If you look at the date on the previous post, or if you have this blog in your feed reader, you’ll notice I haven’t written here in quite a while. Here is what a block feels like: “I just have nothing to say…”. But underneath that silence is a whole lot of stuff. Feelings and beliefs, mostly. And just recently, it’s beginning to unfold.

Here is one thing: I want to write about God.

Not the white-haired-dude-in-the-sky, of course. Rather, the interconnectedness underneath everything, and how to access it and why it matters and what it means, and how a misunderstanding of it leads to crappiness.

All fine and good, but I grew up in a very intellectual home, and “believing in God” just seemed sort of low class. Intelligent, sophisticated people just don’t talk about that sort of thing. If you wanted to do that in the privacy of your own home, fine, but keep it to yourself.

So essentially, I am afraid. I am afraid smart, interesting people will think I am stupid, delusional, need some kind of crutch to get through life, etc. Because that is exactly what I grew up thinking about people who believed in anything.

And when I run across people like this - intelligent, interesting atheists - I feel anxious and want to “convert” them. (I realized this recently, to my chagrin - how crass!) I feel the urge to tell them how I used to think like them, and I was wrong, and I was so close-minded, and I just didn’t understand before, and they are not hearing what I really mean.

And you can imagine how seriously un-fun that conversation would be.

But what I’m realizing is that underneath that anxious desire to convince them that I’m right, I just want validation. I want someone to say “OK, I see why you think that, that makes sense to me”. Because whatever my connection to Spirit was as a kid, it was never, ever validated. Whatever I believed in was squashed, repeatedly and definitively.

For example, when I was very young I believed in Care Bears for awhile — imaginary helpful teddy bears that live in the coulds. And when my brothers went on a trip, they took pictures out of the airplane windows of the clouds to prove me wrong. This was the atmosphere I grew up in. So I want people who are skeptical to believe me so I feel like I’m not crazy. Which I often did, as a kid. So I project a little bit of my family dynamics onto these unwitting strangers, and then try to make the past come out different. And/or, I live in fear of them judging me.

Which, on the whole, is not a great energy with which to approach teaching or writing.

What this points to of course is just another internal area that needs healing, and that’s fine. But I just wanted to come out with it: sometimes this blog scares me shitless and pushes all my buttons.

I feel constantly afraid of being ridiculed, although that has never happened here. I will have recurring thought trains that I ought to be able to justify my thoughts on God with logic and proofs and arguments based on new physics.

But I can’t — I don’t actually know that much about physics, and my connection to the Divine is not logical, it’s intuitive. I can describe the sense it makes to me, but I can’t lead someone from atheism to spiritual connection in a logical argument. And if I could, it would miss the fundamental point: God only matters if you feel that inner connection, and that is between you and whatever you feel is at the heart of things. I don’t know what your path is — it’s yours, and it has to unfold for you.

It’s very hard, when you find a path that leads you to liberation, to not decide it’s the best path for everyone. And this urge is compounded if you have a fear that you are crazy if people don’t agree with you.

For the most part, I’m fine, but devout atheists punch a particular button having to do with my childhood, and that’s what I fear–that someone will come along and trigger the painful feelings of being invalidated so often as a kid, about something that later turned out to be a huge part of who I am and the work I want to do in the world.

So, there it is. Now I can work with it. Hello, fear. =)

Tags: god, healing by emma
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