OUR APPROACH
HEALING IS HOLISTIC
BEHOLD
the glory of God
We provide opportunities to seek the wisdom, wonder, and goodness of God, spend time in His presence, and rest in His love. These opportunities to encounter the Holy Spirit through trauma informed counseling principles elicit healing, wholeness, and freedom.
BELIEVE
in His Truth
God’s restorative and transformative work begins by asking Him to go to the root of ongoing negative emotions, disruptive patterns in relationships, lack of self worth/confidence, and enslaving behaviors, to identify lies, and replace them with His redeeming truth.
BECOME
the person God designed you to be
Discover a new narrative to your story and the relationship between God's design of you, experiences you've had, and passions within, to live the hopeful and purposeful future He has imagined for you.
SPIRITUAL FORMATION AND INTEGRATIVE PROCESSES
Today we see growing numbers of stress related illnesses, debilitating fear, emotional distress, spiritual disconnection, marriage and family difficulties, and social division. Regardless of socioeconomic status, location, religion, lifestyle or culture, people are struggling with the same kinds of distress. We have a problem of brokenness, disconnection, and disunity internally, within ourselves, and externally, in relationship with others. We are wounded and fractured by the complexities of trauma, fractured and do not have the power to heal ourselves.
Primarily our culture sees the spiritual realm, the emotional realm and the physical realm of an individual as separate entities. We rarely find integrative help that sees and addresses the unique relationship of these areas of self as interdependent and holistic, and that interdependency affects overall health and well being.
It is common to overanalyze, overspiritualize, or outsmart our struggles with logic, discipline, and coping strategies or to believe that a change in our situation or a new experience will eliminate our pain. We can become comfortable with the idea that our difficulties are linked to our identity and we are powerless against them rather than embracing vulnerability and being honest with ourselves. These approaches keep us burdened, stuck, and bring little to no freedom. Why is hope and healing so hard to find, hold on to, and stand in, when we may know the wonderful counselor, healer and Savior? In part it is because of a dis-integrated approach to a dis-integration problem and a fear to allow God to go below the surface to the roots of our sin, pain and brokenness.
"We only rise to the level of our unprocessed pain and experiences". - Kerrie Oles (author of Revived)
Our approach to wholeness, healing and growth is through spiritual formation and integrative processes that move inward toward the heart then outward to the world. We recognize God’s sovereignty over the whole person, and the relationship of the mind, body, spirit for transformative work in us.
SPIRITUAL FORMATION
Spiritual Formation reveals the character, truth and redeeming work of God through the power of the Holy Spirit. It includes going beyond behavior change and cognitive understandings to expose the root of sin, stuck points, painful experiences, negative emotions, needs, longings and life patterns. It is where our story meets God's story and we ask Him to speak into our hearts, restore and heal what has been lost or broken, and rewrite our story to bring true transformation. From this place of heart transformation, we are free to live authentically with others, reflect Christ more accurately, and fulfill His purpose in our lives.
"The heart is where the body, soul(mind) and spirit come together as one. It is the center. The place where God dwells and where he continues to form us into the likeness of Christ. Spiritual Formation is formation of the heart."
– Henri Nouwen
INTEGRATIVE PROCESSES
When Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they disconnected from their source of life, and drew on their own understanding. Our primal instinct then became a broken and depraved mind.
"Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done". Romans 1:28
"We were left knowing good without the ability to sustain it and knowing evil without the strength to avoid it"
- Josh Morris
Recent studies in neuroscience indicate that our memory and neural pathways (thought processes) that we live out of are palatable and changeable. They change and grow based on repetition, movement and experience. In essence, what we focus on is what grows.
Free to Be uses integrative processes of faith and neuroscientific and psychological principles to practice the presence of God and invite the Holy Spirit to unify, redeem and move in the heart. Combining prayer and the word of God, experiential techniques, movement, individual reflection, and community processing to renew the mind, body and spirit.