blocks and knots” that I didn’t even know I had felt much like a great holistic healer or massage therapist who finds and releases those physical knots and blocks you didn’t know you had! Let me tell you, the freedom and joy on the other side of those releases was/is exhilarating!
As spiritual directors, we have all heard it said that we are able to journey with others only as deeply as we have gone or are willing to go ourselves. All personal and spiritual growth work draws us towards new levels of freedom. And as we ourselves are freed, so we are able to free others, and thus we transform the world.
So, you can imagine how pleased I was when I heard that Teresa Romain would be joining us at Sacred Ground to present a workshop on supporting each of us to better recognize scarcity patterns within ourselves and our directees, as well. I’m excited to know that she will support us to see these scarcity patterns for what they are–blocks to our ability to receive and experience God’s love and grace, which is essential for our own spiritual growth, and for those we direct. I know from first-hand experience that, once we’ve begun to recognize some of these blocks, Teresa will also guide us in how to respond to them in a way that fosters spiritual growth, healing, and faith.
Knowing what I know about Teresa, and her unique and gifted approach, I’m confident that even I will learn something new or hear it in a new way! I’m jazzed! I’m already signed up to attend Teresa’s workshop and I’d love to see you there, too!
Deb Sylvestre holds a B.S. in Education, and Spiritual Direction Certification through the Cenacle, and was part of the administrative team that birthed Sacred Ground in 1996. She currently teaches in Sacred Ground’s Spiritual Direction Formation Program. Trained and rooted in St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises/Discernment, Deb lives out her lifelong passion of supporting people to awaken and deepen their faith and experience of God’s immense love for them. Deb enjoys gardening, swimming, spending time with friends, family and, most especially, her two new grandchildren. She serves as a member of the Liturgical Dance ministry at Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Roseville.
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Deb, your enthusiasm overflows and is contagious! I am signing up for the workshop right now. You are so right about the need to remove blockages of scarcity. God’s love overflows and we worry that there won’t be enough!