Creating a Personal Mantra

This is an except from Tender Leaves of Hope: Finding Belonging as LGBTQ Latter-day Saint Women, coming out in spring 2022. Here is a short clip from a presentation on this topic; this is the backstory

My therapist invited me to develop a mantra to ground myself in my own identity. It is a key to differentiation, an antidote to merging with others. Merging (also called codependency and enmeshment) happens when our borders are too porous, and we merge with another person’s emotions and needs, because we are not secure in ourselves and our self-identity. My goal was to become highly differentiated, so I could sit with a person in high emotion and stay in a state of open-heartedness, not enmeshed but also not retreating. If I am connected to a higher sense of self, I see feelings, I sort them, but I am not sucked in by them.

When I start to feel my boundaries slip, or sense that I am over-identifying with someone else, I find I am taking on their thoughts and feelings, or trying to fix, rescue, or control them. My personal mantra pulls me back to my own side of the road. It didn’t come easily. My therapist suggested I write a statement consisting of 2-5 sentences that answer these questions:

·       What is the ideal space I want to live out of?

·       What do I want?

Out of these questions I sought to craft a statement I could connect with multiple times a day to keep me grounded and prevent merging with others.

I worked for weeks to distill down the essential truths and desires of my life into a few sentences. Amidst so many conflicting choices, longings, aspirations, and roles, getting to the core of myself was a struggle. Looking back on my life and analyzing my choices was most helpful. This wasn’t about who I wished I could be; my goal was to come to know and describe myself, not prescribe the Ideal Meghan. I wasn’t searching for “shoulds.” This was an exercise in coming to know myself as I am, the most true description of self.

I added some questions that helped me evaluate my past choices:

·       What do I always come back to?

·       What centers me?

·       What is the consistent desire of my heart?

Looking back on my life, I could see that whenever I strayed from God and His covenants, I always came back, and I came back quickly. Like the earth circling the sun, I knew God was at my center, and His light and love were consistently the desire of my heart.

As I identified other constants in my thoughts, desires, and passions, I would bring draft versions to my appointments. My therapist made one suggestion—that I add something about my same-sex attraction. My first response was “That is not a significant part of my life!” Then I realized how much it had shaped me: my mental health; my internal narrative; my barriers to honesty with myself, God, and others; my faith in Christ; my complicated relationships with men and women and ambivalence in friendships. It seemed to touch so much—and I knew that though my relationship with SSA might change, I had never believed it would simply go away. It merited a mention, too. I also wanted my mantra to reflect the theme of my daily work, the things I was drawn to spend time on, many of which focused on inviting others to Christ. I realized that my love and gratitude for Jesus Christ had become one of the organizing principles of my life.

After weeks of tweaking, I settled on six sentences. My relationship to women ended up claiming its appropriate amount of space:

·       I am a disciple of Christ.

·       I am faithful to my covenants.

·       I love and cherish David and my family.

·       I move through the world in a way that reflects humility and invites others to come unto Christ.

·       I experience same-sex attraction, but it does not define me.

·       My love for women manifests best in a commitment to help them gain a profound awareness of their own nobility and their potential to become like our Heavenly Mother.

Reading through my final version, it rang true. This was me! (Others might raise an eyebrow at “humility,” but it is a desire of my heart, and I’m getting better at it.) This captured my essence, and as I repeated it throughout the day, I felt more and more grounded in who I was and what I wanted. The mantra was a valuable tool to take me out of imaginative, wishful thinking and ground me in the reality of who I was and what I really wanted.

Crafting this self-description required me to ask questions about the internal forces that shaped my life. I had wondered if staying in my marriage and in the Church meant I was suppressing my authentic self. Instead, I found those choices were manifestations of my authentic self.