Spirituality For The Rest Of Us
Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?
Many of us come from religious traditions and backgrounds, churches and faith communities, families of doctrine and dogma. If you’re like me, you may feel like ideas of divinity and belief are in your blood, etched in your skin, a part of your makeup and DNA, a fundamental part of who you are.
But also, if you’re like me, this may not have always been a welcome association.
It’s always been easy for me to believe in something I can’t see, in good and bad ways. It’s always been natural for me to feel a connection to something beyond me. But as I grew older, it became apparent that within my faith tradition, and by proxy, my family, there were both acceptable and false ways to outwork and practice faith and belief. Some of these contradicted the way that I organically understood God and spirituality. But because I was so young, and so indoctrinated, I just did what I was told in fear of not belonging to the group. And as I grew older, so did the cognitive dissonance. My faith tradition asked more of me than what I had to give; moreover, it wanted me to denounce more of what I believed to be fundamentally true. I hit breaking point in my early 30s and left my church job and the church, and found myself out in the big wide world with (seemingly) no spiritual home.
How do you practise spirituality on your own terms? On the other side of faith deconstruction, re-orientation, or after spiritual abuse and trauma, or exhaustion and disappointment?
Are you allowed to practise your own brand of faith? Or do you have to commit to a structure of belief that already exists?
Can you find your own way? Or do you convert to someone else’s path?
Whatever it is you think you need in order to be a spiritual person, a person of faith, someone who has belief, let me tell you:
You don’t.
There are so many rules and regulations, dos and don’ts, assumptions and standards, precocious ideas and unrealistic expectations about what it is to be a spiritual person, and at this point in my life and journey, I reckon most of them are
Bullshit.
Some of the ideas and concepts out there about faith, belief, and spirituality, just seem so out of reach, out of touch, above and beyond, too high and lofty, sacrificial and separate, busy and all-consuming… it can come across like we have to give our lives to reach a place of holiness… In fact, I was directly taught that was the path to God.
It’s not.
In this series, we’re going to take some of the ideas about what it means to be a person of faith and strip them back, find some ground, re-evaluate and re-define what it means FOR YOU to have a vibrant and healthy spirituality, belief system, faith journey - whatever you like to call it.
Spirituality for the rest of us - for those of us who have lives and pay bills and experience conflict and pockets of joy and save for holidays and fight with our partners and feel inadequate at times and underrated at others, because here’s the thing: spirituality doesn’t take you away from your life, it should be the very thing that takes you right into the heart of it.
Join me this week in the App, it’s going to be fun.
Liz Milani xo
Instagram: @thepracticeco
From this week’s series titled "Spirituality for the rest of us," with a subscription in the App. Hope to see you there.
