Testimony on the Human Growth Workshop

We are grateful to the Lord and to our superiors who facilitated this intense formation for several months. This was an intense time of encounter with us. Also, we were able to experience how God is doing his work in our lives in the midst of human frailty.  We are also grateful to Sister Amilbia for leading the workshop and helping us to enter into the depths of ourselves, so that we can find our own tools to live better from who we are.

We shared some of our personal experiences in brief saying that the workshop helped me:

To be aware of who I am, to understand that I still don’t know myself completely, that it is a lifelong process.

To develop my listening skills, to be an active listener, to pay attention, to know how to enter into the experience of the other, feeling the sorrows and joys of the person sharing without judging or interrupting and trying to understand what is hidden behind their words, gestures and movements.

Doing my daily emotional cleansing so as not to hurt the feelings of others will also help me to move more towards my deepest self.

Knowing how to use the defenses mechanisms. Understand that perfectionism is a defense mechanism, and my mistakes or negative attitudes will remain if I don’t become aware of them. It is also important to know the origin of my disproportionate reactions and how to deal with them today.

To accept the painful experiences of the past, to forgive the people who hurt me and to heal the inner wounds inside me.

To be continually grateful to God for the gift of myself and for feeling recognized and loved as Her child.

To work on maintaining a balanced self-esteem and not to the overshadow others.

That through the questions and the exercises we received, I was able to recognize my personality, reflect on myself, realize why I act the way I do.

To accept every joyful or sad experience that has been stored in my black box, which will help me to manage every feeling that comes up.

Feeling that self-talk is an experience that happens in me and is difficult to manage, because the deeper I went into myself, I also found a lot of wounds and understood that self-talk was an inner turmoil in me, but through this workshop, I realized that it is important to admit that I have wounds in order to heal. I also noticed a change in myself, as I began to open up to let myself be shaped.

Learning to integrate myself as a consecrated woman, living in an attitude of learning, observation, deepening my knowledge of myself, growing in affective maturity, management of feelings and emotions, improving fraternal relationships.

To know more about the cause of my emotional instability, sometimes good, sometimes bad, to ask myself what I want in life. In addition, it is helping me to become aware of the wounds that I bring from my past and that I can find in my blocking box. I was able to recognize them, I am ready to embrace them, not to deny them anymore, to put myself in a learning attitude to live more integrated.

Learning to be closer to my body, to listen to it, to know it and to be aware of the feelings and reactions that occur in it.

To get to know something new in me: to build a good personality, it is not about the perfection of oneself, but to integrate the history, the lived experience. “Today I am what I received yesterday, tomorrow depends on me”.

Realize that as I grow in age, I am not always the same, that I am marked by my family and social environment, and all these experiences have repercussions on my relationships and my way of understanding the world today.

To know my weaknesses, my strengths and my capacity to situate myself in community life.

To understand that the personality reading key that we have known is important for my growth. From here I am learning to think coherently, i.e., to accept that everything is connected: thoughts, feelings, behaviors, nothing is loose, everything is triggered at the same time.

Novices of Africa, Philippines and Indonesia