S2 E3 - Four Maps for Finding Your Way Home
===
[00:00:00] Four maps for finding your way home. I'd like to begin with a poem. This one's called Maps. It's from Tour Day 986. Where we are going informed by where we've been. Our old stories with us today as a fresh start we begin. Often our stories are hidden, stacked over decades of our past. Dark valleys, mountaintops, all useful from the first to the last.
How to discover, how to mine takes quiet time and being brave. Patterns uncovered, desires clear, future tomorrows to save. This hard work so rewarding as we seek to remember helps tame the [00:01:00] inner inferno with perspective reduced to ember. Life unexamined snares and entraps. Freedom, surrender available as we explore our life's story maps.
The inspiration for this poem came from a season when I was beginning to understand something I had avoided for most of my adult life. I didn't really know my own story. I knew the highlights. I knew the professional arc. I knew the version I told at dinner parties. But the actual terrain of my life, the patterns, the turning points, the movements when I was most alive, and the seasons that cost me the most, I'd really never sat down and honestly mapped those out.
Today, [00:02:00] I wanna share with you the tools that changed that for me and what I found when I finally let them do their work. Why we map before we release. In my reunion tour, the program I built for my own journey, the Remember Movement is the foundation for everything else that follows. Before we can recognize what no longer fits, we have to know what we've been carrying.
Before we release it, we have to be able to name it. And before we can name it, we have to have done the honest work of looking at the full terrain of our lives. Not just the parts we're proud of, not just the parts that hurt, but all of it together. The tool I use for that work is One Life Maps, which was co-authored by my spiritual director and dear friend, Sibyl [00:03:00] Towner.
You'll hear from Sibyl herself in our next conversation. Her story of how these maps came to be is remarkable. But today, I want to walk you through the four maps that form the Remember Movement and tell you what they surfaced in my own life. There are four of them. They move in a sequence - that's not accidental.
You begin with where you are now, then you go back to where you've been, then you look at what gave you life. And finally, with care, with honesty, you look at what took something from you. Present, past, gifts, wounds. By the time you've done all four, you have a portrait of yourself that most people never get to see.
Not [00:04:00] the resume, not the story you tell, the actual terrain. That portrait is what makes everything else possible. One Life Maps invite people into this work with a set of questions I find deeply honest. I want to share them with you because they may name something you've been carrying Are you seeking God in a deeper way and desire to rediscover who you are through His eyes?
Perhaps you've thought, "I don't know myself anymore." You wonder, "Is there something more?" You stand at the crossroads of life and ask, "Which way will lead me to expressing more of who I am made to be?" You're looking for a way to understand the restlessness you feel inside. Perhaps you're relationally at odds with yourself and others [00:05:00] in ways that have ties to your past.
If any of these statements landed with you, this episode, this conversation, for you. And the maps, my friend, are waiting. So map number one is called My Life Now, and it's a snapshot of where you are today. And the name is exactly what it says. Before you go anywhere into your history, before you look at the peak moments or valley seasons, this map asks you to do something surprisingly challenging, to stop and look honestly at where you've landed.
What's your situation? What's pressing? Who's involved? What are you drawn towards? What's most important? And this question tends to catch people off guard: what's causing restlessness? That last [00:06:00] question is the reason that most of the people who find their way to my reunion tour are there in the first place.
It's not a dramatic crisis. It's a quiet, persistent restlessness, a sense that something is off, but they can't quite name it. Finally, the map asks, what are your lingering questions? I love that phrase, lingering questions. Not urgent problems to solve, not crisis to manage, the questions that won't quite leave you alone, that show up in the early morning when the noise dies down.
Here's what I've learned about Map 1 from walking others through it. People think they know where they are. They've been living there. But when they sit down and actually write out their situation, the pressures, the people, the desires, the [00:07:00] restlessness, something they have not quite named comes into focus.
That's the whole point of Map 1. Not diagnosis, not prescription, just a simple, honest look at where you are today, where you've landed, which turns out to be harder than it counts. Map two, My Life Story: The Arc of a Life Laid Out. The second map is one I'd call the foundation of the Remember Movement.
It's called My Life Story, and it does exactly what it sounds like. It asks you to map out the whole arc of your life. The map is organized by eras, the first 20 years, and then you can carve out your 20s and beyond. And within each era, it invites [00:08:00] you to place events, people, places, turning points above or below a dotted line.
Positive experiences above, negative below, just like an EKG of your life. It asks about aspirations, dreams, positive influences. It asks about losses, hurts, the seasons that cost you something. And then it asks a question I find remarkable in its simplicity: Where was God? Where was God visible? Where did God seem distant?
Where you look back now and see a presence that you didn't notice at the time That question, where was God, is the difference between a biographical exercise and a spiritual one. [00:09:00] This map isn't just asking what happened, it is asking where was the holy in it? I love this quote from the maps, "Remembering in this tradition is re-membering, reassembling what was scattered, recovering the pieces of a self that life has pulled apart."
When I sat down with this map, one of the reflection questions stopped me right in my tracks. How might I title the chapters of my life? Not describe them, not summarize them, title them the way you title a chapter in the book. And here's what I notice when people do this map. The chapters they thought that were their best chapters sometimes weren't.
The chapters that they've been avoiding, the ones they've never fully titled, never fully [00:10:00] named, those often turn out to be the most formative. The suit that no longer fits becomes visible in a life story map, like map two. You can see exactly when it was tailored, and sometimes if you look closely, you can see the moment you made the vow that held it in place
Map three is peak experiences. When you were most alive. The third map shifts direction, and after you've looked at the arc of your whole life, map three asks you to zoom in on the moments when you were most alive. Not your proudest achievements, not your greatest successes as the world would define them, but the moments, six to eight of them, when something in [00:11:00] you came fully awake, when you felt the most yourself, when there was unexplainable satisfaction in what you were doing or experiencing.
And this map makes a specific and important request. Go back to your first 20 years, before the cultural overlay of achievement and approval, before you learned what you were supposed to want, before the suit was tailored. What were you doing in those early years when you lost track of time, when you were completely present, when something inside of you said, "Yes, this"?
For many people in midlife, this question is emotional because we haven't thought much about those early years in a very long time, and when we go back, really go back, we [00:12:00] find something that surprises us, something that was true about us before anyone told us who to be. The question that ties all the peak experiences together is this, what themes appear across all of these?
Not what you did, what was present? What was at the center of every moment that you felt most alive?
That pattern is a signal. It's pointing at something true about who you were made to be. And for most of the people I work with, that pattern was visible long before we learned to cover it over
Map four, the valley experiences. What the hard seasons left behind. This fourth map is the one that requires the most care and the most courage. It's called valley [00:13:00] experiences, and it goes exactly where you think it goes. They ask you to name the losses, the hurts, the seasons that took something from you.
Not to mine trauma for its own sake, but because the valleys in life are often where the most important formation happened, where the deepest vows were made, where the coping mechanisms that are still running in midlife were first installed. The map asks, "What happened? How might I name this loss? How did I compensate for that loss?"
That last question, how did I compensate, is one of the most diagnostically powerful questions I've ever encountered because that answer reveals the identity that no longer fits. The way we arrange our lives around a loss, the coping mechanims- [00:14:00] mechanisms we build, the vows we make, the suits we tailor, those trace directly back to what was lost.
And most of us have been living inside that compensating mechanism for so long we've forgotten it was ever a response to something The map also asks, "How do I grieve in healthy ways? Whom do I need to forgive? What do I need to confess and take responsibility for?" And then it asks something I find deeply anchored in the theology of transformation.
"What scriptures remind me that God has walked this valley with me?" I love this quote from the maps. "We no longer live with the festering wound. We have a scar, and a scar is where God has met us." That framing matters [00:15:00] because this is not an exercise in victimhood. It's not a rehearsal grievance. It is an honest naming of what happened, followed by an equally as honest search for the redemptive presence that was there within it.
I'll say this, map four is not a map to rush. It's not a map to do alone. In the communities I run, participants prepare for this map carefully before they bring it into a shared space. The valley experiences require a container, and that container is the covenant of community But what you find there, what the honest naming of the valley reveals about how you've been living ever since, that's some of the most important work of the Remember Movement, maybe of the entire journey [00:16:00] What do these maps reveal together?
Four maps. Present, past, gifts, wounds. Taken one at a time, each map reveals something. But taken together, they reveal something you can't see any other way. By the time someone has completed these first four maps, honestly, without rushing, they've likely named their restlessness. They've mapped the terrain of their life and can begin to see the outlines of a pattern from altitude.
They've identified the moments when they were most alive before anyone told them who to be, and they've faced the valleys what those valleys took, and what was built to compensate for them [00:17:00] if a person is a candidate to move forward into the deeper work of recognize and release.
These are the next two movements of My Reunion Tour This accumulated portrait will have done its work in its quiet way by the time you finish Map 4. Something will have shifted. The restlessness will have a shape. The identity may even have a name. And if the remember movement is as far as anyone goes, if you do these four maps and step back into your life with a clearer picture of who you've been and what you've been carrying, that's a complete and meaningful gift.
Not a consolation prize, a real thing
I can't wait for our next conversation because I'll be sitting down with Sybil Towner, the co-creator of One Life Maps [00:18:00] and my own spiritual direction across the hardest years of my own journey. I want you to hear the story about how these maps came to be in her own words, and I want to ask her the question I'm most curious about: What do these maps surface in her own life?
But for today, I want to close with a poem and one invitation. This poem is called Story. It's from day 961
How I answer one simple question colors this day and my tomorrows. Unless I pause and reflect carefully, who am I? Often we answer with memories, starting from our earliest days, words spoken over us, or events that never leave our mind. Other [00:19:00] times we respond with roles we've played over the years, relationships we held, responsibilities we assumed.
All of these answers have served us well in due season, but do they still fit now? Yet we cling to them anyway. For the freedom promised by our Father begins with a different identity, beloved, equipped, prepared for this day as it unfolds. Releasing the loyal one who protected us in certainty, retired in honor, counting the cost, our pathway to freedom is in a new story
If today's conversation has to stirred a desire [00:20:00] for you to do this work, to sit with these four maps and to let them do what they're designed to do, I'd love to walk that path with you. The Remember Movement of My Reunion Tour is open to anyone. It is, as I've said, a complete experience on its own and the foundation for everything that follows.
If you're ready to begin, visit myreuniontour.com and schedule a conversation with me. Not a sales call, an honest conversation about where you are and whether this is the right season for you. We do the Remember Movement as a group of people together, and we'll be forming our next cohort very soon.
So that conversation will get you on the wait list, and I'll notify you when our next group is ready to [00:21:00] begin Also, invite a friend to subscribe to Begin Again wherever you listen to podcasts. And you won't want to miss my next conversation with my spiritual director, co-author of One Life Maps, Sibyl Towner.
This is gonna be an amazing conversation, an incredible life story, and one that has deeply impacted me and hundreds of other people. I'm Winston Faircloth, and you're right where you're supposed to be.
===
[00:00:00] Four maps for finding your way home. I'd like to begin with a poem. This one's called Maps. It's from Tour Day 986. Where we are going informed by where we've been. Our old stories with us today as a fresh start we begin. Often our stories are hidden, stacked over decades of our past. Dark valleys, mountaintops, all useful from the first to the last.
How to discover, how to mine takes quiet time and being brave. Patterns uncovered, desires clear, future tomorrows to save. This hard work so rewarding as we seek to remember helps tame the [00:01:00] inner inferno with perspective reduced to ember. Life unexamined snares and entraps. Freedom, surrender available as we explore our life's story maps.
The inspiration for this poem came from a season when I was beginning to understand something I had avoided for most of my adult life. I didn't really know my own story. I knew the highlights. I knew the professional arc. I knew the version I told at dinner parties. But the actual terrain of my life, the patterns, the turning points, the movements when I was most alive, and the seasons that cost me the most, I'd really never sat down and honestly mapped those out.
Today, [00:02:00] I wanna share with you the tools that changed that for me and what I found when I finally let them do their work. Why we map before we release. In my reunion tour, the program I built for my own journey, the Remember Movement is the foundation for everything else that follows. Before we can recognize what no longer fits, we have to know what we've been carrying.
Before we release it, we have to be able to name it. And before we can name it, we have to have done the honest work of looking at the full terrain of our lives. Not just the parts we're proud of, not just the parts that hurt, but all of it together. The tool I use for that work is One Life Maps, which was co-authored by my spiritual director and dear friend, Sibyl [00:03:00] Towner.
You'll hear from Sibyl herself in our next conversation. Her story of how these maps came to be is remarkable. But today, I want to walk you through the four maps that form the Remember Movement and tell you what they surfaced in my own life. There are four of them. They move in a sequence - that's not accidental.
You begin with where you are now, then you go back to where you've been, then you look at what gave you life. And finally, with care, with honesty, you look at what took something from you. Present, past, gifts, wounds. By the time you've done all four, you have a portrait of yourself that most people never get to see.
Not [00:04:00] the resume, not the story you tell, the actual terrain. That portrait is what makes everything else possible. One Life Maps invite people into this work with a set of questions I find deeply honest. I want to share them with you because they may name something you've been carrying Are you seeking God in a deeper way and desire to rediscover who you are through His eyes?
Perhaps you've thought, "I don't know myself anymore." You wonder, "Is there something more?" You stand at the crossroads of life and ask, "Which way will lead me to expressing more of who I am made to be?" You're looking for a way to understand the restlessness you feel inside. Perhaps you're relationally at odds with yourself and others [00:05:00] in ways that have ties to your past.
If any of these statements landed with you, this episode, this conversation, for you. And the maps, my friend, are waiting. So map number one is called My Life Now, and it's a snapshot of where you are today. And the name is exactly what it says. Before you go anywhere into your history, before you look at the peak moments or valley seasons, this map asks you to do something surprisingly challenging, to stop and look honestly at where you've landed.
What's your situation? What's pressing? Who's involved? What are you drawn towards? What's most important? And this question tends to catch people off guard: what's causing restlessness? That last [00:06:00] question is the reason that most of the people who find their way to my reunion tour are there in the first place.
It's not a dramatic crisis. It's a quiet, persistent restlessness, a sense that something is off, but they can't quite name it. Finally, the map asks, what are your lingering questions? I love that phrase, lingering questions. Not urgent problems to solve, not crisis to manage, the questions that won't quite leave you alone, that show up in the early morning when the noise dies down.
Here's what I've learned about Map 1 from walking others through it. People think they know where they are. They've been living there. But when they sit down and actually write out their situation, the pressures, the people, the desires, the [00:07:00] restlessness, something they have not quite named comes into focus.
That's the whole point of Map 1. Not diagnosis, not prescription, just a simple, honest look at where you are today, where you've landed, which turns out to be harder than it counts. Map two, My Life Story: The Arc of a Life Laid Out. The second map is one I'd call the foundation of the Remember Movement.
It's called My Life Story, and it does exactly what it sounds like. It asks you to map out the whole arc of your life. The map is organized by eras, the first 20 years, and then you can carve out your 20s and beyond. And within each era, it invites [00:08:00] you to place events, people, places, turning points above or below a dotted line.
Positive experiences above, negative below, just like an EKG of your life. It asks about aspirations, dreams, positive influences. It asks about losses, hurts, the seasons that cost you something. And then it asks a question I find remarkable in its simplicity: Where was God? Where was God visible? Where did God seem distant?
Where you look back now and see a presence that you didn't notice at the time That question, where was God, is the difference between a biographical exercise and a spiritual one. [00:09:00] This map isn't just asking what happened, it is asking where was the holy in it? I love this quote from the maps, "Remembering in this tradition is re-membering, reassembling what was scattered, recovering the pieces of a self that life has pulled apart."
When I sat down with this map, one of the reflection questions stopped me right in my tracks. How might I title the chapters of my life? Not describe them, not summarize them, title them the way you title a chapter in the book. And here's what I notice when people do this map. The chapters they thought that were their best chapters sometimes weren't.
The chapters that they've been avoiding, the ones they've never fully titled, never fully [00:10:00] named, those often turn out to be the most formative. The suit that no longer fits becomes visible in a life story map, like map two. You can see exactly when it was tailored, and sometimes if you look closely, you can see the moment you made the vow that held it in place
Map three is peak experiences. When you were most alive. The third map shifts direction, and after you've looked at the arc of your whole life, map three asks you to zoom in on the moments when you were most alive. Not your proudest achievements, not your greatest successes as the world would define them, but the moments, six to eight of them, when something in [00:11:00] you came fully awake, when you felt the most yourself, when there was unexplainable satisfaction in what you were doing or experiencing.
And this map makes a specific and important request. Go back to your first 20 years, before the cultural overlay of achievement and approval, before you learned what you were supposed to want, before the suit was tailored. What were you doing in those early years when you lost track of time, when you were completely present, when something inside of you said, "Yes, this"?
For many people in midlife, this question is emotional because we haven't thought much about those early years in a very long time, and when we go back, really go back, we [00:12:00] find something that surprises us, something that was true about us before anyone told us who to be. The question that ties all the peak experiences together is this, what themes appear across all of these?
Not what you did, what was present? What was at the center of every moment that you felt most alive?
That pattern is a signal. It's pointing at something true about who you were made to be. And for most of the people I work with, that pattern was visible long before we learned to cover it over
Map four, the valley experiences. What the hard seasons left behind. This fourth map is the one that requires the most care and the most courage. It's called valley [00:13:00] experiences, and it goes exactly where you think it goes. They ask you to name the losses, the hurts, the seasons that took something from you.
Not to mine trauma for its own sake, but because the valleys in life are often where the most important formation happened, where the deepest vows were made, where the coping mechanisms that are still running in midlife were first installed. The map asks, "What happened? How might I name this loss? How did I compensate for that loss?"
That last question, how did I compensate, is one of the most diagnostically powerful questions I've ever encountered because that answer reveals the identity that no longer fits. The way we arrange our lives around a loss, the coping mechanims- [00:14:00] mechanisms we build, the vows we make, the suits we tailor, those trace directly back to what was lost.
And most of us have been living inside that compensating mechanism for so long we've forgotten it was ever a response to something The map also asks, "How do I grieve in healthy ways? Whom do I need to forgive? What do I need to confess and take responsibility for?" And then it asks something I find deeply anchored in the theology of transformation.
"What scriptures remind me that God has walked this valley with me?" I love this quote from the maps. "We no longer live with the festering wound. We have a scar, and a scar is where God has met us." That framing matters [00:15:00] because this is not an exercise in victimhood. It's not a rehearsal grievance. It is an honest naming of what happened, followed by an equally as honest search for the redemptive presence that was there within it.
I'll say this, map four is not a map to rush. It's not a map to do alone. In the communities I run, participants prepare for this map carefully before they bring it into a shared space. The valley experiences require a container, and that container is the covenant of community But what you find there, what the honest naming of the valley reveals about how you've been living ever since, that's some of the most important work of the Remember Movement, maybe of the entire journey [00:16:00] What do these maps reveal together?
Four maps. Present, past, gifts, wounds. Taken one at a time, each map reveals something. But taken together, they reveal something you can't see any other way. By the time someone has completed these first four maps, honestly, without rushing, they've likely named their restlessness. They've mapped the terrain of their life and can begin to see the outlines of a pattern from altitude.
They've identified the moments when they were most alive before anyone told them who to be, and they've faced the valleys what those valleys took, and what was built to compensate for them [00:17:00] if a person is a candidate to move forward into the deeper work of recognize and release.
These are the next two movements of My Reunion Tour This accumulated portrait will have done its work in its quiet way by the time you finish Map 4. Something will have shifted. The restlessness will have a shape. The identity may even have a name. And if the remember movement is as far as anyone goes, if you do these four maps and step back into your life with a clearer picture of who you've been and what you've been carrying, that's a complete and meaningful gift.
Not a consolation prize, a real thing
I can't wait for our next conversation because I'll be sitting down with Sybil Towner, the co-creator of One Life Maps [00:18:00] and my own spiritual direction across the hardest years of my own journey. I want you to hear the story about how these maps came to be in her own words, and I want to ask her the question I'm most curious about: What do these maps surface in her own life?
But for today, I want to close with a poem and one invitation. This poem is called Story. It's from day 961
How I answer one simple question colors this day and my tomorrows. Unless I pause and reflect carefully, who am I? Often we answer with memories, starting from our earliest days, words spoken over us, or events that never leave our mind. Other [00:19:00] times we respond with roles we've played over the years, relationships we held, responsibilities we assumed.
All of these answers have served us well in due season, but do they still fit now? Yet we cling to them anyway. For the freedom promised by our Father begins with a different identity, beloved, equipped, prepared for this day as it unfolds. Releasing the loyal one who protected us in certainty, retired in honor, counting the cost, our pathway to freedom is in a new story
If today's conversation has to stirred a desire [00:20:00] for you to do this work, to sit with these four maps and to let them do what they're designed to do, I'd love to walk that path with you. The Remember Movement of My Reunion Tour is open to anyone. It is, as I've said, a complete experience on its own and the foundation for everything that follows.
If you're ready to begin, visit myreuniontour.com and schedule a conversation with me. Not a sales call, an honest conversation about where you are and whether this is the right season for you. We do the Remember Movement as a group of people together, and we'll be forming our next cohort very soon.
So that conversation will get you on the wait list, and I'll notify you when our next group is ready to [00:21:00] begin Also, invite a friend to subscribe to Begin Again wherever you listen to podcasts. And you won't want to miss my next conversation with my spiritual director, co-author of One Life Maps, Sibyl Towner.
This is gonna be an amazing conversation, an incredible life story, and one that has deeply impacted me and hundreds of other people. I'm Winston Faircloth, and you're right where you're supposed to be.
