Talk Stigma

Hello, I believe I am live. Let me see. Here we are. And, yes, I am live. Welcome. Just getting settled in here. And if you're just joining me, my name is Seth Perry, and this is talk stigma. I want to welcome you to today's. To today's livestream. All right, let's see. Let's see. I think I'll flip. I'll flip back. Hello, Karen. Welcome. I'm just gonna have to go like this today. All right, good. I'm going to be writing a few things down, but I want to see if I can. Let's see here. Okay, so today in today's livestream, again, my name is Seth, and I am a pastor.

I'm in recovery from addiction. I'm in recovery from my mental health condition. I have bipolar disorder. And I am really happy to be here in the Cadre sphere today talking a little bit about what do I look for in a spiritual community. So, thinking of any type of spiritual community out there, let's get my mic going, too. Geez, I'm all over the place right now. Mic is set now. You can hear me a lot. I just want to make sure that my live stream is up and going. Okay, good. We're good. So what do you look for in a spiritual community?

That's the big question today. And I have a story from my life where, you know, in my teen years, I decided to leave the spiritual community that I was raised in. And it wasn't a good experience for me that time in my life. When I think back to that specific time in my life, I was about 14 or 15 years old. Leaving my spiritual community was not a fun experience. A lot of my identity was wrapped up in my spiritual community. And so I think that my. The way that I do ministry right now and the way that I lead a church, I'm always thinking about what are effective and healthy ways that are good for people's mental health.

What are those good things that we look for in a spiritual community? So let me define what I mean by spiritual community. It's not just a church. It can be a church community, but it can be a group of people that embrace a particular meditation, meditation practice and meet regularly. But it also could be communities that exist around clubs or even businesses. So yoga is a spiritual practice that there's plenty of businesses out there where people pay memberships and attend a yoga studio. But it also could be like, there's a tai chi society in the community that I got sober in.

A lot of people went to. So here is. Here's here's some things that I really look for. I look for a place that affirms who I am. So the things that I do, my behavior, you know, I look for an affirmative type of relationship around the behavior in my life, people that encourage the things that I do. So that's one thing that I look for in a spiritual community. The opposite would be finding a community that condemns the things that I'm doing in my life. And I find that condemnation is a really, if that's what your spiritual community is based around, that can be particularly harmful and abusive.

And another thing, I look for a community that, you know, affirms and embraces the path that I'm on, because I might be doing many different things in my life in. In my spiritual journey that may be ideologically different than other people in my community. And I think that that kind of has to just be okay. I also need to be able to have free thought in the spiritual community that I belong to. Freedom of thought, freedom of expression. I think that those are really good points to hammer home when we're talking about healthy spiritual communities.

And also, I need to be able to have a free flow of emotion. So, again, I've talked about four points. Healthy behavior, affirming people's behavior, affirming ideology and information, freeing people's thoughts in the spiritual community, and also emotional freedom. So why am I talking about four particular things, behavior, information, thought, and emotion? Well, often when I think about a spiritual community, that I think about these four things, because it's actually a. It's actually a proposed structure called the bite model.

And it's something that I use every once in a while to think about other spiritual communities. Why? Because a man named Stephen Hassan created the bite model because he once was in a cult. Right. And so I, as a pastor, am always evaluating my religious and spiritual practices by looking at the bite model. If I'm a pastor and I have to look at it, am I preaching and assuming that people should be behaving in a particular way or should be getting their information from particular sources or thinking in a particular way or feeling emotions in a particular way?

Then I really need to check why I am doing that, because I prefer fostering a community that just affirms people where they are at instead of tells people what to do. And so that's my gift to you all today in the Cadre sphere. Look it up. Look deeply into Stephen Hassan's bite model. It's something that I think a lot about and often evaluate my own practices as a pastor with. And again, it's the bite model. Capital bite. And again, look for Steven Hassan. And it's an interesting and fun rabbit hole to go down when you're thinking about spiritual practices.

But also when we think about people who restrict our behavior, information, our thoughts and our emotions, there's a considerable amount of stress on our mental health, which is why I wanted to bring this to you today. So that's what I have for you all today on this wonderful day. I wonder who was with us today. Uh, hello? Oh, and, yeah, I decided to turn my phone around all weird. And. And, uh, I was gonna watch the live stream on. On my computer. I don't know why I did that, but I'm not gonna do this again.

I was gonna write some things down and hold them up like I did last week, but I doesn't matter. I had a good time with you anyway, so I'll see you again next time, next Sunday.