A Journey Towards Spirituality, Part I
I was raised without religion.
I grew up with the critical, scientific part of my brain being nurtured and praised. I don’t actually remember being dissuaded from listening to my intuition, or believing in a god, or in a greater meaning, but I don’t have any memory of those things being fostered either.
I even don’t remember ever having even believed in Santa. I do remember WANTING to believe. I have a vivid memory of standing at the back door of my friend Jessica’s house on Christmas eve. There were 3 or 4 of us young girls all peering out the window. My friends were exclaiming that they could see Rudolph’s nose and they were getting so excited. I remember feigning excitement too, wishing that it felt real to me. I remember being so relieved when they finally all knew what I did… that my parents put gifts under the tree, not Santa. (The story from my mom is that I asked how Santa delivered presents to those of us without chimneys when I was very young and she didn’t want to lie to me so she told me the truth. On the plus side, I don’t have any trauma around finding out and there was still plenty of magic in the season for me!)
I remember feeling the same about the tooth fairy as I did about Santa. I REALLY wanted to believe she was real, but even before the explicit knowledge that the tooth fairy was just my mom, I always had this deep knowing that nothing magical was causing my tooth to be replaced with a quarter, it just didn’t make rational sense to me.
(The Easter Bunny was a different story though! I’ll applaud my kindergarten teacher for that long-lasting belief. Those giant muddy bunny footprints discovered in our classroom after recess were the scientific proof my critical thinking brain needed to believe!)
In adolescence, I believed in astrology… maybe. I mean, I thought it was fun to read my horoscope, but I couldn’t really truly believe in “any of that stuff”, despite wanting to.
For a long while, through my teens and early 20’s I called myself an agnostic, but if you had asked me I would have had to admit that atheist was far more accurate. I WANTED to believe in SOMETHING… but I just couldn’t bring myself to truly accept that there might be an unknown that science couldn’t explain, that reason couldn’t rationalize.
And then I married an atheist. I mean, a real, die-hard, rational-to-a-fault atheist. One who ridiculed the very notion of astrology, or a higher power, or a deeper knowing. One who did not believe that humans have a right to be happy or that our lives hold any inherent meaning or purpose. He wasn’t quite a nihilist, he did have morals, but he was close. Within the confines of this relationship, it became unsafe for me to explore the possibility of different ways of knowing. Of other truths held within the cosmos. Of manifestation and divine right timing.
It has been HARD for me to shift from this mindset and to turn towards the other part of my brain that has always held a deeper knowing. I have prided myself on my critical, scientific mind for my whole life. It is my armour, my safety net. And it needed to be taken off, so that I could explore the possibilities that exist on the other side of it (which, incidentally, we are beginning to amass quite a bit of scientific evidence to support. Go figure!).
To be continued…
I’m so curious about other peoples’ experiences of spirituality, deeper knowing, and religion (my first degree is actually in Religious Studies!). If you have any desire to engage on this topic, please send me an email! I’d love to chat about it with you! Stay tuned next week for how the shift from rigidity to expansion happened for me.
#spirituality #woo #neuroscience #somethingmore #santa #believe
