Let me introduce you to my friend, Leeana. Leeana Tankersley is the author of Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places and the Breathing Room: Letting Go So You Can Fully Live. Leeana holds English degrees from Liberty University and West Virginia University. She is married to Steve Tankersley, an active duty Navy SEAL, and they are currently stationed in San Diego, California, with their three kids Luke (5), Lane (5), and Elle (2).
This fall, I’ve invited a few friends to share what God is teaching them. I hope their words are an encouragement to you as you continue to awaken to the joy and delight that comes with being a child of God.
I started seeing a spiritual director, Beth. Luckily for me she has dreads because I’m absolutely sure people with dreads hold the spiritual secret the rest of us are seeking.
I’ve been in one of those seasons of life when you look in the mirror and realize your eyes are melting down your face and you greet your kids in the hallway and have to think to remember their names. Exhausted. Overwhelmed. Unhinged.
We meet on Beth’s patio, which overlooks a eucalyptus canyon. Dozens of ceramic monkeys riding surfboards line her deck, watching over us like elders. Beth’s patio quickly becomes a quirky sort of womb.
Each time I see her, I tell Beth how poorly it’s all going. I cry. A lot. I risk appearing needy because, let’s face it, I am. I tell her I’m “drowning in a void” to take a line from Psalm 18:16-19 (MSG) and, like the psalmist, I am in desperate need of a wide-open field, a spacious place, some breathing room.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been there:
Overcome with this feeling that something in your life has got to give, that you’re finally ready to start caring more how it’s all feeling on the inside than how it’s all looking on the outside.
The truest thing I can tell Beth is: “I feel like I’m running to keep ahead of whatever this thing is right at my heels.”
And then I confess: “I’m tired.”
Because, the truth is, so many of us are tired. Tired of the scrambling and striving. And we need someone to look in our eyes with compassion and tell us, “Stop. Just stop.”
Beth says, “What if you stop. Turn around. And eat that shadow that’s chasing you.”
I’m sorry. What?
Beth tells me to go home and look it up. So I read that the shadow, an idea popularized by Jung, is those things in us that we’ve rejected, those traits or characteristics that we’ve disassociated from, denied, even come to loathe.
We hate certain qualities in other people. We vow we will never be “that way.” But somewhere, deep down, our contempt is actually a sign that we are, in fact, “that way” too.
Beth says to me, “Go into the kitchen and get out a big spoon and think about all the things you’re trying to outrun in yourself, and just heap them into your mouth. See the re-integration as nourishment, fulfilling your soul hunger. See the acceptance and even compassion for your shadow as a way into wholeness.”
I actually like the gruesomeness of it—chewing up and swallowing these bits of myself that I’ve bullied, silenced, pretended didn’t belong to me. All the rejection has ever done is keep me drowning in the void.
Christ is reaching down and offering me rescue. I don’t get there by working harder. I get there, ironically, by stopping. No more proving. No more striving. No more heroics.
Because—and this is one of the most profound truths I know—I’ll never run fast enough. The running will never, ultimately, set me free. It just perpetuates my confinement.
I am in the throes of this work. Asking God to help me welcome all the parts of me I’ve rejected. Asking God to gently remind me when I’m anxiously trying to secure my own place in this world.
So, here it goes: Inner frantic fixer, inner free-spirit, inner carb lover, inner fear-based non-dancer, inner intensity addict . . . I see you. I hear you. I love you.
Your turn. (Oh, and, I believe in you.)
This week, were giving away 3 copies of Breathing Room by Leeana Tankersley.
This week, were giving away 3 copies of Leeana, like so many of us, began to feel overwhelmed by life. And like so many of us, she assumed she was struggling not because life is inherently difficult but because she was personally failing in some way. She knows firsthand what it is to bully yourself, to put yourself down for not being able to keep it all together, to compare yourself to others and find yourself lacking. But she’s also discovered that all of the hurt and hostility and pain only add up to a life of holding your breath. What if we could exhale and let go?
Breathing Room is her beautiful release of self-condemnation, her discovery of the rest that comes when we give ourselves some space to breathe. She draws readers in through shared experiences of perfectionism, jealousy, and striving and shows them how to let go, how to be radically on their own team, and how to experience the broad grace that Christ has offered all of us.
Anyone who has been trying to do it all, who has been putting on a strong front and yet secretly struggling, will find in Breathing Room both a trusted friend and a generous Savior.
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The three winners will be selected and announced on Friday.
What activities give you rest?
