Today’s episode is going to be a dive into what it means to be spiritual, what expansive spirituality looks like and feels and on a personal note, this episode is an update follow up on some of the previous episodes that I’ve shared about my own personal spiritual journey.

It’s been a couple years since I talked about my personal relationship with spirituality and religion. And I thought it was time to share a little bit more about how that feels for me now at this point in my life a few years later. I know I always appreciate hearing firsthand about people’s own stories.

We’re so connected through story. We understand when we can put ourselves in someone else’s place. This episode is an attempt both to encourage and teach and inspire some spiritual practices.

Of course, I’ll be sharing some research about The way that spirituality and an affiliation with the, with connection to something greater than ourselves can bring life satisfaction and increase our well-being and also the way that my personal connection to spiritual practices and to spirituality has felt expansive in a way that feels very fulfilling and peaceful because one of my own personal favorite spiritual practices is the listening to, reading, contemplation of poetry.

Segment: Pause for a Poem

I’m going to not only share A Pause for a Poem right now as we begin the episode, but I’m going to share a couple favorite pieces of poetry throughout the episode to create some stillness and invite us into contemplation, which is a beautiful way to experience a connection to something deeper than ourselves.

And we’ll begin today with Evidence by Mary Oliver.

1. Where do I live? If I had no address, as many people

do not. I could nevertheless say that I lived in the 

same town as the lilies of the field and the still 

waters. 

Spring, and all through the neighborhood now there are 

strong men tending flowers. 

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But 

all beautiful things inherently have this function–

to excite the viewers towards sublime thought. Glory 

to the world, that good teacher. 

Among the swans, there is none called the least or 

the greatest. 

I believe in kindness. Also, in mischief. Also in 

singing, especially when singing is not necessarily 

prescribed. 

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious 

and full of detail. It wants to polish itself; it 

wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in

 the world that can hold in a mix of power and 

sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas, 

ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue. 

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. 

2. There are many ways to perish, or to flourish.

What an old pain, for example, can stall us at the 

threshold of function. 

Memory: a golden bowl, or a basement without light. 

For which reason the nightmare comes with its 

painful story and says: you need to know this. 

Some memories I would give up anything to forget.

Others I would not give up upon the point of 

death, they are the bright hawks of my life. 

Still, friends, consider stone, that is without 

fret of gravity and water that is without 

anxiety. 

And the pine trees that never forget their 

recipe for renewal. 

And the female wood duck, who was looking for this way 

and that for her children. And the snapping 

turtle who was looking for this way and that also.

This is the world. 

And consider, always, every day, the determination

 of grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.

3. I ask you again, if you have not been enchanted by 

this adventure– your life– what would do for you? 

Spirituality and Religion

spirituality, and religion are often lumped together and sometimes even interchanged. People will use spiritual or religion back and forth as if they were the same thing. And while they overlap, they’re not the same and have some distinguishing features that I want to highlight.

Spirituality

Spirituality comes from root words in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek that all mean Wind, breath, or air. That which gives life. Spirituality, then, is that which gives life. I love that definition as a starting point for the discussion and contemplation of spirituality. Spirituality is not religion or religiosity.

In spirituality, the questions are, where do I personally find meaning, connection, and value? What gives me life? And you can think about that in a metaphysical sense. What gives me life in terms of connection to the divine and divinity and the universe and God and in terms of practicality. What gives me life in my day-to-day life?

What things light me up? What do I enjoy? Where do I find my strengths best utilized? Religion, in contrast, is a structure to house the practices and rights of spirituality.

Religion

Religion, the questions, lean more towards what is right or true, what is the way in which practices of spirituality should or could be carried out.

And the, you can think of religion as forming sort of a container for the learning and development of spiritual practices. If you think of a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles, on the left is spirituality, on the right is religion, and in the middle is some of the ways that they intersect. I just want to, and I’ll put one of these on the show notes for today’s episode if you want to have a visual about it.

Spirituality. is going to be about truth discovery. It’s formless, inclusive, expansive, experience based, individual, purposeful. Religion is truth knowledge based. It’s structured, exclusive, traditional, built up of practices of worship, and external divinity. And then the overlap, what’s in, inside both of those containers is faith, direction, belief, lifestyle.

People can be both spiritual and religious. People can also be religious without being spiritual. And people can be spiritual without being religious.

In the book Creation Spirituality, Reverend Tim Thorstenson writes, “Every sacred religious tradition is a wellspring, in fact, a bubbling up of the river into the human experience of life enhancing spirituality.

That we best serve the needs of all humanity when we not only respect other religious paths but collaborate with them in our shared work of healing creation. No one tradition contains all the answers, but every tradition can be a finger pointing at the moon, in Buddha’s words, directing our hearts toward the source.”

A similar sentiment is expressed by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning when he says, “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers, the truth that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief must impart. The salvation of man is through love. And in love.”

Spirituality and Religion in Positive Psychology

It was so interesting over the last year to see religion and spirituality through the lens of positive psychology through my studies. So, I wanted to share a little bit about what the research in psychology says about religion and spirituality overall.

A large body of research suggests that religious attachment is generally beneficial for people. Religious affiliation is correlated with good health habits, such as less smoking and drinking, an enhanced ability to cope with stress, increased social support, along with these benefits, research also finds some downsides, such as increased levels of guilt and shame in stricter religious communities.

In a 2002 Target article called, The Bitter and the Sweet, An Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of Religiousness, a psychologist, Kenneth Pargament, shares a bunch of research, this is a meta-analysis, so he’s looking at lots of different studies over the years that are talking about different ways that religion affects People’s well-being.

I’m going to just summarize some of the conclusions that I found interesting. The bitter and the sweet, right? Some of the conclusions that are shared in this article are that some forms of religion are more helpful than others. And here’s where it gets into a little bit of detail.

Religion that is internalized, intrinsically motivated, and built on a belief in a greater meaning of life, a secure relationship with the divine, and a sense of spiritual connectedness with others, has positive implications for well-being.

That all kind of makes sense, right? If you’re religious is intrinsically motivated, that means that you are self-determining its importance in your life. It’s building belief on greater meaning in life, connection to the divine, and to others that will make you feel better. You’ll, it will have positive implications for your life.

Conversely, this is the bitter, a religion that is imposed, unexamined, and reflective of a tenuous relationship with the divine bodes poorly for well-being.

If your religion is not something that you’ve chosen, if it’s not something that you have examined and determined to be aligned with your personal values and if it continually highlighting the ways in which your relationship with the divine is in question, that’s not going to be as good for your well-being. Of course, that will lead you to feel worse and not fulfilled.

Another finding from this meta study is that not everyone experiences the same benefits from religion. Religiousness is more helpful. Tends to be more helpful for socially marginalized groups older folks members of minority communities women and people in lower socioeconomic classes tend to in religious communities that apply, you know with what we were just talking about to the intrinsically motivated and integrated forms of religion they tend to receive greater benefit from the religion of religious affiliation than folks who are in the majority higher socioeconomic status and maybe have other ways to find similar fulfillments and communities.

And another data point that’s interesting here in this conclusion is that the efficacy of the religion tends to depend on the degree in which it is well integrated into people’s lives. So, the people who benefit most from their own religion are more likely to be part of a larger social context that supports their faith.

So, they’re living in a community of similarly minded folks. People who find that their own religious beliefs, practices, and motivations are harmoniously connected and aligned with their own personal value systems.

And the contrary to both of those is true, that when you are not aligned, when your religious affiliation and practices are not aligned or integrated into your own, harmoniously with your own alignment, then it is detrimental.

You tend to suffer more when it’s fragmented. And, when your religious identity is not supported by your social environment, it tends to not be as beneficial. Of course, like any research, these are just, pieces of bigger studies that have been done, and I’ll have lots of, of course, nothing is universally applied.

Religion can be both beneficial and detrimental

I think that it’s interesting to think about the ways in which religion can be beneficial, and where and how it is helpful, and where and how it can be not only not beneficial, but detrimental. Where and how it can start to. take away from your well-being. And instead of moving you towards feeling better and the hope and harmony and peace that religion, I think in general, is hoping to promise, that it starts to become the source of some of your dissonance confusion, and, Ill being rather than well-being.

In Steger did some research around the word’s meaning. And they came up with three meanings of the word meaning. One is coherence. Meaning can mean making sense of one’s experiences in life. Meaning can also mean purpose, having direction, and a future oriented goal. And meaning can mean significance, worthwhileness, and value in one’s life.

So, meaning, the word meaning can mean coherence, making sense, purpose, having direction or goals, or significance, worthwhileness, and values in one’s life. And spirituality can bring all of those to our lives, whether it is housed within the framework of a specific religion.

What if unfinished is whole?

Professor Ken Pargament is a psychology professor of religion and spirituality, and in a lecture that he gave, there were some things that I thought were interesting that I just want to highlight.

He talked about the ingredients of wholeness, how religion tends to point us towards the idea of wholeness. I know in the religion of my youth, we talked about perfection a lot, perfection meaning wholeness. And Ken Shared first, I love words and their origins, and he talks about how wholeness and holiness come from the same root words, but also how the ingredients of wholeness are the capacity to see and approach life with both breadth and depth and to Organize our life journey into a cohesive whole, wholeness.

What if broken is the finished product? Is one of the questions that we discussed in class when we were talking about spirituality and religion. What if wholeness is unattainable? If broken is the finished project, if perfection is unattainable, then imperfection is wholeness. Can we find something to be whole and holy in its imperfection?

You can also pose the question, how do we put the pieces of our understanding together in a way that makes sense for our lives and our own environments. Of course, when talking about spirituality and religion, we also talked about doubt and the benefits of doubt. Two of the benefits that he brought up and discussed how doubt can be so helpful, questions and doubt and curiosity and wondering can be so helpful in a spiritual journey, is that it cultivates critical thinking.

And can clarify what we believe versus what we’ve been told to believe. This distinction, what we believe versus what we’ve been told to believe, is a key element in whether our religiousness or spirituality is beneficial for us. Because as the research talks about, this intrinsic motivation, this inherent self-determination within our spirituality, is one of the key elements of whether We benefit or are burdened by our religious affiliation or spiritual beliefs.

So having doubt, asking questions, wondering about things, and then clarifying what we believe versus what we’ve been told to believe helps us find alignment and find some congruence in what we believe and how we then act. A quote from an article he shared, the article is a 2004 Chittister, is the researcher, says, “Spiritual struggle gives life depth and vision, insight and understanding. It not only transforms us, but it also makes us transform as well. It teaches us that everyday life starts over again. Stress, and strain, and struggle, and doubt, and questions are part of a spiritual pathway. They’re part of a spiritual life.”

Spirituality is a search for the sacred.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewildered like atoms?

Who comes to a spring thirsty and

sees the moon reflected in it?

Who, like Jacob, blind with grief and age,

smells the shirt of his lost son and can see again?

Who lets a bucket down and brings up a flowing prophet.

Or like Moses goes for fire and finds what

burns inside the sunrise. Jesus slips into a house

to escape enemies and opens a door into the other world.

Solomon cuts open a fish and there’s a gold ring.

Omar storms in to kill the prophet and leaves with blessings.

Chase a deer and end up everywhere.

An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.

Now, there’s a pearl.

A vagrant wander empty ruins. Suddenly, he’s wealthy.

But don’t be satisfied with stories,

how things have gone with others.

Unfold your own myths,

without complicated explanation,

so everyone will understand the passage,

We Have Opened You.

Start walking toward shams.

Your legs will get heavy and tired.

Then comes a moment of feeling

the wings you’ve grown, lifting.

Unfold your own Myth, Rumi

My Personal Spiritual Journey

I was raised spiritual and religious. I have a deep love of the divinity of God, of spirituality, and I was raised to have a personal relationship with the divine. In June of 2021, I shared an episode number 150 about having nuanced faith within organized religion. And in that episode, I shared a little bit of my history.

I’ll recap here for those who haven’t listened to it if you’re interested. I was born and raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormon. And at the point I shared episode 150, I was embracing uncertainty and doubt and questions within active participation in Mormonism.

Although at that time, it’s funny looking back because we weren’t attending church. No one that I knew in Virginia was because of the pandemic. In March of 2020, all, everyone stayed inside for the foreseeable future. It was not until over a year that we even had the possibility of attending church in person anymore, at least in my neighborhood where I live.

When I shared about choosing to remain active or participate within the religion of my childhood. At that time, it was in practices and rights and identity more than in actual attendance because I couldn’t go to church then.

In episode 150, I also pose the question, do you have to agree and align with every one of an organization’s decisions and purposes to belong or identify or support it?

And I don’t think so. I didn’t think so then. I still don’t think.

So now that, that’s an example of nuance, being able to participate or identify parts of an organization, parts of a container, parts of a religion, parts of a structure. Sometimes within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, particularly having grown up within the heart of the church, which is in Salt Lake City, which is where I grew up, you can begin to believe that the things that you learn as part of this dominant religion and lifestyle and culture and truly so much.

I grew up in a religious monoculture

I haven’t lived in Utah for 16 years, but growing up there so much of the even, secular culture bent to the norms of the dominant culture, the dominant religion. So, I started to believe that Mormons had a monopoly on orthodoxy, on religious lifestyle guidelines, on the right way to do things.

That’s all very normal. Growing up, you know what you know. And I also remember thinking that I, was so lucky to be part of an organization that had a monopoly on faith filled spiritual experiences and truth.

Of course, that’s not objectively true. And I shared in episode 150 that, millions of people live their lives of faith and spirituality and goodness without participation in any religion or full participation in religions other than One religion.

Billions of people have access to truth and knowledge and light and spiritual practices and uplift and joy and will live full beautiful honorable exemplary lives. Regardless of whether they’ve ever encountered a particular religious structure. And while this may go without saying, it feels important to remember that our personal experiences are personal.

And the idea of faith transition, struggling with questions inside religion, hoping for change within organizations, and living fulfilling lives are universal. I don’t believe that there is a one size fits all approach to how to do life. In fact, my work for a decade has been helping people understand what they value and how to live lives based on what matters most to them, knowing that it is inherently going to be different than what matters most to me.

And that’s okay. It’s so fun to work as a coach with my clients and help individual women unearth, discover, establish, recognize their core values and strengths, and then practice with them using those things in practical ways to build a life that feels aligned, fulfilled, and beautiful to them. Sometimes those lives include spiritual practices and religious affiliation, and sometimes they don’t.

Either way, the aim is to get closer and closer to what gives life. Remember this definition of spiritual is life giving what gives your life?

I am inherently deeply spiritual 

For my whole life if I can remember like my memory goes back to early childhood where I loved. God and I loved church, and I loved spirituality.

I’ve loved reading the scriptures and spiritual texts I loved my affiliation in the church organization. I liked going to church as a child. I loved singing at church I loved teaching in church.

And as I mentioned growing up in this, really dominant religious culture It was so comfortable and so fun to be part of what I felt like everyone I knew was part of.

As I’ve grown up and as I’ve got moved away and had a diversity of experiences and lived among different people and myself is just have just become older and my understanding has changed and progressed and grown and expanded, I have found that the spiritual traditions and the religious practices that I grew up with formed a really beautiful scaffolding and a floor, a foundation of understanding how to communicate with the divine.

I became really comfortable asking questions and receiving answers, understanding what holiness feels like to me, what sacredness feels like to me. And using the gifts of discernment of, allowing myself to trust the answers that I’m receiving the personal revelation and intuition that I can receive in my life that I was taught at church, how to ask questions and how to receive answers that all formed such a beautiful. scaffolding, and foundation for the beginning of what has now become a more expansive spirituality.

They taught me to ask questions, then the answers led me beyond the doors of the chapel.

I laughed while talking to a friend last year about how I learned so well to listen and trust in church that when it came time to seek spirituality beyond the container of the religion of my youth, I knew how to understand that feeling that led me out the door.

That told me that the ceiling that I kept bumping into and the truths that didn’t feel true to me that were held as sacred within the doctrines of the religion that I grew up with when I could recognize that those things felt untrue and that the spirituality that I desired was more expansive than the container that I had grown up with.

The spiritual practices and doctrines that I grew up with taught me to be a spiritual person taught me to have a personal relationship with the divine and the divine invited me to ask questions and receive personal answers. And it’s been through that process that the next right step for me in my personal spiritual journey was outside of the container of Mormonism.

More than One Way

A few months ago, previously Mormon podcaster and meditation host Brooke Snow shared a podcast called “There is More Than One Way to the Tree.“

I love this episode. In her show, it’s episode 150, and she talks about a story within the Book of Mormon. where Lehi, who’s one of the prophets of the Book of Mormon, is led by an angel in a vision to wander in this spacious field. And at first, he’s in darkness, and then he’s able to see this beautiful tree understood and explained later in the story as the Tree of Life.

And he comes to the tree, but he, in that process, sees other people, hundreds of people around, some are in the field, some are along this narrow pathway that has an iron rod. Leading them to the tree. Some are in a river; some are across floating in a building. There are all sorts of people going on in this vision.

And Brooke recognizes and shares in this podcast that it was a beautiful spiritual awakening for her to understand that Lehi doesn’t take the pathway to the tree. That he comes a different way. And that there are lots of different ways to get to the tree. I resonate so much with this example of so many different pathways leading to God, leading to goodness, leading to love.

And they’re not all straight and narrow. They’re not all tiny. You don’t have to hold on to a rod, necessarily. And you can! A lot of people are comfortable on one pathway versus another.

Expansive Spirituality feels like an Opening to Uncertainty

Expansive spirituality for me has felt like an opening to uncertainty, an opening to uncertainty. Non-judgment to allowing and encouraging other people to trust their own relationship with the divine, their own ability to determine what is aligned for them for them to realize the benefits of spirituality.

In 2008, I graduated with a Bachelor of Nursing and started working with a specialty in diabetes education. One of my real focuses in my work was the science of nutrition and how to eat in a way that benefited our bodies, our communities, and was sustainable for the environment. I started reading about the difference between biodiverse farms and industrial farming promoting monocrops.

Now there are benefits to monocrops, and in fact most of America’s industrial agriculture has now turned to monocropping, which is raising an entire farm of the same type of crop. This means that there is consistency, high yield, and an ease. An ease because everything gets the same amount of water, the same amount of fertilizer, the same amount of pesticide.

It seems like a really good idea for a while, and then some problems begin to arise, which is that the soil becomes depleted of nutrients. There are more fixes that are needed. You need to start adding more pesticide. You need to start adding more fertilizer. The land itself begins to deteriorate. The plants and insects and birds and mammals are not able to support each other in a way that they were historically evolved to do, and so these mono Farms become barren.

The benefits of diversity

Contrast that to a visit in Costa Rica a few years after I graduated. I’ve been many times to Costa Rica. It’s one of my favorite places. And on this visit, I toured an organic cocoa farm. Cacao plant is a fruit. If you haven’t seen it, it’s cool. They grow these yellowish orange pods out of the trunks of cacao trees.

You would never have guessed that this was a cacao farm. driving up to it. It looked like a jungle. And as we wandered through with the farmer, he was pointing out the cacao trees that were growing in harmony with dozens of other types of fruits and vegetables and flowers. The rainforest was home to myriad animals, birds, and insects.

He showed us how the cacao grew better when it was under the shade coverage of banana or coconut trees, and how the ground cover of floral and mosses Enabled the mulch underneath the cacao plants, then the soil to retain nutrients, how the, they didn’t use insecticides or herbicides because the insects were played a key role in turning up the soil in pollinating the different fruits and trees.

He pointed out these amazing leafcutter ants. I’m sure you’ve seen them, even like the beginning scene of Lion King has these leafcutter ants marching along a branch. Tree cutter ants are so interesting, if you ever need like a deep dive into just like a fascinating insect. They churn up. They cut apart leaves and contribute to the ability of the rainforest to mulch and renew itself.

They take those little leaves down into their hives, their underground tunnel systems, where they use them to chew up and use them as fuel to grow mushrooms. They’re growing fungi under the ground and the juice of the mushrooms is the food that they Eat to continue to grow and to have colonies.

It’s fascinating. In addition, they must have a sterile environment for those mushrooms to grow underground with the leaves that they bring in. And their saliva has antibacterial properties, the, to keep a sterile environment underneath their tunnels. So, scientists are, researching how to replicate some of the antibacterial molecules in leaf cutter, ant saliva to help with healing human diseases. So fascinating.

All these pieces, every piece of that environment contributes to the benefit of the whole. They can’t survive on a monocrop. It can’t work to have everyone doing the same thing and being the same way and performing the same rituals and roles. Diversity is key to sustainability.

I feel closest to God in nature.

I’ve always felt the closest to God in nature. Growing up in Utah, I spent a lot of time outdoors. And I remember in high school, I only had a half day of classes my senior year because I had done early morning religious class. I got credit for that. And so then by the time I was a senior, I’d fulfilled my credits early, basically, and I would spend the latter half of my day hiking.

I would leave school, drive my car up Mill Creek Canyon, which was just, a half mile from where I went to high school, and I would hike this canyon. And one of my favorite practices was to hike along a trail and then find an outcropping of rock in the sunshine, and I would go sit on the rock and pray out loud. Speak to the heavens.

I would look around at the beauty of nature, these incredible vistas and the trees and the birds and the plants and the sunshine on my face and feel connected to God, feel connected to the earth, feel connected to my own divinity. I’ve always marveled at the diversity of creation.

The way the natural world is made up of so many interesting things and how we all play a part.

Creativity benefits from Diversity

When I was studying for my master’s degree last year, my thesis was about the benefits of everyday creativity. I read hundreds of pages about the science of creativity. And it reminded me again of how important Diversity of thought and behavior and experience is the most creative ideas come from groups made up of the most different types of people.

When a company brings in people from all different departments to solve a problem that faces one department, they’re much more likely to come to a creative solution than if the people who are quote unquote specialized are the only ones solving the problem. Bringing different backgrounds and worldviews and specialties and mindsets Is the magic in creating innovative, useful, and society changing art and technology.

And I believe spirituality too is a unique process that has many different viewpoints, beliefs, and meanings. It can be right for you to worship within the container of a specific organization. And it can be right to worship with spiritual practices and rituals and understandings outside of that container as well.

There’s room for both.

Mine has been a conscious unwinding and deliberate dissociation from the organized religious community of my upbringing. My spiritual expansion and transition have echoed the growth and progress of my adult learning and differentiation. Consciously choosing, with intention to no longer participate in the religion that I grew up in, was the next right step for me towards alignment with my personal values.

My deeply held sincere beliefs led me away from the structure, guidelines, and hierarchy of Mormonism. This was a conscious pathway, not easier, but more meaningful and more truthful for me.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout is having a conversation with her dad about a case that he’s taken up that the community is not happy about.

And she says, “Atticus, you must be wrong.”

“How’s that?” He answers.

“Most folks seem to think they’re right and you’re wrong.”

“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions, said Atticus. But before I can live with other folks, I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Expansive spirituality for me has felt like spiritual rituals and valued, aligned choices, deep faith, and purpose, and meaning that expands beyond the walls of a particular religious container.

That’s not to say that I haven’t participated in and attended some churches here and there. Like I said, I’ve always liked church. I’ve liked going to church and I love the community and participation of church. There’s a non-denominational Christian church. Nearby me in Richmond that a couple of my friends attend that I have participated in a few times and found to be interesting and uplifting.

I love the way that the pastor has shared what feels like to me core religious gospel principles and stories and truths and invitations rather than A set of reinforcing of dogma and practices and a particular set of guidelines. I think part of that has to do with being non-denominational that there isn’t so much of the structure of, hyper-focused on what people eat and where and do and say, and how they do it.

Just being good people ultimately is what the focus is on. I also have a good friend here in Richmond who is a new praise leader. So, like the choir director or the band leader for the church that she attends. And I’ve toyed with the idea of joining the band. There’s an actual band because I love to sing.

I love to sing. I love to sing praise songs and hymns and singing. I sang my whole life, I sang in the church choir, I sang in the school choir, I sang solos in sacrament meeting, and singing has always felt like a way that I love to praise, and it will be interesting, maybe I’ll join and do some singing in church, we’ll see.

Are you experiencing an unwinding of faith?

I want to call out for those who are listening who are experiencing some sort of unwinding of faith whether a lot of times that can be called a faith crisis I’ve preferred the term faith expansion or faith transition that can be uncomfortable the process of unwinding critical thinking questioning determining what feels right?

What doesn’t feel right? What do I do about everything that comes along with that, particularly in high demand religions and religions that entangle themselves into every part of your lifestyle? That’s a lot of unwinding. It’s a lot of new choices. And I want to acknowledge that process can be extremely taxing.

It can be emotional. It can be difficult. I waded through that for a decade from 2011 when Dave and I first sat down and because of some things that were happening politically within the church, asked ourselves, is this a place that we want to participate? Is this a place that we want to continue attending with our family?

Ultimately decided yes for now. And we came to that, that fork in the road several times. Over the last decade of, things happening that disrupted our understanding of truth and that flew in the face of what we believed.

It’s not easy, though, and here in Richmond, it has been easier for me to not participate and not identify with a particular religion because my community is not built of religion and hasn’t been and maybe that’s part of why the unwinding happened here in its completion because I have great neighbors my friends are made up of people from some from church, but also from school and from my kids, friends, moms and from my gym where I find so much community and so many like-minded people and my book club that is just made up of an incredibly diverse religiously and culturally diverse set of women.

Who are mutually engaged in loving and caring for one another and holding space for difficult conversations about things that are going on in our lives and supporting one another in a really incredible way that being able to bridge the gap of that transition out of religion, if that’s something that you’re in the middle of right now with community with finding spaces where you can Be whole and be yourself and be loved and accepted as your whole self without hiding pieces that feel uncomfortable to other people. That becomes helpful.

I maintain a positive relationship with the church and members.

I also want to share that I have a positive relationship in general with the church that I grew up in. I have many friends, many family members who are active participants in Mormonism, and I support them, and I love them. I love the process of learning to form relationships across divides.

I think that’s something that we’re as a culture and a community are having a hard time with these days loving and accepting and being friends with and supporting people who don’t align with us politically, spiritually culturally being able to recognize the humanity and goodness within individuals and loving people for being people hoping for that same love and acceptance and not judgment in return.

One of my favorite quotes from Deepak Chopra is “Use moral values to uplift others rather than to judge them.“

I think that’s an important measure of whether your so-called religiosity or spirituality. Is it love-centered are you using your values and your viewpoint to uplift others or to judge them, manipulate them and belittle them?

It feels so much better to meet people where they are with love and acceptance and support. It feels good, also, to meet myself in a place with love and acceptance and support and recognition that I can trust myself.

That when enough things don’t feel right that I can trust myself to endure the unknown and the uncertainty of what it looks like outside of a structure that contained me for over 30 years, and I’m so happy to share that spirituality outside of religion for me has felt beautiful, and fulfilling, and satisfying, and whole.

I’ll share in a few minutes about some of the things that I think contribute to that.

First, you must learn desire.

Hold its fruit in your hands.

Unmarry it from the hunger

to be held, to be wanted,

to be called from the

streets like the family dog.

You are not a good girl.

You are not somebody’s

otherness.

This is not a dress rehearsal

before a better kind of life.

Pick up your heavy burdens

and leave them at the gate.

I will hold the door for you.

Take Back a Life by Kate Baer

Spirituality is different from Religion

As I mentioned earlier, spirituality is not made up of a specific set of guidelines, dogmas, doctrines, and rituals. Where religion is, and one of the things that can feel uncomfortable Moving into an expansive spirituality outside of religion and even within religion. I think this applies having some personal spiritual rites and rituals that you Participate in to connect to spirituality is so helpful.

So even though I don’t regularly attend church. I do regularly engage in spiritual practices, and I want to share what some of those are I’ve talked with so many women friends about You know exiting religious structure, not only the Mormon church, but I have friends who’ve left Catholicism and who’ve left orthodoxy and all sorts of different things.

The disorientation that comes with having abided a certain set of regulations, rules, guidelines, rituals, having a pathway determined for you by the religion itself and the structure of that, it can be really disorienting to leave that. And it’s been helpful for me to have some specific Rituals that I engage in outside of a container of religion.

Some of my Personal Spiritual Rituals

One of them is time spent in nature. And I mentioned that has been part of my own personal spiritual practice since I was a child. Within the confines of Mormonism. One of the ways that I experienced spiritual connection was through nature. That’s been a way that I’ve continued to engage in spirituality outside of religion.

Going to church in the wilderness. Taking myself to church on a hike, on a mountaintop, at a lake. Watching a sunrise or a sunset.

Catherine Knight Sontag describes this beautifully in her book The Mother Tree, discovering the love and wisdom of our Divine Mother. She says, “Our breathing changes, our attention is restored. We feel rejuvenated, soothed in the rhythm of waves, wind, and birdsong. We encounter the mysterious offerings of attentiveness to creation, epiphany, revelation, transcendence, that have no substitute. By doing so, we commune in ways that allow for the exploration of our internal landscapes, which has the potential to transform our ways of engaging with each other.”

Richard Rohr, American Franciscan priest and writer, speaks poignantly of the divine revealed by our attentiveness to the outer world and to our inner world. “We come to God through things as they are. Spirituality is about sinking back into the source of everything. We’re already there, but we have too little practice seeing ourselves there. God, in Christ, is in all, and through all, and with all.”

Spending time in nature has been, and continues to be, one of my favorites intentional spiritual practices, marveling at the creation, my connectedness to the divine, the nature that is within me, praying in nature have all been rituals that I continue to practice with love in expansive spirituality.

Reading Spiritual Text

Next, intentionally reading spiritual text. Within religion, this often has a canonized set of scriptures, or a particular list of books that would be, considered religious. For me, this is anything that connects me to Meaning, to purpose, to something greater than myself. It looks a lot like reading books of poetry, returning to poets who I love, searching for new poetry, spending time in the words and then also in the contemplation of the words and the making connections of what this means for me, how I am changed by it.

Poetry feels like scripture. I also love and appreciate traditional spiritual texts and add those to my readings as well.

Intentional Service and Kindness

Intentional service and kindness feel like a spiritual practice that I am recognizing outside of religion. Not only within the confines of, this is how to do it or when or what, the day of the week or the list that I’m given, but how can I be of service to my friends, to my neighbors, to my community, and stepping into that as a part of my devotion feels impactful for me.

Growing a Garden

Growing a garden, spending time in my garden feels like faith, the true, metaphor of planting seeds and watching them grow and watering them and tending them that we find metaphors of growing all throughout traditional scriptures, the Bible and the Book of Mormon for those who have grown up Mormon and Doing that in real time feels like a spiritual practice in faith, in hope.

I’ve also had some private, more personal spiritual rituals that have felt important to me.

We can design and choose and enact personal spiritual rites and rituals in our lives.

Last summer, I was talking to a friend. From school. One of my classmates who had grown up Orthodox, Protestant, and in her 40s had come out as gay and is now married to a woman, and we were talking about the, some of the untangling that happens even, as a full adult, untangling yourself from the belief systems that you grew up with that, in her case, not only misalign with her identity, but directly contradict her identity that she was expressing, still feeling uncertain or ashamed, even though she was comfortable with her sexual identity and with having come out as gay and loving her relationship and her family.

That she was occasionally still, flares would come up of what she had learned at church about, homophobia and gay being wrong and We talked about how there are so many rites and rituals to initiate yourself into a particular religion and for the maintenance of the religion.

In Mormonism, you’re baptized and confirmed a member of the church, you have a weekly ritual of taking the sacrament at church, in addition to other rituals and rites that happen, and there are similar things in her religion, and we started a conversation about what does it look like to exit religion? and maintains virtuality, you almost need to start building some of those rituals outside of religion as well.

A religious exit ritual?

And we talked about what might it look like to have an exit ritual, the initiation into the church membership in both of our experiences had been baptism. What does it look like to have a ritual for an exit, an intentional and grateful, loving exit from the religion that you had grown up in and so we were able to talk about some ideas for that. It’s been interesting to consider what if you know if I’m the creator of this of my own spiritual pathway Which we all are within or without a religion We are those who experience our own spirituality like That is the way that it has to be because those things are individual.

What do I want my rites and rituals of spirituality to be for myself, and how do I build those into my life?

Thomas McConkie, who is he grew up Mormon, and then he was a Zen Buddhist monk for 30 years, and he now is, again, practicing Mormonism. And lives and teaches in the intersection of meditation and Buddhism and Mormonism.

I love a quote that he shares that what we pay attention to is ultimately what we worship. That quote has resonated with me in my own spiritual expansion. My goal is to be moving from love instead of fear, maintaining hope and peace and ease, living in faith and uncertainty. And loving and embracing what feels true for me, outside of religion, for now.

A wound in my roots

from a zealous hoe,

the quick demise of friendly weeds.

A strange new stretching

with the flow of nourishment

from last year’s leaves.

Sun and rain by turn appear,

growing season must be here.

The Growing Season by Carol Lynn Pearson.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for tuning in today and I hope that this episode on expansive spirituality has felt meaningful for you in one way or another, and that an update on my personal spiritual journey can feel resonant to you, whether you’re in one of your own, or if people. who have experienced a spiritual transition, expansion, and want to know a little bit more about where they are or how it might feel for them.

Hopefully this episode has been meaningful. I will be back next week, same time, same place. I hope that you have a wonderful week, and I will chat with you again then.