My Newfound Faith

First Impressions

I grew up in the Catholic Church but stopped participating in high school. During those early years, I never felt connected to God beyond as a concept studied in Sunday school.

When adults told me to “have faith,” I felt forced into offering up my trust at the altar of a shadowy figure with fickle and cryptic expectations of me. The experience made me feel unsafe, shame-filled, and like a phony. I was resistant to believing in this supposed God without having had any personal communion with them. But the looming punishment of eternal damnation made it difficult to completely stop going through the motions of worship, even if they were devoid of any true devotion.

So as I left the church, I also left the idea of faith to the realms of organized religions. Since this departure, I’ve explored on my own a loose and exploratory relationship to the universe and its mysteries. I’ve felt profound moments of gratitude, awe, joy, and connection to the experience of being alive that instilled in me a wonder of what we do and don’t know about our existence. However, I didn’t consider myself a person of faith as I didn’t subscribe to any explicit religious or spiritual deity, force, or institution.

This changed through my recent trip to Korea.

Spiritual Passage

The best way I can describe my experience is as a spiritual passage.

My past few years have been a disentangling of my entire known reality. At the point when I felt wholly unraveled, I found myself at the silent meditation retreat that came towards the end of my time in Korea. A dedicated space and time to sit with all my unwoven threads.

(If you’re curious about my experience with the retreat, you can read more here.)

In this container, I experienced a connection. 
Not with some external deity or ghost.
But with my self.

The limitations and secondhand nature of language make it difficult for me to describe this experience precisely. Because it was the felt nature of the experience that made it so profound. 

Felt and not just understood.
Going deeper than my mind.
Into my bones and then further still. 
I felt comfort and assurance from my self.
That I was okay.
That I would continue to be okay.
That I didn’t have to keep grinning and bearing.
That I could surrender and allow.
Not because the future would be free of hardships.
But because this self was, is, and will be there with me. 
That I already had everything within me to navigate the continued unknown.

And this trust wasn’t being asked of me blindly.
All that had seemed serendipitous and by chance—following a feeling to let go of corporate stability and pursue a calling, encountering those who’d healed me through those who’d hurt me, walking away from a serious car accident alive— was my self expressing itself in different forms. 
Soft as a whisper, forceful as divine intervention. 
Each of the unwoven threads revealed a through line of how my self had already been navigating life through and for me. 

This self made no promises of security or stability.
No guarantee of safety or achievement.
All it did was make itself known.
And in doing so, let me know it was always with me. That I wasn’t going through life alone or abandoned.

• • •

Takeaways

My unraveling had been a terrifying, challenging, and humbling passage. But I finally understood why the journey had to have happened this way. I had needed an opposing force that could match the level of my ego’s concretization so it could break my ego open.
And in my case that was a lot of necessary force. 

Addressing my ego—fears, narratives, identities—was the mechanism which lowered the barriers between me and this self. This knowing self showed me all my chasing of ends to soothe my ego had stemmed from a sense I would not be okay.
That I would not be taken care of.
That I was not worthy of being taken care of. 
With this new knowingness that I was attended to, my ego loosened its grip on my system.
And for the first time in a long time, I felt okay.
Truly okay.

But for this experience to continue, I have to do my part.
I have to actively participate.
Remain attentive and awake to life and its signs.
Keep my heart open, fill it with joy, and share generously.
Believe people when they show me who they are and where they’re at in their own spiritual passage and adjust myself accordingly. 
Prepare for opportunities, receive them gratefully when presented, and act upon them wholeheartedly.

My newfound faith is a faith in my self.
Intuition.
Knowingness.
Consciousness.
That it’s got my back.
That I’ll be okay. 

• • •

Questions for you

What did reading about my experience elicit in you?

What is your relationship with faith?

What felt experiences do you have with intuition/knowingness/consciousness?

How would you go about describing your own relationship to your self?