Immanuel Journaling: an Invitation to Receiving the Comfort of God

Welcome to the Presence Project! 

The Presence Project is simple, repeatable tools. Ancient Christian contemplative practices. Modern brain science. 

This is episode 32, I’m your host, Summer Joy Gross and I’m always looking for ways to take the wisdom of centuries of contemplatives and make it Monday-morning practical. 

Today on the Presence Project podcast, we’re talking about the gift of journaling for our brain and Immanuel Journaling in particular.

Immanuel Journaling is a tool designed by marriage and family therapist Sungshim Loppnow to help clients metabolize emotion WITH God. This beautiful practice is explained in the book, Joyful Journey: Listening to Immanuel written by Sungshim Loppnow, her husband John,  friend Anna Kang, and neuro-theologian Jim Wilder. You should see the highlighted pages of Presence Project members and all the scribbles on the edges of my copy. This is a book you’re going to want to have in your hands. 

Today you’ll also hear a 3-minute clip of an interview I had with Sungshim in June (the rest of the interview is on the presence project Patreon site. Listen at any tier.) and later my own testimony of how God has done a powerful work in the area of shame, using this profound tool. 

Next month in episode 33, we’ll delve into the brain science behind the first stage of Immanuel Journaling, Interactive gratitude.

After recess Mrs. Vigne brought out the stack of black and white composition notebooks and set the egg timer to thirty minutes. That first time I doodled on the page in circles and then wrote a poem, all rainbows and one cliche tumbling into another. It was magic. It was a portal. Every time I smoothed my hand over the empty page and heard the egg timer’s tick, I felt an electric surge of possibility. 

A few months into the daily journaling practice, I also found it to be a portal to prayer. I had been reading a series of paperbacks. A young teen goes on short term missions and keeps a daily journal. Jane Sorenson, the author, started each chapter with “God, it’s me Jennifer.” This alone felt completely logical. All the girls in my grade were named Jennifer. We called them Jen, Jenny, and Jennifer to keep them apart. Love Story was the movie of the year of 1974 and the heroine had long brown hair and huge bown eyes rimmed by long lashes and a deep voice. It must have been all of our parents’ first date movie. 

Jane Sorenson through these Jennifer books taught me to pray.

All I had to do was write, “God, it’s me Summer” and let my tangle of 10-year-old thoughts and feelings flow out of my #2 pencil. 

One day this 30 minute blanket of silence was positioned perfectly after a spat on the playground. Jennifer and Angela and I were playing at the edge of the woods under a wide tree with branches that touched the ground, perhaps a weeping willow. Nothing grew under the branches. Using a stick we marked out the kitchen, the living room and walked into the woods for pine needles for beds. Somewhere along the way, the other girls were running with their decorating scheme and I was left outside. 

You can hear my inner narrative of rejection already.

Afraid the friendships had ended, and with an open page and a raw heart, I wrote my first lament. God, it’s me Summer.

Two pages later, the feelings which had been cramped and tangled in the lower regions of my brain, were slowly worked out by God’s fingers and mine as they were named on the page.

Through the years I wrote one lined page after another, one journal after another through jr high, high school, college, young married life. They sit in the garage in a grey tub. I don’t know what to do with them now. They are scribbles of becoming. Too tender to throw away. Too mundane to read.

Journaling became my favorite way to process life. I learned to climb under the white down comforter each night with a notebook, a pen that scratched a bit across the page, and a hot cup of herbal tea with a squirt of the honey bear. I learned to take the impossible work of God to bed with me and write it down, a lie which laid heavy on my chest during the day, a fear which was a wall between me and my husband and then  listen to the deep work of God. I would “meditate” on scripture across the page each night, choosing life, choosing to remember truth, writing the work of God one line at a time until it would etch its way into my soul. Then every morning I’d open the journal again. Read last night’s words. Start where they ended. 

Repetition is the best soil for deep roots and I had found that growth came through quiet, a pen, a blank page, and through listening deep.

Now I’m sitting in a Barnes and Noble next to a window, yes, social distancing, watching the trees around the mall blown in clumps by the wind looking like rows of feather headdresses. They’re brushed peach on top. Chartreuse on the bottom. I’m googling brain science and journaling. I’m fascinated.

Did you know a UCLA study found that just by putting your finger on the negative emotion that’s looming, just naming the emotion turns down the volume in the alarm center of the amygdala? Journaling encourages you to name and nail down the …

Matthew D. Lieberman of UCLA rounded this off well by stating this process is “In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the break on your emotional responses.” 

I take a sip of my whole milk latte and I click on an article called the science of journaling in which the author sites the reasons for journaling side by side with one scientific study after another.

The Science Behind Journaling: How the Brain Reacts

Why journal?

• Boost your mood.
• Build new habits.
• Enhance your sense of well-being. Reduce symptoms of depression before important events (Flinchbaugh, Moore, Chang & May, 2011)
• Improve your working memory ( First researched by Richards & Gross in 2000, reproduced by Klein in 2002 and Baikie & Wilhelm in 2005)
• Deal with trauma.
• Improve asthma or rheumatoid arthritis in a clinically relevant way, even four months later (Smyth, Stone, Hurewitz & Kaell, 1999)
• Reduce intrusive thoughts & increase emotional regulation (Davidson et al., 2002)
• Strengthen immune responses (Booth & Perie, 2002)
• Decrease depressive symptoms (Stice, Burton, Bearman & Rohde, 2007)

Habit building. Personal growth. Emotion regulation. Dealing with trauma and depression. Building a stronger immune system. Journaling is a proven path to health. But, don’t worry if journaling has been a dead-end for you, you will be surprised like dozens of other Presence Project non-journalers that IJ is a powerful scaffolding for even the most writing-allergic to process the highs and lows of life with God.

But a few years ago, the same fear I shared in episode 31 while pushing a  prayer into a crack at the Wailing Wall dried up all the words. My journal had now become a place where I rehearsed fear. Neural pathways of worry were scratched onto the page. Soon the ditch of anxiety ran deep…a ditch every other thought would wind up sliding into. And journaling was no longer a safe place. 

But Immanuel Journaling is different. Within its stages, I found a deeper haven on the page because Immanuel Journaling is written by listening to God’s compassion, his character, his perspective and his story arching over ours. Within the structure of Immanuel Journaling, I experienced God coming to find me. 

Yes, we need regular journaling as a way to process, to look at the thoughts doing laps around our brains, to bring the right and left brain into integration, to name emotions and to write them out from confusion to clarity. 

We need to lament. To weep, to wail, to question, to wonder, and sometimes even to whine. The battle can be long. The war ravages us. Sometimes Immanuel Journaling is the next step and sometimes it’s the scaffolding that gives our lament structure.

Immanuel Journaling begins with interactive gratitude (we write what we’re thankful for…and listen to how a good Father would feel about his child coming with heartfelt thanks) and then moves to these steps:

1. Write from God’s perspective what He observes in you right now, including your physical sensations. (This is a present moment seeing. An awareness of the tension in our body)

I can see you at your desk. Your breathing is shallow and your shoulders are tight…

1. Write from God’s perspective what he hears you saying to yourself. 
2. How does God see your dreams, blessings, longings, upsets, and troubles?
3. How does God express His desire to participate in your life? “I am glad to be with you and treat your weakness tenderly.” 
4. What resource does God have for you at this time?

Each of these questions are founded on these truths of God’s character:

1. I see you.
2. I hear you.
3. I understand how hard this is for you.
4. I am with you and hold your weakness tenderly.
5. I have resources for you.

So I ask you:

Does God see? His name is El Roi, the God who sees me.

Does he hear? His name is El Shaddai, the God who hears me.

Does he understand the size of the pain? He catches every tear in a bottle, writes our sorrows in his book.

Is he with us? His name is Immanuel, God with us. 

Does he treat our weakness with tenderness? 

The LORD comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places. Isaiah 51:3

And he knows that we are but dust.

Immanuel Journaling comes straight out of the heart of God’s character yet we rarely allow him to comfort us in the daily damage and losses of our lives. Truth is, we don’t know how.

Sungshim Loppnow, the engineer of this journaling method, is a marriage and family therapist trained at Fuller, and an avid journaler. She was also trying to figure out how to help her Korean-American Sunday school class develop more authentic relationships with God. As a Korean who had immigrated when she was 29, she understood the culture well. “It’s a shame based culture focused on saving face,” she told me in an interview. “It’s shameful to talk about weakness or fear and I couldn’t help but notice how their relationship with God was information based. They knew a ton of scripture but when they were in times of high anxiety or grief, they didn’t know how to experience the comfort of God.”

And we who are listening, are nodding our head. We at the Presence Project know we can’t have intimacy with others or with God without emotional vulnerability. You can’t have a relationship with a mask.

But back to Sungshim…

Sungshim was studying the neuroscience behind a pain processing pathway and attunement with Dr. Karl Lehman and having discussions around attachment and with Jim Wilder. She was always thinking about how to better serve those in her therapy practice as well as those in her Korean American church.

Here’s Sungshim in her own words with the hypothesis behind Immanuel Journaling.

Listen to minute 17:23 to 21:01 for a piece of my interview with Sungshim.

Don’t think for a second Moses didn’t feel the pain of the other Israelites. Sure, he was raised with access to education and in the relative comfort of a palace, but when alone with the other inhabitants, his race still drew whispers, still created walls of separation, still drew prejudice.

And this is how we know: His upbringing had made him quick to feel injustice, quick to fight, and his anger burned fierce enough for murder. When he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, anger surged. And that kind of anger doesn’t rise on its own. It comes from somewhere. Moses was a geyser heating up, ready to spew. 

Moses was a man without a country, a man with privilege but no roots.Yet he felt the pain of his people as if it was his own. After killing the slave driver, Moses was left exposed by his sin.  So he turned to isolation, escaped into the wilderness of Midian. Alone. 

And in the desert, he found a father, a family, and later a calling which rose out of his pain. But pain has a way of following us. And as Moses took care of his father-in-law’s sheep, he lived surrounded by the silence of the desert and silence has a way of dredging up old stories we thought were buried.

Maybe you’ve found that too…right here in the desert of COVID-19, where everything screeched to a halt and all you heard was the grief, and every-present churn of anxiety. This was a silence that was not quiet for many people. With the lack of busyness, regrets, broken relationships, and the heightened awareness of our mortality were our only constants.

Where do we go with this much pain? 

The Spirit comes in wind and living water, but also in disturbances, the fires we’d rather not turn aside to see.

It takes courage to pay attention to that which is on fire within us, to get closer to that which could cause further pain.

But within the bush he found not more pain, but God’s attentive presence attuned to the suffering of his people. I wonder how these words felt to Moses’ heart, still boiling with anger, still broiling with injustice: 

“The Lord said, “I have indeed SEEN the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians.

I wonder how it felt for Moses to stand with his shoes off in the wilderness before the holy God and to have his pain and the pain of his people acknowledged, to hear it named with the words: misery and suffering,  to be SEEN by Almighty God and to have the cries of his soul and the souls of 400 years of Israelites HEARD and held. He stood in front of the power of God blazing in front of him and heard God’s profound compassion. I wonder how it felt to know that his God had not forgotten them, that he was turned toward them.

That he WAS coming.

This week on the Presence Project facebook group, I asked the question: have you always been a journaler? How has Immanuel Journaling changed your experience of pen on page?

1. Kelly Hodgkins:

I was a sporadic journaler, depending on my season, but now I IJ every evening before bed and sometimes in the morning too if I can. Biggest gift: having God’s word to me to reference during the day. He often gives me a phrase or a picture to return to. Some most surprising and always more gentle, kind and loving than I would be to myself. I also find it is helping me process old hurts in a more positive and healing way.

2. Sue Fulmore

For many years I have been a journaler and found it so helpful in figuring out what was going on inside of me. Immanuel Journaling has opened up another dimension of having a conversation with God. I have never experienced the care and presence of God more fully than when doing this type of journaling. 

And here’s my story feeling safe, seen, soothed, and secure through the stages of Immanuel Journaling. Dr. Curt Thompson, psych Falls Church, VA, neuroscientist, and the author of the book, the Soul of Shame says it takes 3 seconds for shame to take hold and we don’t need to do anything, it just sinks its talons into us. 

I have decades of talon scars. 

Let me paint a picture for you about shame. Dr. Thompson says that shame is the feeling when we offer something vulnerable and tender to another person, a piece of the soft underbelly of our souls, and they turn their face away. And not only do they turn their face away, they walk out the door and they make sure you hear it slam behind them. 

Even into my years as a young mom, shame would creep up on me during interactions with friends and colleagues, (why did I say that? Why do I have to be so awkward? Why can’t I grow out of this? How could I do something so stupid? I’ll be like this the rest of my life. I was gripped by spirals of poisonous self-talk.) Shame would pounce, make me hunch in the corner of my life, and I’d isolate for days while it continued to circle and scratch.  

A few days later there was an untangling, but I never understood the rhyme and reason. Sometimes a piece of truth would pull it out of my skin, one talon after another. Sometimes a moment of joy would unlock the darkness. Sometimes a friend’s listening would unlock its power. I never really understood it. There was a ton of healing work occured through those years. But the feeling of shame still had a power which could take me down. I have never experienced a larger freedom until now.

Dr. Thompson says that in order for shame to release us, we need someone to come find us in our shame and stay and assure us they are not going anywhere. 

This spring as I began to Immanuel Journal with every Presence Project small group I taught, there were seven opportunities (and more on my own over the weekend) to invite the Presence of God into where shame had taken hold. Seven plus times for God to come find me. Seven plus times for him to reassure me he was not going anywhere. Seven plus times for him to stay while it unraveled its hold.

Through Immanuel Journaling, God metabolized the shame with me so that it didn’t have time to metastasize. 

I began to see shame coming and not flinch because the God of the Universe, the God who stands on the road looking for lost sons and daughters and runs toward them…the God who stands on the road looking for me…me, his daughter who can’t move because shame has me bound, runs towards me, sees me, soothes me, and brings me home.

And it is Immanuel Journaling which is giving me the strength to look up and see him coming.

Where do you need to feel seen today? 

Here’s another question. Do a small body scan from the top of your head to your toes. Become attentive to where you’re feeling tension. Be gentle with yourself. What does that tension represent?

Allow God to see this with you. Raise this stress, this strain, this emotion to God.

Bring this awareness into our lectio divina with Exodus 3:7-8a.

The Lord said, “I have indeed SEEN the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians.

It’s a privilege to walk this journey with you.

If you’d like a transcript of this podcast including links, visit summerjoygross.com and from there you can subscribe to receive a weekly email, Breakfast in Bed, your slow weekend starter guide. For the next few months it will include the Immanuel Journaling Process.

2 invitations:

First, I invite you join the patreon.com/thepresenceproject at any tier. Your support makes this full table possible. 

Second, inside patreon is a tier of a live zoom class called Table of the Beloved which meets twice a month. We’ll have one next Thursday at noon. It’s always recorded. It’s a sort of Presence Project podcast LIVE. Each table will correspond to the teaching and spiritual practice we’re doing inside the podcast. This week I’ve invited author and spiritual director, Lane Arnold to do a teaching on the beautiful gift of lament. She’ll share pieces of her story and how lament has become a leaning into the abiding life.

It’s always a privilege to journey with you.

May you know today that you are being held in the hollow of God’s hand.