Healing is holographic. It must be. We simply can't take in the whole picture at once. So we begin wherever we are struggling, and as we do the work, the larger picture slowly becomes clearer.
Doing the Work offers a glimpse of that picture. Through the personal stories of Jill Loree and Scott Wisler, we get to visit some of the regions of the inner world that most of us would rather avoid: shame, fear, grief, addiction, sexuality, money, relationships, conflict, specialness, crisis and spiritual confusion.
Most importantly, Jill and Scott don't write as people who have somehow arrived. They are willing to show themselves not as finished spiritual people but as people actually doing the work-being wrong, reactive, frightened, stubborn and confused, and learning to become more real.
In short, we see what happens when spiritual teachings meet ordinary human life.
We see hiding and uncovering. Resistance and willingness. Pain and feeling. Inner division and the slow movement toward wholeness.
This is important, because spiritual growth may seem very different when described from a distance. It can sound lofty, abstract or even intimidating. But when we see someone wrestling with the same things we wrestle with, something changes.
I recognize that thing you're describing. I do hide from myself. I do have a part of me that says no. I do create stories around my pain. I do blame other people. I do sometimes want to be special. And maybe there is something underneath all that.
This is the doorway.
To see that in our struggles, we are really all the same. Our pain is what separates us. Our shared humanity is what can reunite us.
Jill and Scott don't tell the same stories in different voices. Their experiences illuminate different aspects of the same territory. Jill's stories often bring us into emotional and relational material-vulnerability, shame, recognition, crying, money, relationships and the places where we hide.
Scott's often bring us into the terrain of will, control and surrender-competence, stubbornness, specialness, crisis and the inner splits that keep us divided.
Together, their stories create a fuller picture.
You won't find the whole map here. No single book can provide that. But you may begin to recognize the landscape.
Perhaps that is enough to make you curious about traveling into some of these unknown regions yourself.
