“Through my tears I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely” is one of my favorite quotes and comes from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange (1948 – 2018).
goddess
I can remember sometime in my early teens having some sort of “epiphany” as I have called it. I was always a dreamy sort of youngster, having a tendency to “zone out” and into a sort of trance-like state where I could see, hear and imagine all sorts of things. Things happened in these states that were just as real as the things going on around me in the “real”, physical world that I paid attention to.
One day, while ruminating over whatever challenge I was having in my life at the time, I wondered why I’d been in a position to have dealt with situations that would have been difficult for anyone to cope with and a thought came to me “you were not put here to suffer”. Where did that come from? Although we sometimes went to church and I had a strong belief in what some call God, I’ve never been anything remotely like religious. I did at times try to cling to religious faith. I tried to understand religious tenets and tried to live my life according to “the rule” however, because…well, weren’t we supposed to?
I’ve always questioned who wrote these rules? Who said they were “the” rules to follow? Why do people in other parts of the world follow a different set of rules, and still have either the same issues or challenges or varying degrees of peace? Maybe religion wasn’t really the way. Through it all, I maintained my faith in God. I was 16 when I was baptized, again following the rules. By 17 I was done with church, including the church that I grew up in and still went to occasionally even if only for special events and funerals. I had realized that, while different religions have many common threads, they seem to try to get to the same place…God, Heaven, nirvana, or (if used whatever any particular religion calls the same place. What if God was within, heaven was a state of mind and nirvana was directly within reach?
Yes, I’ve had some heavy, philosophical inner dialogue with myself as a youngster, but I was never really quite like other kids and teens I grew up around. I preferred to bury myself in books, long walks and day-dreaming, rather than playing outside, jumping rope and hopscotch. I was most definitely a loner, an introvert. I found solace in being alone, thinking and introspection. I was always questioning “why”, never accepting the status quo and not typically one to go along with the crowd. It is through deep introspection that I decided that religion was not for me and that I had a deep understanding of and relationship with god. Going to church was a distraction from that. I was already connected and in touch.
By my early 20’s, I had started exploring this further. I had throughout life been having dreams while sleeping that often told the stories of things that eventually happened, dreams while awake (visions) and I had visitations, many of them. So many, in fact, that I’d just learned to accept that there were always spirits around me and I realized that I could make the conscious choice to interact and communicate. The religion I was familiar with taught me that this type of thing either wasn’t real or was evil. My intuition told me that it was normal and to accept and embrace it…my intuition.
Certainly that was a very different attitude from most I grew up with, including my immediate family. I was the odd one. I wasn’t motivated by the same things as they were. I was very different. I had a different set of beliefs. My motivation was how I could reconcile these rather esoteric thoughts and beliefs with the person that I was raised to believe I should be. I decided to get in touch with the person that I actually was, outside of my upbringing. The person or “self” that resided deep within my soul. An esoteric belief system was not necessarily practiced in my home. While I had a parent who also had some of the same experiences, thoughts and beliefs, that parent wasn’t interested in exploring it and preferred to travel the path of religion. Religion was not for me. For me, religion was a set of rules which, if used properly, could be a conduit to god, heaven, nirvana or spirituality, but true spirituality transcended religion. I was already developing a strong sense of my spiritual self.
I started consciously allowing my intuition to guide me. I started asking for more intuitive guidance, or to have the ability to be more in tune with and better able to discern what I was intuiting. I asked for more and it came, or maybe my awareness became more refined. The more I asked for clarity and discernment, the more powerful and obvious the messages became. At some point, it became challenging to remain in the physical because my thoughts and perceptions were always in the spiritual. I started realizing (not just knowing) my connection to all things and our interconnectedness with everything, really feeling and seeing it. I realized that what I was in tune with was energy.