Faith, Spiritual Awakening, and Mental Health.

Odd as it sometimes sounds to say these days, it is, in fact, a spiritual awakening that brought me to the work that I’m doing now. I certainly can’t deny that. I was guided by some form of divine inspiration to do the healing, to start my coaching, to completely ignore all of the logic that would have prevented me from stepping into my true purpose and calling and to do it anyway because I just felt so driven to do it.

And the impact that I’m having on my clients and my followers is proof that I have undoubtedly found my true calling.

Nonetheless, I can look back at that version of me… the one that was consciously going through that spiritual awakening and believing very heavily in some really bizarre, esoteric ideas, with a recognition that I had lost myself. I wouldn’t hesitate to describe my perspective during that period as a form of psychosis. I was operating based on beliefs I had concocted in my head that had no basis in reality and that - in the long run - I have come to realize were false.

I like to say that the universe is not above lying to you to get you to where you need to be. And I think that’s what happened. I was led through false perceptions to the real truth of who I was. I needed to get out of my head to come to my senses. It was a journey.

When I first started the coaching, still at a very early stage in that journey, I focused more on my teachings on ‘spirituality’. I spoke about things ‘beyond the veil’, I spoke about things like quantum consciousness, the dark night of the soul, twin flames, manifestation, etc..

In the long run, I chose to back off almost entirely from that stuff, though, for 2 main reasons.

Firstly, some of the things I believed during that time I simply came to just not believe in after a while (not in the way that people believe in them anyway), and I saw my over-conviction in them as a form of psychosis.

Secondly, for the pieces of it that I still (at least want to) believe in, I simply decided that I didn’t want to teach about anything that I can’t be certain of. Reincarnation, for example… I think I believe in it, but I certainly don’t want it to form a foundational element of my teachings if I can’t know if it’s real.

Still, I believe faith has its place in the healing journey and it is still a small portion of what I talk to my clients about in my course. And here’s where I think it fits in…

One of the core pieces of inner peace (in my philosophy) is a sense of safety.

That’s what’s at the foundation of our emotional healing. Learning how to feel safe in our experience, in our lives, in our thoughts, in our emotions, in our sensations, in our challenges and in our pleasures. If we can feel safe in the moment, we have everything we need.

The majority of the tools and skills I teach to my clients are about learning how to feel safe in the moment. How to understand our challenges, our discomforts, and everything we are experiencing from a new perspective to not see them as threats, and developing the skills and tools to handle and process everything that we need to deal with.

There will, however, be moments when the strongest emotional muscles and skills are not quite enough.

Moments when the pain is so palpable or the future is so daunting that no amount of in-the-moment processing can handle it.

Mortality… for example…

I don’t expect any amount of emotional mastery to make us fully ok with the idea that we will all die one day. Dealing with our mortality and that of our loved ones requires something greater. And that’s where faith in ‘spirituality’ comes in.

It’s the cherry on top of the emotional healing Sundae. It shouldn’t be the foundation. You can’t base all of your day-to-day resistance to emotional struggles on faith. That becomes problematic for many reasons (not least of which is the level of dogmatism that it tends to inevitably lead to). But it’s the extra piece of the puzzle that we need to add to our more practical emotional muscles so that nothing will ever keep us living in fear again.