[Paid Subscriber Article] When Getting Closer to God Makes Your Fears Louder, What Should You Do?

Week 3 (of 10) on Contemplative Christianity: the early church's practices, Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, and the holy undoing Carl Jung called individuation

In this week's free article (read it here), I said out loud the thing we usually don't: sometimes getting closer to Jesus is scary. I told you I feared never getting married, feared what God would ask of me, and feared that total surrender meant losing my personality altogether. And I told you that the cerebral palsy I was born with taught me as a child to hide my weaknesses, hide my fears, and confidently project. Moving through those layers has been terribly hard. And nothing in my life has been more rewarding.

I also promised you a way to carry those fears to God in prayer. This article is that way. It is the map I wish I'd had when my own fears got loud and I thought I was going backward.

Here's what's inside:

• A walk through Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, room by room, and where your fears fit inside it

• The Castle Door Practice: a 15-minute contemplative prayer for bringing one fear to Christ, step by step

• Three short companion practices for your body, your prayer, and your journal

• Four Scripture-rooted tests for telling a holy undoing from plain anxiety, with journaling questions and a seven-day tracker

The Castle Door Practice begins like this: choose one place and one time to pray this week, and keep them the same every day. Sit with both feet on the floor and your hands open. Before you say anything to God, take five slow breaths and let each one out a little longer than it came in...