Reflections from the Retreat May 2025

Do you find that your emotions go up and down? Mine certainly do. There is a natural ebb and flow of emotions that we all experience throughout the day. All sorts of factors shape our highs and lows. Some of you may be familiar with the acronym ‘HALT’ used in therapy to remind us of four main triggers that can cause our mood to dip – Hunger, Alcohol, Loneliness and Tiredness. It’s a useful reminder to check these as a first step if our mood has dipped. Obviously, our circumstances are the main factor to shape how we are feeling. For example, a call from one of my children will lift my mood whereas discovering another leak or unexpected cost on the house renovations will reduce my mood. There's also particular times in our lives when our emotions are more extreme, such as with the hormonal changes of adolescence, with pregnancy or the female monthly cycle or after a major life event such as bereavement or a trauma.

For the last few weeks, I have had decorators, Mario and Ruth, starting the big job of decorating the outside of the house and the courtyard. (They are the parents of Haylie who featured in this blog when she spoke at a government meeting about wanting to be the first female prime minister for Grenada. Haylie and her mum, Ruth, were also some of the first people to use our library here). So, my mood lifted when I saw them do the first step of power washing the outside and to see how good the house looked with just a powerful clean. Then it dipped a little seeing the huge amounts of flaky old paint that now covers the garden and is spreading throughout the house. However, my mood lifted again seeing the brilliantly white balusters after they were freshly painted. My emotions are currently being challenged to stay balanced with our latest obstacle of not being able to get more paint. The two main suppliers on the island are waiting for deliveries from overseas, which are a few weeks away and so we may have to wait awhile to get more paint. There was a delivery of the paint that we needed last week but then when I called back once they had unloaded the container, it had all gone. So it seems there are quite a few of us on the island waiting for paint!

So like the ebb and flow of the tides, my emotions change with the daily ups and downs of life. It seems that our changing emotions are just one of the many rhythms built into nature, like changes in the weather and temperature or the phases of the moon. Natural changes give us hope that Spring will follow Winter or rainy season will follow dry season. Imagine a world that was so regulated and mechanical that there was no variation, no shifts or change. It would be dull and monotonous. So our emotions are a gift – even the unpleasant ones. How can we know joy, if we haven’t experienced pain; how can we be surprised if we have never been bored or know peace if we have never been afraid?

As a therapist, I often use the analogy of our emotions being like lights on a car dashboard. We shouldn’t hide them or ignore them because they give us useful information to know what’s going on ‘under our bonnet.’  Monitoring our emotions can be particularly important if we have more severe mental health difficulties such as bipolar and personality disorders. Noticing when we are getting too high or too low or when our mood is unstable with severe mood swings can help us to catch things early, before our emotions take over.

St Ignatius was a Catholic priest who founded the Jesuit monastic order in the sixteenth century. He was psychologically ahead of his time when he encouraged his students to reflect on their day and notice what energised and drained them in an exercise called the Examen. He encouraged his students to use their emotions to discern what was helping and hindering their relationship to God. So as we look within, we can see spiritual changes as well as psychological ones. As I reflect on my psychological rhythm, I am also noticing a spiritual ebb and flow in my life too. There seems to be times when life is full of synchronicity, when I sense a sacred conversation going on and my faith deepens as I gain new insights or see the Divine at work in my life. At other times, I follow my spiritual practices more out of duty and life seems more routine and mundane. Its like an ongoing pendulum with bursts of spiritual growth and insights and then a swing back to routine. Perhaps there has to be this balance or we would swing too far into spiritual fervour or into daily monotony, like needing to breath in after breathing out so that we keep living. Perhaps there has to be an opposite direction to bring balance. I have distant memories of physics here. Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Having just passed Easter, it reminds me of that balance of life and death. Perhaps we only have our Easter resurrections, when we have passed through our Good Friday deaths. As Richard Rohr said in one of his meditations over Easter,

‘Reality rolls through cycles of death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. In the raising up of Jesus, we’re assured that this is the pattern for everything—that we, and anybody who is suffering—is also going to be raised up. This is what God does for a suffering reality. What we crucify, what reality crucifies, God transforms. I don’t think it’s naïve to say hallelujah. We have every reason, especially now, since biology and science are also saying this seems to be the shape of everything. It just keeps changing form, meaning, focus or direction, but nothing totally goes away. ‘

This reminds me of another law from physics which is the law of the conservation of energy, 'energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only transformed from one form of energy to another.’  Perhaps this law of physics can give us hope that life does continue after death, that our energy is just transformed into another form that we don’t understand yet.

Another ebb and flow is that pendulum swing from stillness to activity, from contemplation to service. If we never take time to be still, then we burn ourselves out or rush forward in the wrong direction. But also if we never take action, we can stagnate and become apathetic. It’s another rhythm we need to listen to and to follow. That’s why retreat houses are so important. They are reminders to take a step back, for the need to be still, to take time and to take stock in order to swing back into life with fresh energy and vision.

Last week I spent a day in a more mountainous area and as I sat in a garden, amongst various flowering bushes and surrounded by trees, I became increasingly aware of the variety of birds around me. As I was there all day there were changes in the types of birds at different times of the day. It began with distant cockerels and chattering parrots and then there were various small birds such as finches and doves and beautiful hummingbirds on the nearby flowers. There were kingbirds and pigeons and the large black smooth-billed ani (which are related to cuckoos but look more like black parrots). Then, as the day ended, the swallows came out and the parrots returned.

So having had a day amongst birds I was pleasantly surprised when I returned home, to find out that it was Grenada’s National Bird Week and in particular Grenada announced a new species. There are house wrens here but last year a team from the University of Northern British Columbia studied these wrens and realised that there was also a different wren that was unique to this island. The newly named Grenada Wren, seen below, is larger, with a longer beak and a richer brown colouring than house wrens. The Grenada Wren was recognised by the American Ornithological Society as a distinct species in 2024 and is a common bird here, though found nowhere else in the world. Its amazing that there is such a rich variety of birds and not only different species but so many variations within each species. Such variety gives the forests and gardens a fullness of life as the birds fly around, being so busy especially this time of the year when they are making nests and feeding young.

Like the birds, our emotions are a complexity that gives our life a richness that we would miss if they weren’t there. This emotional range is sometimes shown as an emotions wheel, like the one below. So just like a colour wheel used by artists to show the many hues and shades available, this wheel can help us name how we’re feeling. So perhaps look at this wheel and ask yourself, how are you feeling today?

Meditation such as Centering prayer or mindfulness teaches us to stand back from our emotions and to know that we are not the same as our emotions and we are not our thoughts. Our thoughts and emotions are like birds flying past a mountain. The mountain being our true self that stays constant amongst our changing thoughts and feelings. So, with a regular meditation practice, we can learn to be more centred and less reactive to external circumstances. As we listen to how we feel, it can help in understanding ourselves better and if we are in a difficult emotion currently, such as grief or anxiety, know that even that will pass in time.