When I'm not feeling happy or joyful

One of the ways that my OCD can be really tricky is by manipulating my brain's response to logic. I know, logically, that I don't need to wash my hands over and over to be "clean." I know, logically, that I don't need to reassure myself every five minutes that I am okay. There are many facts that my brain knows, that "normal" people accept at face value, but which somehow become meaningless to me when I actually have to use this knowledge to combat the obstacles of everyday life. Even when the logical part of myself recognizes that I am behaving totally irrationally, my mind, my being, can't seem to trust the safety net that my brain is trying to provide for me.

So in the back of my mind, I always knew that the initial euphoria that I experienced when I actually started to reach a positive place in my spiritual journey wouldn't last. Even though I have this exciting new perspective on life that has taught me that I can choose love over fear, that I can be simply be happy to live instead of scared of dying, it's easier said than done. I know that suffering is a part of life. I also know that pain is temporary. When I'm able to feel happy, I'm grateful. I embrace the feeling, especially these days! But there's still a part of me that is dead and rotting inside.

It's not so much the OCD this time, at least not specifically. Sure, there are plenty of areas that I still need to work on. But overall, I can clearly see the improvements that I've made and I'm proud of that. Many stupid little things that I would panic over a year ago hardly bother me at all now. At the same time, I've noticed a dark cloud hanging over me. My nightmares have been a major red flag. The longer they go on, the more fatigued I feel. I feel empty. Apathetic. I feel like I'm going into some sort of mental hibernation because the pain of living has beaten me down.

I want to enjoy life. There are so many things that I have to be happy about and to look forward to. But I'm still scared because I feel myself withdrawing. It doesn't surprise me at all that a major theme of my nightmares is an inability to communicate. That's how I feel every day when I am awake. I am constantly frustrated because I can't seem to navigate this world as smoothly as most people can. I want to be happy with being me, but how do I do that when "me" is all wrong here? 

Good and evil; love and fear

Not surprisingly, acknowledging that there may be some sort of spiritual realm that we return to between lifetimes has prompted me to start learning everything that I can about this place. I have always been fascinated by accounts of near-death experiences, and every time I encounter a new story I eagerly study it for clues. What has always been interesting to me is that most of the time, the person reports a positive experience, which they often associate with heaven. I've read some stories about people who claim to have been to hell, and while I'm not necessarily skeptical, I think there's something more to these experiences than the scare tactic that hell is used as in the Christian religion.

I grew up absolutely terrified of spending eternity in hell. I know that the idea of Jesus and redemption is supposed to provide comfort, but for me it was just the opposite. The fact that I couldn't feel anything but doubt just convinced me that I wasn't trying hard enough, and the truth is, my heart really wasn't into it. I learned the Bible stories, and the memory verses, and the worship songs, but I felt absolutely zero connection to "God" or Jesus. Keep in mind, one of the ways that OCD affects my thinking is by distorting my perception to only see things in black and white. The only thing that I was sure of was that Christianity didn't feel right to me. Knowing this, my mind decided that there were only two logical paths that I could take: Either I could "fake it" and devote my life to a lifestyle that felt completely wrong to me, in hopes that I could earn a pass into heaven on effort, or I could just say fuck it and at least enjoy life before going to hell. Even though I eventually went with option B, I've never been fully at peace with my decision until now, because for all of these years I've been carrying the burden of this fear and worry. And you know what? That's what I think the concept of hell was originally referring to: all of the guilt and anxiety that you lose yourself in when you aren't living in the present.

So how does this relate to the "good versus evil" theme that is typically characteristic of religion? It is undeniable that people are capable of doing terrible, terrible things. However, contrary to the party line that I was taught in church, I do not believe that we are all tainted by "original sin." (I want to devote a whole entry to this later, but I actually think the Adam and Eve story was intended to teach a much different lesson). Staying on track, however, I believe that all souls are inherently good. The reason that we do bad things is not because we are "evil," but because we are reacting to life's curveballs out of fear, rather than love. This isn't always conscious- sometimes we accumulate scars from past lives or even earlier in this lifetime that are too deep to overcome right away- but ultimately, we are all the same. We will all return to the same place. It may take some souls longer than other to complete their spiritual journey, but it's not a race. There's no clock. The only "hell" that we need to worry about is the negative energy that we attract when we continue to feed into our fear.

And that's what I wanted to point out in a previous entry when I referred to souls who have been branded as the worst of the worst; those who have committed crimes so heinous that it is difficult to see even a shred of good in their existence. Let me be clear: I do not believe that we all get a free pass to behave however we want just because there's no one standing at a set of pearly gates to admit or deny us entry into heaven. We absolutely are expected to take responsibility for our wrongdoings by working through the negative karma that we create with our own negative energy, whether we manage to accomplish this task in this lifetime or another. However, I think that some souls simply get lost in their own despair. They let their fear control them, and they do terrible things which continues to generate negative karma. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it is these souls who are responsible for much of the unfriendly paranormal activity that is reported around the globe. These reports are too widespread to ignore, even though it's often easier to turn a blind eye to supernatural phenomena that we can't understand. My theory is that while most souls are capable of accepting death as a natural part of life, others cling to the physical world so fiercely that they become trapped as entities that we would probably refer to as ghosts or demons. I don't believe that this is a permanent state of existence, but rather the spiritual version of "learning your lesson the hard way." These souls will return to their spiritual "home" eventually, but first, they must face the consequences of the choices that they have made.

This is where I think Jesus fits in. The Christian church taught me that Jesus was the son of God, sent to earth to save humanity from their sins. As the story goes, by agreeing to take on our sins and then dying on the cross, Jesus gave us a chance to get into heaven, as long as we choose to accept this version of the truth and worship the Christian God. The influence of the church is pretty obvious here- after all, it's much easier to control a large population of people when they are all taught to believe the exact the same things about human spirituality and abide by the same set of rules. I absolutely believe that Jesus existed; history tells us at least that much. However, a lot of language and terminology that is used in the Bible (which you have to remember, has been heavily edited and translated) is hard to decipher and as a result, easily misinterpreted. This entry is getting kind of long so I'm going to save my detailed discussion of soul age for later, but I believe that Jesus was a more highly evolved spiritual being who chose to visit the hurting physical world in human form because the earth was becoming engulfed in negative energy. By sharing his message of love and reminding us of who we truly are as souls, his purpose here was to "clean up" all of the negative karma that humanity had accumulated. This is still just a sketchy theory at this point that I want to study further, but maybe as a more evolved soul, Jesus had the ability to take on the bulk of this negative energy and work through it more efficiently, which freed mankind to embrace the love and joy that is a crucial part of our spiritual identity.

Break time- I hear a thunderstorm brewing and I'm getting happily distracted by the rapidly darkening sky!

-L

What happens after we die?

This is a question that has been on my mind for as long as I can remember, and which continues to baffle me because it's obviously impossible for me or anyone else to definitively know the answer. However, my view on the afterlife has changed drastically now that I've given myself permission to think about it free from the confines of my Baptist upbringing. Accepting the concepts of reincarnation and past lives has truly been eye-opening to me because it has given me an entirely new perspective on... well everything, really. First and foremost, it has allowed me to get closer to the root of my OCD, which is why I started looking for answers in the first place. I had reached a point in my therapy where I realized that many of my health problems, both physical and mental, were a red flag for repressed trauma, and my research on the topic has helped me get a better understanding of where my OCD symptoms might be coming from.

I read an incredible book about past lives, Reincarnation: Past Lives and the Akashic Records by Lois J. Wetzel, that was full of fascinating case studies from the author's work giving past life readings. Note: there is a difference between a "past life regression" and a "past life reading." With a past life regression, you are hypnotized and experience the past life yourself, as if it was actually happening. When you get a past life reading, you allow someone else to access these memories for you and then verbally describe them to you, which is supposed to be less traumatizing. Anyways, I really resonated with these case studies because most of them were about people who were experiencing some sort of unexplained problem in their current life, but after learning about events from previous lives, they were able to begin the healing process. As someone who suffers from a chronic mental illness, I'm really intrigued by this link between past and present. There are some definite risk factors from my current life that have undoubtedly contributed to my OCD, but I've always had the nagging feeling that there was something more to it. I've even been questioned by therapists who ask, "Are you sure there isn't some sort of trauma that you haven't addressed that could be causing all of this?" It was only my recent stay at an inpatient mental health facility that forced me to dig deeper and face my fears instead of run from them.

One reservation that I initially had about past lives and reincarnation was that if I did exist in previous lifetimes, why don't I remember any of it? I have always been intrigued by accounts of children who can remember impossibly accurate details about a past life, but that has never been my experience. I was willing to believe that others had experienced reincarnation, but it never fully occurred to me that this type of "rebirth" could actually be the answer I was looking for, and not just an unusual phenomenon. It took hitting rock bottom with my battle against OCD to open my mind up to the possibility that I could still be carrying around scars from a previous lifetime. I haven't undergone any type of hypnosis or past life therapy as of yet, but it's something I definitely plan to do in the future.

In the meantime, however, I've also been learning what I can about what happens BETWEEN lives, and how that relates to the concepts of heaven and hell. Interestingly, a few years ago I read a personal account of a person who had a near-death experience and emerged with this radical story about where she was and what she learned about life. I brushed it off because it was too "out there" for me to take seriously, but when I started to research past lives myself, I encountered stories that were way too similar to this lady's experience to ignore the connection. So with an open mind, here's what I've started to believe:

Before we came to earth, we all existed in some sort of spiritual realm. There's some physics behind this theory, but you'll have to Google that for now because my one year of physics in high school didn't really prepare me for that kind of explanation. I hope I'll get to dig into it someday. Anyways, this place is our home. It's where we came from, and where we will return to when we die. Descriptions of this spiritual plane are very similar to what most people would think of as heaven. So this, of course, directly contradicts the Christian belief that there is a "heaven" and a "hell," and you must be a believer of the Christian faith in order to gain entry into heaven. I believe that we all* (before you sputter and say but Hitler! murderers! rapists! - hang on! I'll get to that, don't worry) return to the spiritual realm after our physical death. Here we recharge, and evaluate this most recent lifetime with spiritual advisors, who are souls who have reached a later point in their spiritual journey. We participate in this process because we consciously decided to life on earth to learn a lesson, and when we finish, we will return to the spiritual plane having grown as a soul.

But wait- if we have this greater part of ourselves who has been to this supposed spiritual plane and agreed to visit earth, shouldn't we remember that? Well, think of the theme of light vs. dark (very popular in my Sunday School days!) It's definitely a useful metaphor here- we can only appreciate the light because we have also been exposed to the dark. If it was light all the time, we wouldn't fully appreciate what it meant to be in the light, because we wouldn't know that any other type of existence was possible. So that's the same sort of reason why we agreed to come here. We have to experience the suffering that comes with living in a physical world in order to fully appreciate the euphoria that is the spiritual world. And, from what I've read, we choose not to remember this decision, or anything about our spiritual existence, because it makes the human experience real.

To me...this is a huge comfort. I've lived my whole life worried that I would do something wrong that would permanently damn me to hell. I've had crazy, realistic nightmares where it seems as if I'm actually there, and I always wake up gasping for air and panicking over the state of my soul. I've felt guilt ever since leaving the church because as much as I know it was the right decision for me to make, the fear of hell is so deeply ingrained in my soul that I felt like I was walking the spiritual plank directly into flames. I even envied those who appeared to truly believe in God and everything that the Christian faith stood for, because it seemed so easy for them to slide joyfully into heaven. What I didn't realize that by giving into my anxiety and constantly living in fear, I had created a personal hell that was entirely self-inflicted. It wasn't until I began to practice mindfulness and living in the present that I was able to slowly begin extracting myself from the snare of self-doubt. It's a long process, but it's so unbelievably freeing.

OK, I know this is a cliffhanger ending but I promise there will be a "Part 2" soon. It's late for me and I can feel my eyelids shutting!

Good night, world.
-L

More about dreaming

I've been exhausted these past few days, and for several reasons. I'm still recovering from abdominal surgery, which wasn't nearly as bad as I expected, but it has taken a lot out of me. My OCD is incredibly draining as well, and I am constantly struggling with finding the right balance between pushing myself through my exposure-response therapy while also remembering to pace myself. But the most significant reason that I've been so tired recently is that I hate the dream world that I keep returning to. For all of the joy that I've been experiencing while I'm awake, I encounter the exact opposite when I am asleep. The feeling is so overwhelmingly dark that my mind's response is to avoid sleeping, even though my body knows I need it. Last night, however, I was so tired that I slept for eleven hours straight, and as I anticipated I returned once again to the exact same place.

As usual, I found myself as a patient in a mental institution. Unlike the inpatient facility that I stayed at in California, this place was bleak- more like a psych ward in an actual hospital (and yes, I do know what that's like, too). I always get the feeling that I am locked up inside many, many layers of doors, and that even if I was to find my way out of one of them, I would still be nowhere close to the outside world. Sometimes it feels like I'm being jailed, and punished as if mental illness was some sort of crime in this alternate reality. Other times I just feel completely isolated, because I don't have the ability to express my feelings to the people around me- even though in my mind, I feel sane. Either way, this feeling is eerily familiar, because my OCD really does make me a prisoner in my own mind. In my dreams, however, this sensation is exponentially magnified to the point where I can't see any hope.

In this particular dream, this hopelessness was exploited to make me even more miserable than I already was. I was told that I was being released, but I wasn't given any further details, and every time I tried to pack up, or ask about the arrangements, something would happen to get in the way. Meanwhile, I still had to put up with the day-to-day drudgery, lost in a sea of people, none of whom were my friend. There was a murder in my dream last night, and even though I wasn't the one who did it, I saw what happened. Not only was this traumatizing, but my presence at the scene also put me in danger, because while the staff was trying to grill me for details, the person who did it was threatening me so that I wouldn't give anything away. I kept silent, first and foremost to protect myself, but also because I wasn't quite sure that I should trust the people who ran this institution.

Needless to say, I woke up feeling deeply unsettled, and I can still sense a cloud hanging over me. I have so many good things that I want to write about, but I'm having a hard time shaking this gloominess off.

Past lives, personal identity, and the soul

I'm sure that it freaks a lot of people out to think about reincarnation and the possibility that you, as a soul, likely existed before your physical birth into this lifetime. Within the context of modern-day Christianity, the church teaches pretty clearly that you get one life, so you better make the most of it by accepting certain truths and following a prescribed moral code, which of course varies based on the specific denomination you belong to. It doesn't seem possible to be a Christian AND believe in reincarnation. From a more personal viewpoint, it's also difficult to accept this broader definition of the self because the "YOU" that is experiencing this lifetime right now wants to consider itself the most important element of its existence. Even though, at least for me personally, it's a comfort to believe that physical death is not the end, it's still hard to grasp the possibility that the "I" who I think of as "me" might have actually been someone else, and will possibly be someone else in the future. I'm starting to sound crazy again, but hear me out.

I've talked before about the theory that you as a soul are part of a larger consciousness. The more I turn this idea around in my mind, the more things have been starting to "click" for me. What I have cautiously started to believe is that the being who we think of as ourself only exists in this lifetime. I can reconcile this with what I've been taught in the past because in a literal sense, you really do only get to be this exact version of yourself only once. That being said, I think that when our soul returns to the spiritual world (more on that later) we rejoin the more complete being that is actually us as a soul. We still keep these pieces of our soul that have each had different experiences, which is where a lot of our personality comes from, but I don't believe that we cycle through an endless rotation of bodies with the exact same portion of our greater consciousness. Fascinatingly, from what I have read I have learned that early Christianity DID actually acknowledge reincarnation long ago, and it may have at one time been such a widely accepted truth that it was simply a given observation about life. Let me explain.

Another Biblical passage that has greater spiritual implications than the obvious lesson is found in John 9 (hey, I really was paying attention in church way back when!) To summarize, Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man, who he promptly heals as an educational demonstration of sorts. (That guy sure knew how to get creative in the classroom!) His disciples ask, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus tells them that neither of them did; but that he was born blind so that "the works of God could be seen in him." Christians often use this story as a metaphor for spiritual darkness: the blind man represents the Pharisees, who were too concerned with following Biblical law to the letter to understand the greater purpose behind the instructions they were given. Again, this really is a useful interpretation! We see this happen every day in our culture. There are people from many different religions- not just Christianity- who act hatefully towards the LGBT community based on a handful of obsolete historical laws. They care more about imposing their personal beliefs on others than demonstrating the love that we should be focusing on, instead. So already, we are being taught a valuable lesson.

But I think there's more to the story.

The knee-jerk reaction to the suggestion that this passage supports the theory of reincarnation is to zoom in too far and use its exact words to refute the claim. The church would argue that Jesus is clearly stating that people don't experience past lives, so logically this man's blindness can't have been a consequence for something that he or anyone else did in a past life. (Then they would start to talk about original sin, but more on that later). What I want to do here instead is think like a historian. I realize that many people think of the Bible as holy and I always want to be respectful of that. However, I want to point out that just like any historical document, it's seen a lot of editing since it was written. Whether or not you believe it was inspired by God, it was still recorded by man, and I think there are a lot of spiritual concepts that no human language is fully equipped to explain. It was also written a really long time ago, so the audience that it was originally intended for came from a completely different culture. All of these factors make it difficult to decipher the story's intended meaning. I mentioned before that historians believe that reincarnation was once a widely accepted belief. If we consider that this was likely the case at the time the Bible was written and put the same words in this context, maybe what Jesus was really saying here was not that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a sin committed in a past life to affect a future life, but that IN THIS CASE that's not why the guy was blind. Not convinced? Remember, Jesus also says that the man was blind so that the works of God could be seen in him. Jesus isn't trying to be a show-off, or even trying to specifically help this blind man, although of course the miracle itself is still meaningful. He is simply trying to get people's attention, and to preach love and empathy towards others. The disciples assumed that the man had somehow accumulated negative karma because it was common knowledge at the time that this was how life worked, but maybe what Jesus was trying to say was simply that for this particular man, his blindness was not karmic, but actually part of that soul's divine purpose to contribute to the gospel of love that Jesus is credited with spreading.

Just wait. It gets even better. I'm dead exhausted from all of this writing today, but I'm already excited to talk about what happens in between lives, and how that relates to karma and significant life events when I pick back up again tomorrow.

L

Dreams and their relation to "reality"

I think that one of the reasons that it's so easy to cling to organized religion is that our minds can't fully grasp the significance of life's grander meaning in relation to the soul and the universe. Religion gives us a firm set of man-made guidelines for navigating life, and it allows and sometimes even encourages us to become complacent followers rather than engaged learners. It also tends to "fill in" answers to tough questions with easy-to-swallow platitudes. While this can be comforting, I think it also gives us "spiritual blinders" that block out any concepts that we don't understand or which don't fit neatly into our chosen belief system. The result is fear of the unknown. We accept certain systems to define the physical world, such as the measurement of time and space, but a breakdown occurs when we try to relate the physical world to the spiritual world because the same science that performs so smoothly for us when we apply it to our physical reality doesn't describe our spiritual reality nearly as clearly. It's like trying to understand calculus with a first-grade textbook- we understand the basics, but we haven't even come close to learning all of the concepts that we would need to know in order to make sense of much more advanced math. That's why I became so frustrated with Christianity as I experienced it in the church- the spiritual leaders who I encountered were usually wise when it came to teaching me to love and be kind, but they didn't fully answer all of the questions that I had about paranormal activity, or life after death, or the significance of dreaming. So I was terrified of so-called ghosts and demons, because I thought they were related to Satan and hell, and I was even more scared of the afterlife, because even though the church dangled the possibility of entering heaven in front of me, it seemed more likely to me that I would make a mistake that would send me straight to a pit of fire and brimstone.

On an everyday basis, I had so many questions and thoughts about the significance of dreams, and I still do. I've always suspected that the emotions and events that come to my mind's surface when I am asleep are somehow more intense than what other people experience. In my case, because I didn't really know what that meant, or how I was supposed to deal with it, I had nightmares. I can still remember nightmares that I had at 5 years old, and then the subsequent recurring themes that danced through my slumbering consciousness growing up. I used to have a lot of nightmares about bridges; specifically falling off bridges and plummeting to my death. Now I suspect that these dreams indicate that I really might have fallen off a bridge and died in a past lifetime. I have dreams about a terrible car accident too, and those are even more vivid. I didn't know how to interpret these before- was it a premonition, or was I subconsciously afraid of being in a car? It's really comforting to me to consider that I'm simply remembering the end of a past-life, and that even if I do encounter trauma on a similar scale again, I don't have to be afraid of death.

But I also feel that dreaming is more than a twisty, familiar version of your memories that you play back in your mind while you sleep. I'm not a neuroscientist or a psychologist, but think about what sleep is. The physical signs of sleep are obvious. Your body becomes relaxed. Your breathing slows. Your eyes close, your muscles loosen, and you eventually drift away. But where does the YOU that is your soul go when your BODY is resting? I've started to consider that possibility that what you see and what you do when you are asleep is just as "real" as the world you live in when you are awake. Some people might see this as an opportunity to talk about parallel universes or alternate realities, and while I don't know a lot about those concepts yet, I'm willing to admit that our dreams may be more rooted in reality than we realize or could ever fully understand in this lifetime. Interestingly, my own experience with dreaming over the past month or two is what really forced me to face this possibility. I started to notice that I was returning to the same place every night in my dreams, but instead of repeating the same scenario over and over again, I would just pick up where I left off. It feels like I am part of an actual series of sequential events, and it is incredibly unnerving. I've actually been losing sleep because of it, so dreaming is a topic that I would really like to learn more about.

One noticeable feature of these dreams is that the overall setting is the same. There are a few different places within the same "world" that I have gone to, although the buildings that stick out to me the most are a high school that is eerily similar to my alma mater, a large, ornate hotel, and a mental institution that I am usually locked in as a patient (interesting, considering my history of mental illness in this lifetime). The circumstances that I return to are often the same as well: I'm separated from loved ones, and experiencing great emotional distress. Sometimes I'm trying to pack, but I never actually manage to leave. Other times my ability to communicate is compromised, and I'm panicking because I know that there is nothing I can do about it. There are enough similarities between this dream world and my waking reality to suggest that there is some sort of connection, but I don't think that the link can be fully explained by what we know about memories.

Mainstream science currently concedes to the existence of dreams, but it limits itself by only acknowledging the hard data, such as brain scans and quantifiable observations of sleep patterns. Details about what each person experiences while they are dreaming is unique to the soul, and it is difficult to validate these experiences when in order to record and study them we must use our limited, human frame of reference as our only guide. Of course, that's part of what makes dreams so fascinating, although I'm guessing that unlike me, most people probably brush them off relatively quickly. But think about how much of our lives we spend asleep. If you're lucky enough to get eight hours every night, that's a third of your life spent sleeping! It's clear that our bodies need the rest, but dreaming indicates that our mind is perfectly capable of keeping itself occupied in the meantime. Who's to say that we don't participate in other, similar lifetimes while we sleep?

I think this has a lot to do with how we view the relationship between our soul and our body. Once you can stop viewing them as the same thing, rather than two separate entities, it seems only logical to consider that the soul can actually exist outside of the human body. On the other hand, we know that the body does need the soul to give it life, so it stands to reason that the soul's experience is actually more "real" than that of the physical body. After all, think about the thousands of reports of near-death and out of body experiences floating around. Without getting into the differences between clinical death and biological death, this phenomenon suggests that it is possible for the soul to exit the body and then return. We usually only relate the soul's departure to death, but what if the soul actually does leave every time we sleep to go poke around somewhere else? I'll admit that sounds creepy- after all, does that mean that your sleeping body is just a soulless shell tucked in a bed? But when we return to our discussion of what the soul actually is- a fragment of a much larger consciousness- it's easier to understand how the soul could be in what we would think of as two places at once. In fact, just by living in the physical world the soul is present in more than one plane of existence. Because we are all part of a larger whole, the spiritual "self" that we experience on earth is like a deaf, blind version of who we really are. I think that by making an effort to pay attention to our dreams, we open ourselves up to the ability to absorb lessons that can help us while we are awake. I even think it's possible to work through negative karma in our dreams- that could be another reason why we experience nightmares. My theory is that by containing this energy in the mind, the soul helps avoid trauma to the physical body that might accidentally end the lifetime, while still receiving the benefit of the lesson learned.

Dreaming is also an important element of many religions. In Sunday school, I learned about Joseph, who had a dream that he and his brothers were gathering grain. First, each brother bowed to his own bundle of grain. Next, the sun, the moon, and the stars bow to Joseph himself. The story goes on to say that Joseph's brothers were so disturbed by this dream that they plotted to kill him, but even though they managed to get him thrown into jail, they were ultimately unsuccessful and he did, indeed, become an important ruler. So what does this teach us about dreams? Christian doctrine teaches us that this is a reminder to be patient and to trust God's plan. I do agree that the importance of patience is a valuable lesson, but I don't think that's the limit to the information this parable is giving us. To me, it's a flashing billboard saying: DREAMS ARE IMPORTANT! PAY ATTENTION TO THEM! One of the things that has always bothered me about studying literature is that it often feels forced to try and extract a deeper meaning from a text than what was really intended by the author, and many of the Bible studies that I attended growing up were guilty of encouraging the exact same behavior. There's a difference between reading a passage, forming an opinion or reaction, and discussing it with others for the purpose of personal growth, versus twisting the words and distorting the context to further your personal agenda. The Bible uses a lot of metaphors and parables to illustrate certain specific points, but sometimes the framework of these stories also contain clues to bigger, universal truths. Instead of accepting someone else's interpretation of the Bible and other religious texts- even if that someone is a trusted leader with useful insight- it's still important to engage in personal spiritual study. How do you know what you believe if you are just taking someone else's word for it? Allowing someone else's truth to fill in as your own is easy, but as I've already discovered, searching for your own truth is much more fulfilling.

-L

Overleaves and a clumsy, human attempt to talk about the soul

Back in my Sunday School and Youth Group days, the content of this blog would have made me cringe. Even now, I can take a pretty good guess as to how the modern-day Christian would react to theories that appear so glaringly blasphemous. And I totally get it! It's so easy to get turned off by terms like "past life," "reincarnation," or "spirituality," because they are often related to ideas that seem to directly contradict the most basic Christian doctrine. The more I learn, however, the more respect and appreciation I have for my Christian upbringing, because there is a surprising connection between what I was taught then and what I believe now. It has taken a shift in perspective for me to see it, but now that I can, it has really inspired me to revisit the Christian faith through a more universal lens, and to extract the spiritual truths from their many layers of human distortion.

That being said, I know that my ideas seem pretty radical, and that's okay with me. It takes awhile for all of this to sink in, and I'm still only beginning to explore what it means to be a soul. There were some major concepts that I had to grasp, and the first one was that what I am, what you are, what we all are, are fragments of a larger consciousness. We start out as "baby souls" and slowly, over the course of hundreds of lifetimes, evolve into a more spiritually awakened being until we eventually become part of the whole once again. This is a pretty loaded statement, so a fun way to ease yourself into this part of your personal journey is to learn about how the soul relates to personality. Most of us have taken a personality quiz at some point or another, and it's always so interesting to read the results and learn more about yourself.  But it can also be really useful to learn about the different components of your personality, also referred to as overleaves, because it can help you gain a clearer picture of what path in life will make you the happiest. The overleaves include:

• The goal: Our primary motivation in life
• The mode: How you pursue your goal
• The attitude: The reason why we do what we do
• The center: The part of our self that we get our motivation from
• The chief feature: Our blind spot

The first time that I encountered this information, I skimmed through it very quickly because I was so eager to sink my teeth into it. I thought it might be useful to go back through it now that I have given myself some time to chew on it, so that I can get to know myself better and perhaps educate an online stranger or two in the process.

So. The first overleaf, the goal, has seven different possibilities. (You'll notice that the number seven is a pretty obvious theme. I'm not a math person, but in later entries I'll try to touch on some of the ways that numbers are related to the universe. It's so incredibly fascinating!) To summarize them briefly, they are:

• Re-evaluation: Taking stock of where you are in your spiritual journey 
• Growth: Taking on more or new lessons
• Discrimination: Developing a sense of discernment
• Acceptance: Finding your place in the world
• Submission: Learning to take care of others
• Dominance: Being the one to initiate events
• Flow: Embracing life for what it is

Interestingly, each goal can generate both positive and negative personality traits. For example, I've come to believe that my goal in this lifetime is to experience personal growth. When I give my negative pole more control, I tend to come off as complicated, confusing, or self-centered, and it is easy for me to become overwhelmed and over-stimulated. On the other hand, I am also very enthusiastic and driven when I want to be, which not only keeps me going but also gives me the strength to power through life's obstacles. Knowing that my goal is growth, my objective as a soul is to use these positive traits to get it done, which will help me create positive karma.

The next overleaf, mode, also has seven possibilities, and they are:

• Reserve: You either have the ability to show restraint (positive), or you are inhibited (negative)
• Passion: You are expressive (positive) or get easily carried away (negative)
• Caution: You are careful and deliberate (positive) or controlled by your fears (negative)
• Power: Your behavior is either authoritative (positive) or oppressive (negative)
• Perseverance: You are either persistent (positive) or you settle for monotony (negative)
• Aggression: You are dynamic and lively (positive) or hostile and contentious (negative)
• Observation: You have the ability to see things clearly (positive) or you let life pass you by (negative)

Notice again that every attribute has positive and negative possibilities. This is a theme that shows up time and time again when you are learning about how the world works, especially in relation to karma. If you put positive energy out into the world, you will attract positive energy in return. If you expel negative energy, you will receive negative energy. To me, it's glaringly obvious that I am a passionate person. While it's true that I tend to let my emotions overwhelm me, that also makes me a deeply expressive and energetic person.

The "attitude" overleaf has a lot to do with how you put your life experiences into context, and there are of course seven different ways to do so:

• Stoicism: "It is what it is."
• Spiritualism: "It could be."
• Skepticism: "It might be."
• Idealisim: "It should be."
• Cynicism: "It probably isn't."
• Realism: "It probably is."
• Pragmatism: "It must be."

In this stage of my journey, I definitely think that my attitude is very spiritual in nature. I've always been very inquisitive, and now that I've started to really focus on my spiritual journey I just can't get enough. I almost feel restless because I can't process all of this new information as quickly as I'd like to, and in the meantime my sense of wonder and curiosity is boiling over. 

You are likely already familiar with your center simply because it is how you experience life every day. Are you an emotional person? A physical person? Some people operate purely on instinct, while others are more intellectual and find they need to make sense of the world. There are also people who need to constantly be on the go in order to get the most out of their life experience. Personally, I have a hard time deciding whether I behave more emotionally or intellectually, and I think that's okay because it's human nature to allow different parts of you to "take over" in response to certain situations. I know that I'm a very emotional person and as a result, my behavior can be impulsive and volatile, but when I pause and give myself the chance, I have the ability to be rational and draw from my intellectual center instead.

Finally, your chief feature is your Achille's heel; the root of your fears and the trait which gets you into trouble. It could be:

• Self-deprecation- The fear of not being good enough
• Arrogance- The fear of judgment
• Self-destruction- The fear of losing control
• Greed- The fear of not having enough
• Martyrdom- The fear of being the victim
• Impatience- The fear of missing out
• Stubbornness- The fear of change 

I think the feature that has caused me the most problems in this lifetime is my tendency to be self-destructive, and of course that includes my ongoing struggle with OCD. In therapy I have learned how a lack of control over my own life has created my need to resort to compulsive behavior. Because my parents were so strict, I grew up feeling like I was trapped in a bubble. I know that parents need to have some degree of authority over their children, but there is a difference between teaching respect versus instilling obedience. I was expected to obey my parents no matter what, even when I didn't subscribe to their fundamentalist values. Growing up in a Christian household might have been completely different if my parents had raised me lovingly rather than dutifully, but in my case the confines of an overly sheltered childhood prompted me to spin out of control as an adult. It is only recently that I've been able to pick up the pieces and look at my experience with Christianity as an early, necessary stage of my spiritual journey.

For example, in church I participated in similar exercises that were designed to teach me about myself. I was taught that each person has "spiritual gifts," such as wisdom, knowledge, or leadership. I don't see any reason why that couldn't still be true even outside the context of Christianity; and in fact it seems like a pretty useful lesson. Identifying the things that you are good at can help you develop a sense of purpose and direction, which plays a huge role in your ability to be happy. Now, the former Christian in me gets a little uncomfortable when I push the envelope and consider who I am in relation to the universe. There is a metaphor in the Bible that relates the different parts of the human body to the different roles that people play, and the lesson is supposed to be that we all have unique, but equally valuable strengths that as individuals we can use to contribute to the greater good. I agree, but I also think that this passage can be interpreted in a more reflective context to reassure us that it's okay to be proud of who you are and enjoy being yourself, because the teeny portion of energy that we are as a fragment of the universe is nonetheless a crucial one. In church, I was led to believe that I had to give up my sense of self to be a cog in a community that I didn't want to be a part of. Now, I realize that developing and celebrating my identity is critical not only to my growth as a spiritual being, but also to the creation of the masterpiece that is the universe. In fact, visualize a mandala. There are so many different components that come together to create the beauty of the figure in its entirety. We are each like one of those pieces, and the more detail that gets filled in, the more beautiful the overall picture becomes.

L

Ramblings of a crazy lady, or uncomfortable truths?

I know that obsessing over heavy topics like these makes me seem a little crazy, and with my admitted history of mental illness, it would be easy to write me off as a complete lunatic. And that's fine with me! One aspect of spirituality that has really helped me see the world from a different perspective is the realization that every single person on this planet has a unique experience, so it only makes sense that everyone is at a different, and equally valid, point in their journey. Some people just aren't interested in spiritual things, and in a way, I think that's enviable! What better way to enjoy humanity than to completely immerse yourself in the experience? Living in itself is a crucial part of a soul's spiritual journey, and you don't need to be a religious scholar to appreciate it.

On the other hand, it's possible to have a zest for life and still wonder about what happens after we take our final breath. In the past, I've avoided thinking about spirituality because it made me uncomfortable to be so clueless about the "afterlife," especially when my observations about the world around me seemed to contradict what I had been taught growing up. For so long, I not only blindly accepted the existence of heaven and hell, but I let myself believe that the ONLY way to "get into" heaven was to worship a God whose presence I couldn't feel. I worried that I couldn't feel God because I didn't have enough faith, and my anxiety only increased when I stopped attending church. Even though I had reached a point where I could see that something wasn't quite right with the narrative I had been sold, I still clung to my old fears of hell, and I couldn't understand that it was possible to be a spiritual person outside of the confines of organized religion. To me, it seemed like the church wanted me to give up who I was to be a worshipping, tithing robot, when what I really needed at the time was to develop my sense of self. It has taken me until now to realize that simply allowing myself to enjoy life isn't going to permanently bar me from entering into a happy afterlife. Losing that fear of death has freed me to truly enjoy the human experience.

The relief that I feel from this burden being lifted has also opened my eyes to the power of fear. From as early as we can remember, it seems, we encounter face-offs between forces that we commonly refer to as "good" and "evil." This theme of good versus evil is everywhere, from the "Fall of Man" story in the Christian Bible, to the latest blockbuster superhero movie. Sometimes the difference is black and white, while other situations present moral dilemmas that force us to dig deep in order to make a decision. Just looking at the world today, it's pretty obvious that many people do make bad choices, but even so, I don't believe that anyone is inherently evil. Instead, I've come to believe that we allow our behavior to create either positive or negative karma by choosing to act out of love, or to act out of fear. When we act out of fear, even unintentionally, the consequences can be disastrous. Every day we hear about people doing such horrible things to other people, which makes me question how there could possibly be a shred of good in their soul. And while I'm not saying that we shouldn't pay for our mistakes, I've started to understand that everyone has a story. I may not understand what goes on in the minds of criminals who the world perceives as sick and monstrous, but there has to be a reason that this soul has been driven to such extremes. It's also comforting to me to know that even the worst of the worst still has just as much chance as anyone else to turn around make things right; to change negative karma into positive karma.

Of course, this belief sharply diverges from the Christian position that states a person must admit they are a sinner, pronounce their belief that Jesus is the son of God, and confess their faith in Jesus as the savior of humanity. If you don't manage to do this by the time you die, even if you just happened to miss out on the story, well, you're out of luck. See you in hell. As a child, hearing about missionaries embarking on exotic adventures to save the lost souls of people from distant corners of the earth actually scared me, because I couldn't envision a God who would send a person to hell just because they happened to be born in an area of the world where no one had ever heard of Jesus. It was impossible for me to wrap my mind around the notion that these other religions were equally valid- I truly believed that Christianity was the only path to salvation. Imagine how drastically my perspective on life shifted once I was willing to accept the idea that life is a lesson, not a test. There aren't any "right" or "wrong" answers, but instead there are an infinite number of possibilities. So no matter what name you call your God, it seems obvious to me now that part of being a soul is the desire to feel a connection to something larger than oneself. The hard part is figuring out who this entity is, and who we are in relation to it.

I'm not trying to bash Christianity, either. That was the approach that I took for many years but it never made me feel any better, and I think that's because I was focusing too much on my bitterness towards the church to sort out the good things that I gained from that pulpit- crucial lessons, like the importance of being polite, and kind, and generous. How to be social and enjoy fellowship with others, and to do my best to behave morally. I will readily admit that there are many things that modern Christianity still has right. The problem is that we have started to care less about being spiritual and more about appearing spiritual. I used to think that I needed to follow a certain path, and behave a certain way, in order to enjoy the benefits of spirituality. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but historically, organized religion has been used as way to control the masses. After all, telling a population of people that they must follow a certain set of rules or they will be sent to hell is a pretty good way to keep them in line as citizens. The consequence, however, is that being dutiful becomes more valued than being spiritual, and not only is that incredibly boring, but it also sends the wrong message. For so long, I had absolutely zero interest in anything spiritual because I couldn't see what I would be getting out of it- why should I subject myself to all of these expectations that are thrown at me in church when it doesn't give me any personal fulfillment? When I shifted my perspective to consider that seeking personal fulfillment IS being spiritual, it completely changed how I viewed everything! Doing the right thing is exhilarating, not confining! In the church, I followed the rules because I was scared of being punished. Now, I try to do the right thing because I know that it will send positive energy into the world, which makes me happy! And when I inevitably make a mistake, even then I am growing. It's so much easier to face tough things when you can look forward to being stronger for having walked through it.

I have a growing list of topics that I want to write about, ranging from crazy to even crazier, so stay tuned! In the meantime, it's time to charge this laptop battery as it seems writing has once again distracted me from time passing by.

The basics, according to L

I know I said it already, but I really want to stress that I am NOT presenting this information as solid fact. I can't prove any of this- and therein lies the fascination, I guess. The only way to find out what happens after we die is to die, and I don't plan on checking out anytime soon (The good news is that I am no longer scared of death for when the time comes). This is simply a set of theories that I have started to collect in order to find my own personal truth. It's up to you as a soul to decide for yourself what you believe. That being said, I'm going to use decisive words like "does" and "is" just because it's easier, but just so I don't have to constantly reiterate this, all I'm really doing is thinking out loud and allowing the occasional online passerby to listen in.

To me, reincarnation is the most important concept that I have studied. Basically, the word reincarnation refers to the theory that the same soul can and does exist in different bodies over a series of lifetimes. When I talk about the soul, there's a quote that I saw (probably on Pinterest, ha!) that really helped me understand the difference between the soul and the body: You ARE a soul. You HAVE a body. The soul is YOU, the being who operates your physical body, who feels and loves and has hopes and fears. Personally, acknowledging the soul has helped bridge the gap between my former and current beliefs because even in the Baptist church, I was taught that "I" am more than a body. I've spent enough time lost in my thoughts to know that life is more than a physical existence. But that was where my certainty ended and my questions began. In church, I was taught that just for being alive, I was burdened with this so-called "original sin" because some naked lady accepted an apple from a talking snake. It hardly seemed fair to me that a mistake that, let's face it, doesn't really seem like that big of a deal, would doom mankind for the rest of time. Still, I accepted this Christian version of the creation story and the idea of only one path to "salvation" because it was all I ever knew. By the time I was old enough to question my parents' beliefs, Sunday School had already permanently influenced my behavior, and I rather reluctantly went through the motions of being a good Christian girl- Vacation Bible School, purity vows, youth group, weekend retreats, the whole nine yards. As much as I tried, my heart was never into it. I was taught to accept ideas that didn't make any sense on faith, and if I couldn't believe, then it was my fault for not having enough. Looking back, it's hardly a surprise that I developed OCD- I was so terrified of doing the wrong thing that I became obsessed with perfection. That's not to say that I ever achieved it, especially considering my interest in the outside world. But even though I was a pretty good kid growing up and never got into any major trouble, I was always incredibly hard on myself whenever I did something that didn't align with my parents' strict Christian values- even when I enjoyed the misdeed. My self-imposed guilt was a constant shadow over my formative years.

Buddhism, on the other hand, teaches the concept of karma. That at least I had heard of before, usually in reference to what I wished an unkind person would swiftly receive! Karma, in a nutshell, is the theory that "what goes around, comes around." I'm going to go into this in much more depth later, but the general idea is that if you do good things and expel positive energy into the universe, you will attractive positive energy in return. If you do bad things, the opposite will happen. To me, this makes so much more sense because it means that we have a chance to set things right, and to achieve personal growth. Moreover, something that has really stuck with me is the suggestion that what we think of as evil DOES NOT EXIST. Everyone is inherently "good," but in this imperfect world we are vulnerable to make decisions out of FEAR (note: NOT hate). Accepting the influence of karma has been so incredibly freeing for me because I have always been so scared of not having "enough" faith to make it past the pearly gates. Imagine my relief when I started to live based on the passion for doing the right thing, rather than the fear of doing or thinking something wrong.

I'm going to pause here because I've been writing for hours now and I'm not used to the words pouring out of me like this- even though I like to write, it usually takes me to forever to put my thoughts into words. This entry, in addition to the previous one, is the most that I've written in one sitting since college, and probably the most EVER that I've written at once for my personal fulfillment. Yet I know I still have so much to go on this long, thrilling journey- and that being said, a bite of eat probably wouldn't hurt! To my hypothetical readers, have a great evening. Try to relax and take some time for yourself this evening, even if you're a parent like me and the word "relax" has a depressingly loose definition.

Is it cheesy to end by saying "namaste?"
-L

Me + Energy Drink = New Journal: An Introduction

I’ve been truly enjoying life lately because I’ve been going through an amazing spiritual awakening. It has completely transformed my life more than I EVER thought was possible. As a result, I’ve been thirsting for knowledge with an intensity that I’ve always admired and envied in others, but have never experienced firsthand. Along the way, I have been learning so much about myself, my purpose, and what it means to be alive. I feel like as a person, I am finally blooming. I say finally because even though I am only in my twenties, I have already been through so much, especially when it comes to my health. During that dark period,  I only felt a murky sense of self that hardly felt worth fighting for. But now, I am inspired to become the best version of myself, and to live with an appreciation for the present yet also the ability to view life with a much wider perspective. By that I mean I want to fully soak in every wonderful moment, and I want to learn to recognize the inevitable suffering for the lessons that it is designed to teach, especially in terms of “the bigger picture.”

I don’t claim to know everything. I can’t even pretend to know anything, really. My only agenda here is to record the ideas that resonate with me and my thoughts on these ideas. I have more questions than I have answers, but that’s actually a good thing because my curiosity is what fuels my enthusiasm. I never want to stop learning about the universe and what it means to be a soul.

Just to provide some context, I want to share some information about myself. I grew up in a Christian (Protestant, specifically Baptist) home. My parents were very strict, and like so many people they cared more about the confines of organized religion rather than the freedom of spirituality. I want to be clear in that I have nothing but respect for people who practice the religion of their choice out of pure intentions. The people who don’t follow a list of rules, no questions asked, simply because they’ve been taught to value obedience over inquisitiveness. The people who don’t behave hatefully over differences in personal theologies, but who interact with others with love because they understand that we are each our own crucial, unique fragment of the universe. If you fit that definition, then I honestly do not care what religion you identify with, and I hope you can extend me the same courtesy. Unfortunately, my parents were not those type of people, and as a result my introduction to spirituality (in this life, at least) was very negative. I attended church with my family every week up until my teens, when I finally put my foot down. I’ve distanced myself from Christianity ever since, and it has taken me a very long time to work through the bitterness that has accompanied that decision. Even though I had managed to escape the isolation of fundamentalism that poisoned my childhood and early teens, I still carried a lot of guilt and fear that I would end up "wrong" and spend an eternity in hell. Oh, was I ever terrified of hell. Looking back, I shudder to think about how much fear I was living in as a consequence of abandoning the only religion I had ever known, without the cushion of a replacement set of beliefs. It is only recently that I have started to realize that growing up Baptist has actually had positive effects on my life, too. Slowly, I have been able to set aside the hurt long enough to think about Christianity with more objectivity. Now that I am focusing on spirituality rather than getting distracted by the ways that people have distorted the core truths of the world’s religions, I am beginning to understand how everything fits together. Actually, scratch that. I may be able to draw clear comparisons between certain beliefs, which has helped soothe my hostility towards organized religion, but I have only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding HOW it all relates. Yet now that I have started to wonder, I know that I will spend the rest of this life, and many more, trying to learn as much as I possibly can.

So what DO I believe? In a nutshell- since the whole point of this blog is to figure that out- right now I am tentatively identifying as Buddhist. I know next to nothing about Buddhism compared to what I know about Christianity, but from what I’ve learned so far, the Buddhist teachings are what resonate with me the most. I think my interest right now primarily lies in the phenomenon of past lives. Growing up, the most I was taught about reincarnation was what I learned in church- basically, that it didn’t happen- and what I learned in school- a carefully tailored blurb about Buddhism and Hinduism that I needed to know in order to pass my world history classes. I didn’t ask any questions for myself because I didn’t realize that I could.

Another thing that you should know about me is that I suffer from severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (commonly referred to as OCD). I have exhibited symptoms since childhood, but it wasn’t until my teens that these “quirks” started to significantly affect my life. Ironically, it has been my battle with this illness that has led me here. When it comes to therapy, I’ve been through the wringer. I’ve had both inpatient and outpatient treatment, undergone extensive Exposure-Response therapy, taken medication, and despite some incredibly trying times, I would consider myself “stable” for the time being. Yet the ability to function is hardly the same as a fulfilling life, so over the past six months or so I’ve been working really hard on uncovering the root of my OCD so that I can heal even further. My first thought was to pursue hypnosis therapy, because I know that I have a lot of repressed trauma that I need to work through. But as I started to research hypnosis, I began to notice mentions of past-life regression. This really piqued my interest, and I knew I had to learn more. Ever since, I have been reading as much as I can about reincarnation and the information has been absolutely mind-boggling. Just ask my husband- I haven’t been able to stop talking about it! And so here I am now, to share what I’ve learned so far in the hope that I can encourage others to ask questions for themselves, as well. I want to examine religious history (because let’s be honest, I’m a nerd) and separate the truths from the edited, polished versions of the facts that we are sold today. At the same time, I also want to learn more about myself and my purpose, not only in this life, but overall, as a soul. So settle in and pause Netflix for a few minutes, because I’m going to challenge you to think in ways you may have never considered before. And if that sounds pretentious, it’s not meant to be. In a spiritual sense, I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going! But if you’re reading this, then I am hope you are as eager as I am to figure it out.

-L