I’ve spent the last few years rewriting all of the memos I received about myself and the world. I did this because to me, living meant suffering and I refused to accept the version of reality that had been handed to me by a fearful and disempowered culture.
I borrowed this idea of memos from the writer/activist/all round warrioress Glennon Doyle and her most recent book Untamed. The image of us being handed a stack of simplistic, unskilled and reductive memos in childhood, which we then follow unquestioningly through life is brilliant because it’s heartbreakingly true.
After living my life in a haze of emptiness, numbing and basically attempting to make life not suck so much, I began to rewrite all the rules so they fitted in with how I wanted to live. I set about to redefine everything, and I thought I had it all covered until I began to connect to God. It struck me that this was potentially the most erroneous and damaging memo of them all.
This is the memo that a lot of people got about God:
God is a man in the sky who is powerful enough to create the universe with you and everything in it.
He is to be feared.
If you do something wrong he can really mess you up, like not let you into heaven and stuff like that.
Actually you’ve already done something wrong just by being born because we’re all inherently sinful so what’s the point anyway?
However, if you go to Church and listen to what the priest tells you and repent a lot for being you, you will be allowed into heaven.
God communicated with some worthy fellows about 2000 years ago, and these fellows wrote everything God said down in one book.
You have to take everything in this book literally and trust that these men got the message right and didn’t leave anything out or add anything.
God spoke to these men and then he just stopped talking altogether. Clearly you are unworthy of being spoken to by God.
This is the memo I got as a child:
God doesn’t exist.
Science is King. Science exists to measure the universe, create some semblance of control, and disprove the existence of God.
You can’t understand science and believe in God.
However, scientists keep changing their minds about their theories. Once we all thought the earth was flat, then we thought the other planets revolved around the earth, then we all thought the atom was the smallest thing in the universe, and we still can’t explain the Big Bang properly. Everything that exists just appeared suddenly from nothing ok!
Oh and there is no life after death, so when you die it’s game over.
Life has no inherent meaning and it’s really hard so just buckle down, get on with it and make sure you get your mortgage paid off.
It’s no wonder that most of what we were told about God was completely misunderstood or rejected entirely.
So how about we start this God thing all over again?
What would happen if you opened your mind enough to allow the possibility that God exists, just in a different form to how you imagined previously?
What if we were to remove all of the damaging concepts around God and allow ourselves to actually discover divinity by going within?
You see the answers were there all along, inside of ourselves. We didn’t need to go to Church or read all the books or listen to any external authority to know divinity. You can do it all by yourself.
This is now my own personal truth about God, which will evolve most likely as I continue to evolve.
God feels like an intelligent consciousness that is the essence of everything, and thus when I feel connected to God I know I am connected to the flow of life itself. I express and God responds.
My relationship to divinity is symbiotic and is a constant movement of energy and flow.
Life is now miraculous to me and I feel like an essential part of the whole. I shift my energy, my thoughts and emotions and I watch as the world shifts around me in response.
Being a part of the divine whole means that I create my reality, and I’m learning each day to create more with flow and ease.
Sometimes God is a voice inside my head or an overwhelming feeling of love or certainty. That feeling of love is partly physical and it always brings me to tears when I feel it. It overwhelms me with pure bliss.
Sometimes God says ‘Go this way’, ‘No don’t trust him’ or ‘You got this, I’m here and I love you so much’.
Sometimes God shows me an image in my mind or a message in my dreams, which I always write down because I have understood much about myself and the world through these messages.
Each day I’m learning new ways to communicate with God and it feels like the best thing I ever discovered, or more accurately remembered.
A dear friend suggested that I ask God to communicate with me in more specific ways so the message is clearer, and so I did. The next time I sat down to consciously connect I said, “God, when I have a thought or say something that is truth, can you give me a sign in my body like a warm rush down the back of my neck?”.
So now God feels like a warm rush through my body that is akin to electrically charged goosebumps when I say something I know to be truth.
The more I connect, the more I feel and have experiences that I would have previously described as ‘other-worldly’. But this transcendental experience of the sacred can become a regular aspect of life.
I would have never known it was possible if I had stuck with my original memo.