not too long after i came out 🌈 at 19, leaving behind the conservative evangelical community of my childhood, i began identifying as an atheist. this distinction was - and remains, in some ways - an important rejection of the image of “God” i was served as a child: a male “God,” a “God” who dictated and held violent authority, a “God” who operated based on a book rather than reality, a “God” who could be integrated into power structures made of men and used to tell people what to think and what to do. i deeply reject this idea of "God." and i reject the idea that we can put an idea of god in place of the experience of <it>. i think this act of packaging up a “God” serves as a ploy to keep us locked away from the real thing.

through a coach who was helping me cultivate my vocation, i realized that to honor the desires of my heart, i needed to cultivate a self-love and self-concept that exists on its own; that doesn’t try endlessly to prove my worth through what i can produce for and offer others. (thanks Kiyoshi Hayashi💗). i spent four months working with my relationship to embodied affirmations~ to being able to tell myself positive, loving things and feel them in my body. at the time, trying to do this caused me to dissociate. it felt so foreign i could feel myself “leaving,” numbing, losing contact with my sensations and experience. with this practice as my singular focus and commitment, over four months, i was able to find a deep shift in my capacity to receive this sort of love from myself. during this time, i found myself on Insight Timer, listening to long guided meditations. i spent hours connecting with my inner child and my experience of an imaginary ‘Divine Mother’ and (later) ‘Divine Father,’ who accompanied me in meeting old, tender pain and fear and bringing love there. (i want to shout out Lisa Romano, whose meditations helped me a lot. she does beautiful work on narcissism, codependency, and religious abuse.)

this time period marks a cognitive shift in my relationship with myself as a “spiritual” being. i think with the label of “atheism” comes with this undertone of rejecting anything ephemeral, anything unseeable, anything not observable or measurable with the basic human senses or with “rational” thought. though this was never my true connection with atheism, i had taken on these (more or less) unspoken assumptions.

the way my experience with Divine Mother and Father was shifting and moving things inside me ~ was opening me to feeling love in deeper ways ~ was a clear call back into my desire and need to interact with the spiritual realm. i was experiencing how spiritual connection can serve as a place of nourishment and not control.

i find this culture i’ve been raised in is one in which the heart and soul tend to feel very dead. it’s an inherently subtle sensation - one that functions partially through making itself invisible to us. yet something inside keeps pulling and grasping for a realer sense of life, of the world - like a shriveled old hand reaching, in the dark, for water. spirituality is the place where i leave the door open to the possibilities within human experience that i feel estranged from. it’s the place where my devotion to the unknown is a boat that allows me to keep breathing sky when the dark waters below would otherwise consume me. it’s the place where i practice the truth that humility - reality - earthenness - is kept alive in the places with nothing filling them. it’s the place where i can sometimes experience the beauty of life as sharper than the terror of it. it’s a place without performance. a place where all i have to do is listen. a place where i am beautiful when i am on my knees and feel nothing left inside me to offer.

one of my deepest passions is creating communal experiences where we tap into this realm of being together. where we cultivate a shared energy that is greater than the sum of our parts, that holds its own beauty, that we all enter together without needing to bring anything specific, pay any price of admission, or prove our right to be there.

through the cultivation of these communal experiences, i was led into the work of “ritual.” i’ve begun to learn the history behind that word, how ritual is deeply rooted in the indigenous cultures we all came from at one point - the lineages that are still alive in our bodies and souls, even if, for many of us, they have become muted, concealed, shut off, or brutalized.

i’ve been learning from a variety of teachers, especially Francis Weller and his contemporaries, mentees, and colleagues, as well as the teachings of Malidoma Somé.  beginning to touch into the grief of how much we’ve lost, and specifically for me - as someone socialized into whiteness - how much harm has been done and continues to be done by the way we’ve been cut off from our roots. how we’ve lost relationship to so many beings that we are in connection with, how we’ve forgotten that land is alive and sacred and deserving of honor - the way we’ve forgotten this also of our own bodies and souls.

sometimes i feel daunted by how much i have to learn and to remember and to reconnect to. often, i have this subtle, almost taunting sensation, pulling me toward the necessity of recovering these broken relationships, of relearning life as a place to relate and not to extract or be extracted from. and i can also feel how i am often not yet able to fully touch that feeling, because that web of belonging is not yet deeply recovered in my own psyche. perhaps, in this body, i will always feel that strange, frightening, sparkling, yearning dance. sometimes i question my worthiness to walk this walk and practice the practices i am learning. i want to do everything “right” and not hurt anyone. and, the wiser part of me knows these expectations are unrealistic and born of the illness i am recovering from.

i choose to trust that my heart is guiding me toward what i am here for, and that it’s worth listening to, even though it’s scary that so much is unknown. ironically, that’s why i’m drawn to spirituality and to ritual anyway: it’s a place where i have the container to honor the unknown instead of simply fearing or avoiding it. it’s a place where i remember that unconditional love exists and that there’s no way for me to be unworthy of it - even if i’ve often lived in and surrounded by that forgetfulness. mother earth holds and consumes us all and breathes new life and beauty into our remnants when we’ve passed. this is indisputable, and to think we are worthless is just that same illness of being blinded to the beauty all around us, which, when we’re living in a state of connection, is so palpable, so awesome. somehow, in ritual, it becomes easy to remember and touch these truths, though they have become forgotten through layers of my body and my lineage.

now that i’ve reached this point in this writing, i no longer know where i’m going. 😅 how fitting. thank you for reading, if you’ve made it here. i hope we get to sit together one day and remember together the beauty that is waiting to meet us.


 

where you might come:

sit with me
join a free group ritual online
attend a weekend retreat

photo by Christina's Captures