Grappling with Spirituality & Seeking New Purpose
What motivates you when you are starting over
I’ve been missing my grandma. Not the attachment to the physical embodiment of her on earth, but her energy. After chatting with my partner about it and shedding a few tears, I realized I also yearn for her in a spiritual way like I used to yearn for a god I no longer believe in. When my grandmother passed away a year after I left Christianity, did I just replace my concept of a god “watching over me” with my deceased loved one who felt like my protector on earth?
For the last few year, I’ve felt more distant from spirituality than I ever have before. It’s different than the way I felt as college student exploring Atheism for the first time after being a hardcore Christian. That was reactionary and experimental. The post-pandemic void of spirituality has been deeper, a strange and surreal loss. And that includes my connection to my grandmother. I’ve experienced enormous endings, profound losses, and massive breakthroughs all at once that have upended my life in the healthiest of ways. And in finding alignment with myself amidst it all, I also became calloused towards spirituality because of how it was used by others to manipulate me in the past. I didn’t just endure the manipulation tactics that are woven into certain flavors of Christianity as a child. As an adult, I allowed an ex-biz partner to scare me with “secret knowledge” gained through various religions, the occult, and secret men’s orders. The ick factor was strong and I didn’t listen to my intuition; I was too scared. Intimidation worked really well on me.
…
This story might be a bit spooky, but hey, Halloween is coming up and the veil is thin, as they say, and I feel safe to share to a certain extent. And as someone who does connect to some witchy things like tarot, I want to say how important it is to guard yourself from other people’s peer pressure when it comes to spirituality. There are people in every spiritual group who will use it to control and manipulate others. There are well meaning people too, but please, guard yourself from people who prey on others and use spirituality as a tool for control and coercion.
Casting a Spell
Quite a few years ago, 2 people I was in business with decided that they wanted to do a ritual and cast a spell over our business. It didn’t feel right to me, it scared me, I was skeptical and didn’t want to do it. I didn’t understand what casting a spell meant, and now hearing from kind and caring people who identify as witches, I think what these 2 people did was morally wrong. They pushed me and made fun of me, as they often did, and bullied me into participating.
We went to one of their houses and they had this table set up with objects that represented things that, I again, didn’t understand. One of them had us write down our wishes for the business and they both wrote about money and cackled about it. I wrote down, I want sustainability and for whatever needs to happen for this business and community of people to be safe. It feels extra gross to me to fuse spirituality with money. My discomfort just felt like it was growing exponentially with each step they ordered. But I wasn’t at a point in life yet where I knew how to speak up when I felt unsafe.
One of them told me, we need to stand around the table, all 3 of us with our hands on the table and one of them would read some incantations. After that, we’d light the papers we wrote on on fire, and release our wishes. Or I guess, that’s the spell casting. (Again, I’m not a witch. But I know now, thanks to witchy friends, what is and is not right, sound or kind to do with spell-casting. This whole situation was not right.)
So as we stood around this table, our hands laid on top and facing one another, one person started speaking out an incantation and I…
I felt my whole body resisting, my emotions, my mind, my soul just felt like it was all pulling inward like “get out of here.” And suddenly, everything went black.
I woke up on the floor to them shaking me awake. I felt like I had slept for years, the deepest sleep I’ve ever known. What actually happened though was that I had passed out for a short period. Is this a common occurrence for me? No. The only other time I recall passing out was when I was a kid, just after moving to the US. The stress of moving countries suddenly, moving cultures and starting over got to me and I passed out one day in the hallway of our new home. Well, this time, I think stress was also the source of my body checking out of a situation I didn’t feel safe saying the word NO to.
I passed out in the middle of someone doing a ritual that I didn’t want to be a part of. It felt like somewhere deep inside of me, I had an advocate pulling me away, shutting me down to protect the me who could not speak. And their response was, “You’re just sensitive. Maybe you’re just too sensitive for this.” And yes, I am sensitive. But not in the way that they used the term sensitive to belittle me. I was also an undiagnosed Autistic person in fight or flight mode and my sensitivity took me on a quick flight out of consciousness for my safety. Thank you sensitivity.
They said, “Maybe you should just sit here and drink some water and we’ll do this part, you can sit out.” So I sat out. It was a relief. I hate that I felt like I needed their permission to bow out. But it is what it is. We still all burned our papers after they did their ritual. But I felt so much safer and detached from the experience because my body literally would NOT participate and I did not write about money.
I no longer speak to these people. I don’t trust them. I don’t feel safe around them. And this was just one of many many instances where I felt coerced into going a direction that didn’t align with me. But fear of them sometimes brought me along on their dictated adventures and misadventures. By getting away from these people a few years ago, I also began a journey of learning how to speak up for myself and how to establish much needed boundaries. Some of those boundaries had to get pretty intense so that I could recover from mental, emotional, and verbal abuse. And a figurative rock solid ball formed in my chest, creating distrust of many spiritual people, most especially those who use spiritualism to manipulate.
…
I’ve built walls up towards the hopefulness found in spirituality because of trauma. I’ve become distrustful of most people who claim to be highly spiritual. And I fear that if I connect with spirituality again in any form, that others will view me as a manipulator like those who have hurt me and coerced me into unsafe head spaces and experiences in my past. I have only just this past week come to this realization, prompted by beginning the first edits on my manuscript for the tarot deck my co-author and I have been working on since the middle of 2020. My personal relationship with tarot has been a mental health support, a source of grounding, and the way in which I restored self-trust, paired with solid therapy.
But even in my willingness to be open to spiritualism connected to tarot, I’ve still found safety seeking ways to intellectualize things rather than be vulnerable and emotionally connected. I read my letter to readers that I wrote a year ago and was shocked at how cerebral it sounded. I was once someone that others said was so open, vulnerable, spiritual and naive. And in being taken advantage of because of those things, I have placed my cerebral self far above my emotional and spiritual self. I have sought to protect myself so intensely that I’ve also blocked myself from those spiritual and emotional resources that once made me feel safe, inspired, gave me purpose and meaning.
I want to find the balance.
Open but with boundaries.
Willingly vulnerable but clearly aware of risks.
In touch with things beyond the physical while grounded in the here and now.
I’ve learned love of self in recent years, and I’ve been so lucky to discover how love feels with someone who is truly good to me. <3
And now, I’m seeking out my own soul, the root of “I,” to know and not know all at once. To feel connection to and with.
I want to know if I can find comfort again in mysterious things like the swell of my own heart, and feeling grandma’s energy.
Have you had weird, magical and mysterious moments where you felt the presence of a passed loved one?
There were many times in the past that I felt sudden rushes of her energy, whiffs of her perfume, and bolstering of her strength in the first few years after her passing. When those moments would come out of nowhere, I’d feel struck with shock and comfort all at once. I believed my grandma was with me in another realm, present but removed. Some sort of fractal, otherworldly tether. In some of my deepest grief in my late twenties, I would cry to her in a great beyond and beg for her guidance. But when she was walking on this same plane, a human on earth like me and beside me, I never begged for her attention, never asked for help. Instead I sought to mimic her stoicism and self reliance. Being like her was what drove me in my past careers. And I am realizing now, I need to decide what drives me in my work as the person I am today.
The last few years after closing my retail store and ending unhealthy relationships in love and work, have been about deciding and defining what brings meaning to my own experience of simply existing. In the past, my mind was so deep in manifesting the future that the present felt foreign and always off. My focus on future also made me an easy target for others to latch on to who wanted to profit off of my ability to turn dream into reality. I didn’t have awareness of that truth until looking back. I never felt good enough where I was at and was so driven to try to be more/better. Never enough, but also trying.
I’ve worked hard to prioritize the present and to value myself as I am in each moment OVER working hard to become someone else or to create something outside of myself in the last 3 years. I’ve found the love of self, and have also become so disillusioned to work being a reflection of who you are. I don’t care about accolades or other people telling me I’m good, bad, talented, accomplished or anything that capitalism deems worthy of calling out. And also… I’ve lacked drive and lost what it feels like to have aspirations and dreams. I’ve learned to feel massive appreciation for the life I have created in love, partnership, home and community. I’ve built a safe community of actual trust and love and THAT feels like a miracle to now have, the actual DREAM come true. I have people who I feel emotionally safe with. I am so grateful and so privileged and feel SO driven to invest in and provide for, care for and nurture community.
But work? Finding the inspiration for continuing forward has been a challenge. I’d love to opt out of capitalism, and also I live in America, have to pay rent, buy my dog food, and I can’t escape the need to make money. Blech. I refuse to make money itself my drive, my goal, or what fuels me in what I create. The accrual of money has never been a motivator for me, but fear of not being able to pay bills has absolutely been a huge motivator for the majority of my life. Anxiety was my boss. Scarcity can be really scary and I don’t want to make decisions from that mindset like I once did. Plus being obligated to please investors and business partners by making money from what I can create did a number on me in the past. I’m NEVER going back there. I will not be bullied and I will not bully myself. But I do want to learn what it feels like to be my own hype man, to have a spiritual practice that inspires me and brings meaning to practical goals.
I’m hungry for new dreams, new visions to work towards, new hope and direction. I’m painting, I’m writing, I am in process of creating plenty of things. But right now, I don’t have any sort of end goal or thing I’m working towards in “work” itself, and I crave that. I have personal goals, but career goals? I achieved a LOT quite young, maybe too much for my own mental good. Some of those achievements were temporary, some ended up feeling meaningless once they arrived, and others were crazy amazing HUGE achievements yes, but also, who really cares? What truly matters? And what is the significance of an achievement if you don’t have the space, time, emotional capacity and ability to absorb it, be in it, and savor it? I don’t want a career goal to fan my ego. I don’t want a career goal to take over my life. But I do want to know what it feels like to be embodied with passion and drive in both work and life.
And that’s where a connection to my grandma pops up again. She was the person I aspired to be like as a kid, a teen, and a woman in the working world. And now I do not want to pursue being similar to her in ways that aren’t true to me, I want to find the alignment where it is natural and promise myself to force nothing beyond that. I want to seek spirituality that soothes and inspires me. I want to work hard to pay the bills, but not fixate on bills as the motivator. God, I wish for all humans to not have to think about bills. I wish for no bills, just support of one another. I want out of a predatory, capitalist mindset and I want in on building a fulfilling life that can be shared with others. I want that sharing with others to be here in the world, on the planet where I am now. And I want to find ways to share with my ancestors and yours, connections that are free from the pressures of work and any expectations, pure magical mystery and opportunities for healing and growth.
I’ve been thinking, a lot. And I’ve questioned whether I should write this all out and share it here after being vulnerable and raw in my writing in the past. It’s a risk! But I want to pursue the right risks. I want to align again and in new ways with my own vulnerability and willingness to be honest. I want an honest life, in work and existing.
And if you feel inspired to share musings on purpose, spirituality, your experiences with work and career, anything that comes up for you when reading my stories, please share in the comments. I want this space to be a space of community. Sometimes its light updates, other days its big contemplations. And that is life <3
Sensitivity is a strength. I am so glad your body stood up for you when no one else was honoring your no.
I really appreciate your thoughts here... especially on capitalism and feelings around spirituality...as an autistic person raised literally from birth in the church (my dad was a minister) I relate strongly to what you've written....thank you for sharing this ..