Oops. I found Jesus.
Disclaimer & Context: My March goal is to write in my blog around 5x a week. The goal of this challenge is to work on my conversion process of idea to blog. So it’s important you and I both know I’m not specifically trying to make these posts 100% true, educational, or helpful to you at all. If it’s any of that: frosting.
Oops. I didn’t mean to, but I found him yesterday but it turns out I got his name wrong. It was actually me. I’ve heard this from ex-Christians a lot of times over the years that I’ve been an activist in the ex-Christian community, that folks reflect back on their spiritual experiences in church and evaluate what really happened and they begin to understand that the experience was them all along. Now, I knew that idea. I mean, I’m not Christian anymore, so obviously I must have handled the cognitive dissonance of my spiritual experiences as a Christian, right? Nah, not really. I think what I did, actually, was just write myself as deluded, hyperimaginative, under the influence of mass, normalized & traditional spiritual hysteria. Honestly, I haven’t really actively and consciously processed what happened to my mind during my time as a Christian. I certainly have attacked it from an intellectual and traumatic perspective, but not from a spiritual one (meaning, the relationship of you with your experienced Self).
A lot of what I experienced within the context of Christianity has been blocked out from my knowing and feeling all these years. It’s absolutely mind-boggling, though, to find out that it’s all still in there and I’m uncovering it as I’m doing this deep dive into my unconscious/subconscious/shadows, whatever the hell you want to call this work.
A couple of days ago, I was listening to random playlists on Spotify. I’ve been working on a playlist of songs that lyrically inspire my self-discovery. If you want access to the playlist, here it is. I started this playlist while driving back home to Minnesota from Alabama. I was really feeling proud of all the discoveries and insights and growth I experienced from the trip and got the idea to create a playlist out of songs that really hit home for what I’m going through right now. So that list started accumulating as I drove all those hours. Back at home, I remembered how much I enjoyed the music sampler game and so I’ve been continuing the activity of searching for and listening to random songs, seeking out those that reflect what I’m going through.
In all this searching, I came across some songs that really, really vibed for me,… but in a different way that these songs about self-discovery. I found songs that reminded me of the Christian praise & worship songs of my past. I’d come across songs like this in the past, but usually through my meditative practice, meaning they had Hindu or Buddhist jargon woven into them. But the songs I was finding were jargon-free, straight-up language about being a human being with a goey brain center. And oh my, they moved me.
Songs about love being the strongest medicine, about blooming as a person once you make peace with yourself, about getting the courage to change, about the heart-warming awe evoked from the endlessness of the universe, and so much more. As I listened to these, I felt a familiar feeling coming up in my mind and body.
I’ve felt this feeling since leaving Christianity. But every time I do, … it’s like I hold my breath to survive the wave of it. I can sense when it happens. It was something I felt as a Christian, particularly when in a process we referred to as “connecting with god” or “being in communion with god” or whatever. Back then, I had less trauma with religion (it was only just starting) and so in praise & worship situations, my mind was more willing to let go and feel that feeling underneath all the thoughts. That feeling of safety, of peace, of centeredness, of groundedness, … But the thing was, I was told that was someone outside of me. And that I needed to have not offended him in order to connect like that to him. If I had done something he didn’t approve of, I wasn’t allowed to access it.
So let’s add this all together: I developed ADHD as an infant due to factors I’ve outlined in another blog post. I developed codependency throughout my childhood due to my family system as well as that being almost a guaranteed thing when you have ADHD. I got involved in a fundamentalist form of religion that appropriated my own “soul experience” and pushed it out into the ether saying I had to behave in order to access it. I don’t care if you don’t believe me or don’t relate, but I have not been a person for 39 years. That’s really how I feel about it. I have been absolutely clouded in my mind due to all of this.
It is painfully, painfully, painfully obvious to me now that this trauma that I’ve been trying to minimize for decades was actually much more dangerous and damaging to my full human expression and knowing than I ever could have imagined. Wrapping my head around this has done a LOT to silence voices of shame and should.
Anyways, trying to get back to my main thread about finding Jesus. Like I said, that basic human quality of having your own inner peace within yourself was outsourced to a god and then my experiences of trying to connect with that inner peace were so traumatic and abusive narratively that my brain shut it all down. I haven’t really been able to connect with myself or my inner quiet this entire time. I have been incessantly thinking for decades. Thinking, worrying, criticizing, being jaded and cynical were very protective for me as well as killed a lot of time whilst I worked my way towards finding myself some decades later.
Did you know that it’s possible to not think and just be? And the Being isn’t absent of all things. It’s FULL… but of peace. Just quiet. Nothing to worry about. Just… being. Just existing. Just realizing that the camera is LIVE and this is the experience I’ve been looking for. The joy of just being alive and being there for it.
This thought-free BEING is something I’ve been accessing the last couple of days and it’s been really scary. It tastes a WHOLE lot like my Jesus experience. It is like I had a fever dream for a decade in my teen’s and ever since then, I’ve been repressing the memory and vividness of it, blaming myself for being delusional and dreaming it all up. But listening to these songs that remind me of Praise & Worship songs for Christians, evoked the same kind of euphoria that I felt as a Christian. But… the words aren’t inherently Christian nor supernatural. They’re very accessible and could be sung while someone just feels an appreciation for the simple fact of being alive and having senses and awareness. And yet, Jesus was there in the feeling. Why? Because that’s the feeling I was told was Jesus all those years ago. That feeling that I had barricaded within myself. That union and clearing that I had subconsciously said to myself is absolutely buffooneries as I continued to move through my life as hyper-protected psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. And of course I did. It makes sense now.
But now I’ve found Jesus. Or put more accurately, I’ve found the peace and joy of just being a human. Yes, it does feel “spiritual”… whatever that word means. It’s an experience we’re not used to discussing and normalizing within American culture. However, I am still not convinced it needs to be defined in supernatural terms definitively. I’m still very interested in curiously exploring it and not naming it or ascribing meaning and innate structure to it. I think that’s where religions perhaps go wrong. I’d like religions better if they all had disclaimers that said, “Yeah, I dunno, this is the metaphor we’ve come up for what we’re experiencing, but it’s just a placeholder for us to process life through. Pop in if you resonate with this way of describing what you’re experiencing”.
Backing out of viewing this within the spiritual realm, this reminds me of the work involved in recovering from codependency. And let’s be honest, the framework evangelicals have for their relationship with god (and their spouses, to be honest) is embarrassingly and unapologetically codependent. Yesterday I was on a Zoom call about “shadow work” and it was a bit woo’y at some parts. However, I’ve been feeling my “spiritual” boundaries lock into a healthier place in my mind, which allowed me to play along with what the group was doing, unconcerned that they were going to be able to spiritually abuse me, even if they tried, yet allowing myself to fully let go and allow my mind to do the things they were asking it to do,… this time without 3 layers of cynicism, fear, and mockery. And I was able to experience that state of mind that isn’t a normal day-to-day state of mind. Something very different from that. I won’t say it’s a higher consciousness, because I don’t know what that means. But it definitely clears out the mess of the thought stream and helps you connect to the enduring peace and timelessness underneath it. What that is? I dunno. But I’m very much OK accessing it without needing to understand it.
It is very odd to get back in touch with this feeling I thought was part of a fever dream so long ago. Like finding out your imaginary friend from childhood was indeed real. Yet it’s even better, but it’s not someone outside of me. It was me. It is me. It is us.
More to come on this, I’m sure. It’s all a working document. I stand by NOTHING that I have said above. :)
