New Age Demons
turns out I was accidentally a witch for 15 years
I spent the other day writing an extremely boring post about how my feet are now too wide to wear normal shoes, and that all my shoes are ugly now. And I’ve decided to… pause that one, and move onto something more interesting, and way more polarizing: God.
Or even more polarizing… God vs Witchcraft.
(I wrote a tiny bit about this in a recent post, about how the Bible app ended up on my phone… as a joke at first.)
Part of my difficulty with writing (and with life) these days, is that all of the things I am thinking about, going through, and grappling with, are very …out there, for lack of a better word.
At best, my thoughts don’t feel very relatable.
At worst, they’re extremely strange and polarizing, and will probably alienate people I don’t want to alienate.
However, it’s come down to the question… Am I a writer? If so, what do I write about? Am I even willing to be a writer anymore? Do I want to be on the record saying the things I am thinking about these days? Or, am I a writer who is afraid to ruffle feathers or continue being unliked, so instead I write about my foot pain and ugly shoes and yard work and house problems?
A Book about God
When I started writing my second book, the book that became Tired as F*ck, I originally wanted it to be a book about God. “A funny, absurd book about God.” That’s what my soul wanted to write. And that’s what I started trying to write — which is interesting to think about now, because at the time, my relationship with God was very strained and distant, and especially confused. I didn’t even feel fully comfortable using the word God.
Maybe I thought I could discover things during my writing. Maybe I thought it would bring me closer to God. I thought the book could be about my little miracles from when I was young, my desperate praying to be healed as a teenager, my new age spiritualism that started in college, and my general confusion about God and how it/he works, despite having a very clear and unwavering belief in a higher power. Confusion and belief, and how those two things mix.
I don’t know what I thought I was going to write, but I didn’t really have anywhere to go with the idea. So the book shifted into something that I was able to write more easily: a book about exhaustion. And it retained just a few of the God ideas and stories. The letter to God. The tooth miracle. My mistakes with manifestation and other self help books. Losing my religion. Cult mentality. And the deleted chapter about sobbing in the Actor’s Chapel after quitting acting, asking God what I was supposed to do, and immediately getting a call offering me a role without having to audition. Etc. The God theme was still there, the book just wasn’t about God anymore. Which is just as well, because it turns out at the time, I had nothing clear or profound to say anyway.
And I was able to keep the God theme relatively relatable and culturally acceptable, because I was coming from the perspective of: ‘I used to be religious, and now I am just spiritual. Religion is a cult. Now I’m a just vaguely woo-woo. Now, I’m a cool, modern girl who does energy work, who believes in God, but like… in a cool way.’ I downplayed the “energy work” in both books, but it was there. I knew it was a little confusing, a little too out there and would turn less spiritual people off, so I tried to dumb it down, both for my readers, and in a way: for myself too. I explained it away as just “processing emotion.” Which, at times it is. Other times, I’ve learned, it is not. Other times, it’s spiritual healing, which, sounds all good and dandy. What could ever be bad about spiritual healing?
But as someone said to me recently: When you say spiritual, what spirits are you talking about? Dark spirits are spirits too.
This is about me dabbling in things I didn’t understand. My 16 years in New Age healing, both as an enthusiast, a patient, and at times: a practitioner. This is about me inviting in things I didn’t know I was inviting in. This is a post that will probably turn off a lot of people, and will trigger another chunk of people.
This is a very supernatural story, from a very supernatural worldview. If you don’t believe in the spirit world, none of this will resonate. You will think I’m crazy. You may even think I’m crazy even if you do believe in the spirit world.
If you’re gung ho about new age practices, as I was, this will probably make you mad. Or stressed. Or both.
This… this might be where I finally lose you.
Testimonies
I’ve been listening to a lot of Jesus testimonies lately. An unlikely turn for me, because I was recently someone who legitimately recoiled at the mention of Jesus. My mind made immediate associations of … idiot brainwashed hypocrites.
Jesus… was lame. Boring. Supremely uncool. And just… didn’t resonate. I just didn’t get it. And I didn’t like it.
So, if you’d told me just three months ago that this is where my head would be now, I’d have been majorly bummed out.
But a few months ago, while I was scrolling the episodes of a podcast about secret society symbolism, I saw a testimony from someone who used to be “in the new age.” An ex-psychic medium, who is now a born again Christian. I avoided listening to that episode for a long time. I didn’t want to listen to a Jesus testimony.
But eventually, I listened. And, she said, that all her channeling of spirit guides, aliens, and light beings? She now sees that they were actually demons, tricking her.
What.
I couldn’t help myself, I had to hear more people talk about this. Was she the only one with this experience? No. It turns out she’s not. I listened to some other testimonies with other ex-mediums, who all came to the same conclusion and had overlapping experiences.
I started listening to even more testimonies. I couldn’t stop. Lots and lots of the stories from ex-new age people, ex psychics, ex mediums — every single story made me think about my own life and experience, because I had spent my past 16 years, fully immersed in the new age, connecting to God knows what.
What’s the new age? According to Google: New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult.
It’s spiritualism. It’s woo woo. It’s an umbrella term that encompasses things like: The Secret, Manifestation, Oracle Cards, Energy Work, Mediumship and Channeling, Divination, Crystals, Ascended Masters, Law of Attraction, etc etc. Most people who are in the new age call themselves “spiritual, not religious.” It’s very trendy right now. And it’s a very culturally palatable replacement for more traditional religion. After centuries of humans corrupting and abusing their power in religion, the new age has a lot of modern appeal for someone who believes in the spirit world, or wants some sort of relationship with a higher power. It is, seemingly, handing the power back to us. Back from religious institutions and power hoarders, or from a cruel (or fake) God. Because in the New Age, you can kind of… make up your own religion. You get to make up your own belief system, based on whichever guru or witchy lady you prefer to listen to. Your own feelings are king. There’s no sin. No hell. In some ways, there is no hard right or wrong. There is just… following your bliss and your intuition. You create your own reality. We are ascending this low vibe dimension. Or something.
Some new age people are very energetic-based: it’s all just energy. High vibration and low vibration. Thoughts create reality. Some are more spiritual: meaning… literally spirits. In my experience, these people usually focus on the good spirits, and don’t pay much mind to the bad ones.
Until very recently, I literally thought that energetic and spiritual were the same thing. That’s because I fell into the first category. It’s all love and light, man.
That’s what attracted me to all my new age beliefs. It’s all just energy, man. It made so much more sense to me. It was so much more appealing. Because if it’s all energy, we’re all just doing our best, flinging our energy around at one another accidentally, and creating our reality, whether we knew it or not. This was the cool, earth-based, feminist, relatable belief-umbrella that I could wrap my head around and willingly associate with. This satisfied my desire to believe in some sort of God and be some sort of magical pagan druid woman living in the forest and concocting potions of rose petals, berries, and mushrooms. What’s not to like?
However, the more I listen to these testimonies from ex-energy workers… the more I’m seeing it all in a new light. One after another after another, I’m hearing ex-psychics and mediums say they thought they were connecting to these benevolent spirit guides. They thought they were connecting to light beings and angels and good aliens. They thought they could discern what was good and what was bad, until …they realized they were tricked, and they were connecting with dark energy. Demons. Not only connecting, but allowing them into their lives, and sometimes …their bodies. They were opening doors they didn’t know they were opening. They were giving permission and “legal rights” to entities they knew nothing about.
Usually they realized what was happening thanks to a series of synchronicities, amidst their lives going really sideways. Despite all of their “spiritual connections” and despite all of their “messages and information from beyond,” things were going really badly: their relationships suffered, and their mental health was a mess. For many of them, when they tried to step away, that’s when the former benevolent beings turned on them, and started making their life even more hellish. Most of these people mention mental torture: suicidality, depression, anxiety, and graphic mental images. All things that went away, once they become Christian and finally got the spiritual protection they always had thought they could give themselves…
I also started hearing people talk about how they eventually researched Helena Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, and Aleister Crowley — all of these influential people who popularized lots of our current “new age” practices (not that they’re new at all), but in reality, these people were very much involved with the occult and darker practices. (Research the connection between Aleister Crowley and a ton of famous musicians…)
The big difference, I was learning, between God and the new age/occult, is that in the occult and new age, you are God. You are seeking special knowledge and special power and control.
With God: thy will be done. With the New Age/Occult: My will be done. Do as thou wilt.
I was bingeing these stories. In the beginning, as fascinated as I was, I was extremely skeptical. Especially because I really didn’t want any of this to be true at all. Oh great, as if I’m not weird enough, now I have to become some crazy extreme Christian lady talking about demons? It would be way better for me, if I could come to the conclusion that these people were crazy and deluded, and go back to my life as usual, whatever that was.
And, for the record, if I were you, reading what I’m writing, I’d write it off as insane, and probably unsubscribe. Or I’d keep following for a bit out of sheer horror/curiosity. And if I were you, reading my above overview of the ex-psychic testimonies, I wouldn’t be convinced at all. I’d have to listen to all of the testimonies myself. I’d have to discern, one by one: Are they crazy? Are they lying? Can I catch them in a lie, and disprove this whole thing? That’s how I’ve been listening to these stories.
Sometimes I would watch a story where the details didn’t add up to me. I was very wary of opportunistic deliverance ministries that preyed on people’s fears. And, I kept telling myself: even things that have some truth, can and will be twisted and exploited by humans. Especially supernatural things.
But I started praying a lot more, for obvious reasons. Because, whether these stories were true, or not, I still believed in God. And after over 15 years of thinking God was just the impersonal Universe, and realizing that, oh dear, I had been seeking special knowledge and control, I was back to praying to personal God. My life had actually gone sideways. My mental health had been shit recently. And it was clear: no matter what, I needed help navigating this. I needed to get discernment. And I probably needed protection too, just for good measure.
I’ve also done such intense research on cult mentality, that that is always in the back of my mind too. What are the odds that all of these people are telling similar stories, and having similar experiences, because they’re all just desperate to believe in something? What are the odds that they’re all lying? Or that their stories of mental and spiritual healing is just delusion? What are the odds that I’m joining a cult just by listening to this? I’ve been wrong before. I know. I can be wrong again.
However, there were enough stories that rang true and genuine to me, especially based on my own experiences. And especially when the people sharing had nothing to gain. So I kept listening. And at this point, I’ve listened to dozens and dozens and dozens of separate stories.
The corroborating date
In the middle of all of this, I went on a first date from Hinge, about a month ago. The guy told me on the date, “Yea, I was super into the new age, for years, until I realized it was a lot of deception. Now I’m Christian.”
“Oh? Wow that’s so weird… I’ve actually been… doing a lot of research on stories like that…. What was your experience? Like what made you change your beliefs?”
At this point on the date, I already knew that I wasn’t interested in him romantically, but he was genuine enough, and this was such a coincidence!? He had gone through what I was heavily researching at the time??? …I had to know his story.
He hesitated. “Well, I was super into meditation, psychedelics, and like, connecting with like aliens and stuff. And one day I was meditating and I asked that if any entity was around, it could enter my body” (Rookie mistake. Even I knew never to allow anything like that.) “Immediately, I felt something enter my body and from then on out… I was just… tortured. For months on end. Almost a year. I had to take a month off of work. It was all… horrible.”
“Wait, what do you mean, tortured?”
He hesitated again. “Well, I don’t usually talk about this. It’s really intense. But…” He stopped again. I prompted him to continue. I had to know. He said, “I started having just nonstop visions of being raped and tortured.”
Ok.
Wow.
So, it wasn’t just people online telling these stories. It was now people in real life. That guy… had nothing to gain by telling me that. In fact, that was probably the nail in the coffin for any possibility of future dates.
What are the odds that I connected with him anyway? After praying for clarity on what was true?
My New Age Days
I was raised Catholic, prayed a lot, actually, but always rather selfishly. And I actually have a list of little miracles that would be hard and boring to explain. I tried to write about some of them for my “book about God,” and they just didn’t land. It’s part of the reason I abandoned that book idea.
I was also into semi-witchy things as a teenager. I remember I did a “spell” (a rhyming poem we wrote) on my roof, with a “potion” (random ingredients from my parent’s pantry) that my friend and I made, asking to get good roles in our High School’s musical. (It “worked,” I was Maria and she was Mother Superior in The Sound of Music. But we were also some of the most talented and enthusiastic student performers. However, I was just a freshman, and she was a sophomore. Hence, why we thought we needed the spell.)
Then, when I was 18 and a freshman in college, I found The Secret and ‘manifestation.' At the time, it seemed like the answer to my very desperate prayers as a teenager to heal me please. I had hormonal imbalances, bad skin, absent periods, thyroid problems, “food addiction” and bingeing. I had been desperately praying to be healed for years. The year before, I promised God that if he healed me, I would help everyone else heal too, even though I didn’t want to. The reason I didn’t want to, is because I thought this meant I would have to become a doctor. I didn’t want to be a doctor. I wanted to be an actress. But, I begrudgingly promised that I’d help other people, if he helped me. If he healed me, I’d figure it out then.
The next thing I knew, I was a raw-vegan, convinced God had answered my prayers with the good word of raw veganism. This will heal me.
Raw veganism led straight into the New Age. Specifically The Secret and manifestation as my gateway drugs. Omg, I was wrong about religion and about the way God works. I am actually the one in control! I am only sick because of my thoughts and beliefs, so now, I need to change my life by changing my thoughts. (Oh, and raw veganism didn’t heal me, instead my hair started falling out.)
On some level, I thought that learning about the law of attraction and manifestation was the answer to my prayers. I thought that The Secret was a message from God, who I now believed, was actually just The Universe, showing me how to heal: never think a negative thought again. Believe yourself healed and you will be.
This never quite worked. It half worked. Sometimes. My skin got a little better, kind of. But I still never got my period. However, I felt like I now had the tools to heal. This was now my worldview. Eventually, I’d heal. It was just a matter of continually being in control of my thoughts, so I manifested the perfect life that I was destined for.
What it did do, was cause lots of anxiety when I would think less than perfect thoughts, and it also made spirituality a very shallow, superficial game. I could have anything I wanted. So, of course, I wanted beauty, health, riches, a career on Broadway, a perfect relationship, and… you know, everything The Secret promised.
The other problem, is that it blamed you for all of your problems. Do you have a health problem? Well, it means you are attracting it. Maybe you even secretly want the health problem. Figure it out, and heal it.
This also started an endless search for spiritual and energetic healers, who would help to release or align or fix my vibration or whatever. It was nonstop. I went to everyone. I went to shamans. I went to spiritual healers. I bought every spiritual self help book. And, while there seemed to be little wins here and there, that had me convinced it was all working, I can’t say that things got much better.
At certain points, I’d find myself praying to a personal God again. I’d flip back and forth between “co-creating with the universe” and “aligning my vibe to my desired outcome” and “saying my mantras,” and back to just talking to God. In the back of my head I didn’t know if that was ok to do, because, apparently I was God. Kind of. I was either God or god, who had forgotten my power. I was creating my reality, whether I liked it or not. So, to then ask an external God for things, or for help, well, it signaled to the Universe a kind of lack, didn’t it. I clearly didn’t believe I was powerful, if I was still asking “God” for help.
But, I’d still find myself talking to a personal God. It just felt better that way. I didn’t know why. And, at a certain point when things weren’t really getting that much better with my manifestation, I asked again for help. I asked again to be healed.
And a healing came. It just wasn’t the one I expected. It was a healing for my relationship with food: The F*ck it Diet. I’ve always viewed this healing as a spiritual gift of sorts, because though the journey took time, the understanding of it came quickly. I always refer to ‘my epiphany,’ because it all made sense at once, and I never looked back.
Yes, I still had to research, and then the research confirmed my epiphany about food and dieting and health. I still had to apply it and see if it worked. But, it was definitely a sudden shift in understanding, that was “beyond me,” in a way I cannot take full credit for.
But not long after this, I started getting very involved with even more energetic healing. First, it was to try and process the stress I had around body image. I was still struggling with that part, so I started researching, and found some simple somatic practices, like EFT, where you tap on your body, and say an affirmation about accepting yourself, even though I feel ____________, I love and accept myself. I started using it on my body image. Then on my audition anxiety. Then on my heartbreak over a breakup. I was going to feel and heal it allllllll.
Staying in the somatic/feeling world would have probably been safe, but I didn’t stay there. I started seeking more. More magical methods. I started receiving remote, group energy healing, and remote group “activations.” Then I took a practitioner training. Then I took another training. Then another. Pretty soon, I was an energy work practitioner. I had my first (and only) $10K week (big in the online business, woo woo, money mindset world). I made that money in a week pre-selling my ebook, and pre-selling energy work sessions. I’d trained in a muscle testing-based energy healing modality, and I was remote muscle testing my clients on a zoom call, and then testing what they needed to release, and how they needed to release it. Meaning, I was testing people’s energy through the ethers. How? Great question. I don’t actually know. Magic, really. And my recent realization is… who gives you power to do magic? I assumed back then, it was God. Because to me, God was everything. And everything was energy. Now? Eh, not so sure.
During this same time, is also when Emma — the woman who connected me with my agent— contacted me out of the blue, which fast tracked my career as a published author. Talk about manifestation. It just… felt like… everything was falling into place. It felt like confirmation that whatever I was doing, was working. My relationship with food was healed. My audience was growing. The Universssse wanted me to write a book, and to make a lot of money being an energy worker witch. I mean, what is cooler than this?
To be clear, I did not identify as a witch. I thought white magic was cool. I liked the mythical forest aesthetic of it. You know what I mean. But I thought I was just an energy worker, and that this was my way to heal, and help others heal, in the way that God/the Universe wanted me to.
However, I stopped selling energy work sessions not long after I started, because a, I didn’t trust the woman who taught me anymore, and I didn’t want to be associated with her. And b, the whole thing …selling something so intangible, kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, and I stopped trusting it as much. I knew that my intentions were pure with clients but… I just… I dunno. I was in the middle of writing The F*ck It Diet, a book about healing your relationship with food, and I wanted to be taken seriously. So I backed off on being a professional energy work practitioner.
But I didn’t stop it in my personal life. In fact I’d become very good friends with my other teacher. This teacher is the one who told me that yes, dark, demonic, opportunistic energies existed, which snapped me out of my “it’s all love and light” pure energetics belief system. She had some drama with an even witchier woman who ran a “mystic society.” She would also tell me she was always getting psychic attacks from these other energy workers, she could feel things or people trying to access her energy. I didn’t really know what she was talking about. It was fascinating, but I kind of wrote it all off like… well, I guess I’m not intuitive or psychic enough to get psychic attacks. Or maybe I’m just not intuitive enough to know I’m getting psychic attacks.
During this time, I was “activated” into an ancient healing system that the teacher was channeling, I was using divination tools, crystal grids, and calling on spirit guides and ancestors. We learned how to clear energy and put up energetic boundaries to protect ourselves, apparently.
All these things seemed great. Exciting. It all seemed like a way to get closer to “God.”
Except… during this time, I still didn’t use the word God. I wasn’t really sure what I believed. I believed in a higher power. And I believed in lots of woo woo things. I called myself spiritual. I called myself woo woo. I guess, for instance, I believed in spirit guides, because as part of this training in this ancient, channeled healing system, I did an exercise to try and learn my spirit guide’s name(s), using a pendulum with the alphabet. It ended up being something super weird and not phonetic. It wasn’t a real name. It was hard to pronounce. Back then, I wrote it off as: eh, maybe I messed up. Maybe I don’t really have a spirit guide. Or maybe I’m not actually very intuitive or good at this. Now that I think about the name, it’s creepy AF.
At the time, I felt like I was protected, because my intentions were good. I would never purposely connect with anything dark. However, what the people I’m listening to now are saying is… it doesn’t matter. They trick you. That’s what they do. That’s what they’ve always done. In my invocation to connect to a “spirit guide” - I was actually connecting to whatever entity that wanted to come through, and I was giving it permission to access me. Just because you ask for an angel or a spirit guide or an ancestor, doesn’t mean that’s actually what you are connecting with. I assumed, back then, that my intention was enough.
Anyway, back then, I thought that a lot of these things and practices we were being taught to do were cool, yea, but I didn’t really have much tangible success with them, and so I didn’t go much deeper with them after a two years or so. I didn’t really feel anything concrete. Maybe this wasn’t really my thing. And … I didn’t really feel anything getting better.
At the core, I was interested in all of this stuff because I was still trying to heal my body. I still had my hormonal problems, and I was still trying to get to the bottom of them. My understanding then, was that my health problems came from stuck emotions or stuck stagnant energy. I hoped that understanding the energy system, and doing lots of energy work, and having a closer relationship with the spirit world and spirituality would help me heal, right?
What actually happened, now that I look back at the timeline all zoomed out, with my new wariness of all the accidentally witchy things I was doing, and all the doors I was accidentally opening… is that… my health deteriorated completely.
I became significantly more chronically ill than I had been before. I was eating well — good amounts of good quality food. I was active. I was happy! I thought. I was creative! And my health just… tanked and nearly debilitated me for many years.
Sure, yes, I had been drinking more than my body could handle, but way less than your average 20-something. So the question remains, why couldn’t my body handle it? Why did I start experiencing chronic fatigue? Liver pain? Low grade fevers?
What I told myself back then, was that my toxic overload, chronic infections, maybe even fallout from my past traumatic dental work or maybe ancestral trauma, it was all bubbling up, asking to be healed. Yes. Maybe that’s all it was, and any connection I’m now making to the ten years dabbling in witchy shit, is just me grasping at straws, looking to make sense of my life. That could definitely be true. I have not ruled that out.
But all I know is, I did two years of “spiritual healing practices,” and, I became significantly sicker than ever. So, I went to go see a naturopath, who also recommended I see another psychic ancestral healing woman (I forget her official job title) who would do “ancestral clearings” on me over the phone... and I did. Multiple, extremely expensive, spiritual ancestral healing/clearing sessions.
At the same time, I also joined someone’s ancestral healing course, where we intentionally did ceremonies to connect with “our ancestors.” And, right then, I started getting visions of an ancestor being sexually abused. Graphic flashes of disturbing images. It was awful. Wait… is this… an ancestor communicating with me? I was torn… is this for real? I had a lot of doubt in its validity, actually. But the images wouldn’t go away. They… were tormenting me. And they kept coming. And, in the belief system I had at the time, this was an ancestral trauma being revealed to me, thanks to all of the ancestral healing work I was doing. And, it was now my job to heal it. It was my job to process it. Whatever that meant.
I flip flopped between trying to ignore and suppress these images, and asking “what am I supposed to do with this?!? Is this even real, or am I just making assumptions, assuming all catholic children had a high chance of being sexually abused? So now it’s just a subconscious fear that’s now on loop in my brain?” But I am not someone who has “intrusive thoughts” of graphic images, so this was notably strange for me. Sometimes I thought, “well, maybe this trauma needs to be “processed,” and if I don’t do it, no one will.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, or how to do that. I also was so disturbed by it, I barely knew who I could talk to about it. I mentioned it to my energy worker friend, and she was like “oh yea that energy in your lineage could be partially why you’re sick.” Great. So, I decided I would begrudgingly allow the images to stay, and I’d …breathe. The goal was to… “process” the trauma, somehow. I now realize that what I was doing was probably just allowing this “energy” to stick around even more. I also had this continual sense of dark creepy energy hanging out behind me.
It’s only now, listening to these very similar stories from other people, realizing that these “visions” were possibly… or probably … dark or demonic energy, just… messing with me. Tormenting me. Beings that I hadn’t realized I’d invited in, thanks to all the stupid-ass witchy shit I was doing.
Alright, this was just Part 1.
This story is to be continued…
I have so much more to say. There’s more to this story, so many other pieces that made me start to question all of this, and so many other questions I still have. And there are also probably many more disclaimers and caveats I should have written into this, to better meet people where they are. I know this is going to turn people off on a bunch of levels, as it would have done to me.
So, now… I will list some disclaimers and caveats:
1. I do realize, fully fully, that all of this sounds insane. Like, I get it. I really do. A month ago I literally thought that there was no way I’d ever be able to write about this at all, ever, because it’s just so… batshit. And so I decided I had to quit writing altogether and find a new career. The fact that I’m now writing about it, a month later, is also insane to me. I can’t even understand why I am. But I also think I actually have just surrendered my entire life and career to be blown up, because I’ve been so miserable and stuck not knowing what to write about anymore. This was the first thing that’s been interesting to write about in a while, because it’s genuinely fascinating to me. So, either I find a new audience of people who are willing to listen to stuff like this. Or, maybe this is where I allow everything to officially blow up and fall apart.
2. I haven’t even addressed the tip of the iceberg on Christianity and organized religion, but I know that there is tons of abuse in organized religion, and in many different Christian organizations and churches. Believe me, I know. This is one of the primary reasons I was so incredibly turned off by it all. And what I’m exploring and sharing now about a more formal belief in God (/Jesus) isn’t meant to discount any of that. There are tons of abusive religious groups and churches. There are tons of abusive, twisted people who hide behind religion and God. It’s just a fact.
However, I’m now wondering: maybe I shouldn’t have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
3. I’m still very much mid-journey, so maybe I shouldn’t have written about this yet… but, if I keep waiting to write, I’m going to forget everything by the time I’m ready to write about this. I already wish I’d been writing all along, so I could have been recording my confusion and resistance in real time.
Read part 2 here:
This paywall below is just so the audio remains just for paid subscribers.