We all feel restless at times, and Father Dave welcomes back Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith to discuss finding our identity in Christ. Dr. Saundra is a board-certified internal medicine physician, the CEO of Restorasis, and the author of “Being Fully Known: The Joyful Satisfaction of Beholding, Becoming, and Belonging.”
Dr. Saundra describes her journey of integrating her medical background with spiritual wellness. “[I’ve been in] clinical practice for over 20 years, but about 10 years into practice, I burned out, and started doing a lot of research around burnout,” she says. “I developed a concept called the seven types of rest, that was featured in my book “Sacred Rest.” That has led to a life all of its own, and I started getting invited into corporations and companies asking about how to put those seven types of rest into practice.”
LISTEN: Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith on ‘Sacred Rest’
“So many people were telling me ‘I’m so tired,’ but saying you’re tired is pretty pointless. It’s like coming to the emergency room and saying ‘I hurt,’” Dr. Saundra continues. “When I burned out, I had to [ask myself] what kind of tired am I? That’s where those different types of rest — the physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory and creative — came from.”
Her latest book draws on “Sacred Rest” and focuses on 3 elements of finding peace in Christ: beholding, becoming, and belonging. Dr. Saundra explains, “Beholding primarily focuses on the spiritual aspect [of our lives]: Beholding God in all things, and allowing what we behold to be a reflection of the things that we may not know about ourselves. [For example], when you turn to the Word of God and you’re reading it, you can notice new things each time you come.”
“You start becoming more aware of God’s characteristics that you don’t really recognize or appreciate yet. That’s the becoming — not becoming more of anything, but actually becoming more aware,” she continues. “Then for belonging, I think we find that a lot of people are striving to fit in. So they have these ambitions, goals, expectations, and all of these extra pressures on themselves in trying to fit in where belonging isn’t really about fitting in. It’s about allowing yourself to show up in the places where you belong.”
“Often that won’t look like everyone else in the room, because your uniqueness, the things that you’re bringing into that situation, belong there. They complete the picture,” Dr. Saundra says. “They actually bring in what’s missing in that spot, and there’s a rest in that, because you’re not in performance mode all the time.”
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Father Dave notes, “It’s very prevalent in our modern world to measure our worth by our accomplishments — the promotions at work, the bank account, or the houses — all those sorts of things, rather than measuring our worth by who we are and who God created us to be.”
Dr. Saundra responds, “There are so many metrics we can be using, and unfortunately, the metrics don’t show a full picture. ”
“A lot of people get frustrated because maybe they had a goal that they set out for, and they don’t reach that particular metric. Does that make that goal or that thing they did a failure? Sometimes success is not in the metric, but in the fact that you had courage, stepped out on faith and did something. I think we have these extra layers of stress that we put on ourselves in all the doing, rather than actually seeing that there are times when we simply need to recognize we don’t need to do another thing other than to be aware of who we are.”
