Releasing Childhood Baggage About Religion So We Can Have A More Satisfying Relationship with God
Hey everyone, here’s a topic that has come up a few times recently that is preventing a LOT of people from stepping into their full power: resistance to talking about God. Have you ever noticed that some people bristle at the very mention of the word “God,” even if they don’t know what the other person has to say about God?
Often, they were turned off to religion for very good reasons… Yeah, it’s not all that surprising. When people react to a word like “God,” or “Jesus,” or “religion,” or “Allah,” they are not really reacting to the present moment. They are reacting to the past. Specifically, they are usually having an emotional reaction to something that happened in childhood that turned them off to religion. If religion was used in childhood as a way to manipulate or punish, then clearly they might be a little wary of it.
For me, personally, I had very mixed feelings about spirituality for a long time. I always felt as a child that there was “something bigger,” some kind of spirit animating the world. Yet I did not have a very pleasant experience with organized religion. My mother left the Catholic church when I was very young and would often criticize it. We were Methodists for a while, and then mom switched yet again to Universalist Unitarian. It was confusing to say the least. Plus, going to services felt like an obligation not something I enjoyed. I resented getting up early in the morning on Sunday after getting up early Monday through Friday for school. I didn’t feel connected to God or Spirit when I was in church. Mostly I wanted to get out of there.
Add to that: the teachings at church did not make much sense. One teaching contradicted another, and nobody seemed to be able to explain anything to my satisfaction. We were just supposed to accept it, even though it didn’t make any sense. And much of it seemed guilt-ridden and punitive, not to mention negative toward women.
Plus the kicker: my dad was an atheist and a scientist who refused to go to church with us. So there was a conflict between my parents about religion that amplified the conflicts that were already there.
Frankly, I felt more connected to spirituality through nature, and I really enjoyed being in the woods or near the water, where I got to have that sense of being connected to All that Is without the religious “baggage.”
And that doesn’t even touch upon what all of us collectively have experienced watching religion be misused around the globe in the name of violence, genocide, and censorship.
I’m certainly not alone in having early life ambivalence about religion. Many of my private clients have discovered in our sessions that they are actually furious at God, their parents, their church, other churches, and everything having to do with religion.
For many people, the “easy” way to resolve all this is simply to become “anti-religion” and ban religion as a topic of conversation. Or they may be very rigid and defensive about insisting that religion is an individual choice and nobody can tell them what to do.
All of which is okay to a certain point … until you realize, as I did through a near-death experience and years of experience with transformational coaching … that by making religion and spirituality “off limits” or “bad,” we are actually disconnecting from a deep part of ourselves AND disconnecting from an extremely powerful Source of power and guidance.
This topic is so charged for so many people that trying to talk about it logically is almost hopeless. Talking about it often results in so much conflict that people wish they had never even raised the subject. Is there any more resigned phrase in the human language than, “let’s agree to disagree”? :(
By contrast, I have found that in actual HBR sessions, we are able to unravel enough of the defensiveness and resistance that a person’s feelings about spirituality transform dramatically. When we peel off the layers of old domination, guilt, betrayal (common when the person prayed to God and the prayer was unanswered), inner conflict, resentment, and other negative feelings that built up during an entire childhood of some “yucky” form of religion — which may take a little while if the person has lots of negative associations with religion — something new usually opens up:
A sense of a personal, intimate relationship with a loving God (or Spirit, or Source, or Universe, or whatever my client wants to call it). AND a feeling of deserving-ness to begin asking this God or Spirit or Universe to start delivering miracles.
Although it’s not always easy to describe this sort of profound transformation in words, the release of negative emotional baggage about religion opens the door to a genuine feeling of Oneness with All that Is.
It also gets the person in touch with a deep sense of personal power, and it reduces the person’s fear of their own power, because there is a sense of the power being “guided” by the Divine, and therefore of being safe and serving the highest good of everyone.
Once that connection with Source is established, then I can teach my 15-Week Miracle coaching program students how to use tapping to enlist the aid of the Universe, which often results in spectacular and totally unexpected miracles :)
This is because the Universe is soooooooo much more intelligent than the ego mind, and it can work out ANY situation for the highest good of all participants, even when the ego mind is totally at a loss and thinks the situation is hopeless. After we reconnect with the Divine, the Divine can HELP us in so many ways, and turn “hopeless” situations into miracles.
It is not my intention to foist any particular view of religion on my clients or members. In fact, HBR is totally non-denominational, and I find that in their purest form all spiritual traditions are quite similar and can all be used in powerful ways. I draw on many spiritual traditions to empower my clients. My primary intention is to remove the negative emotional charge so that people can be truly at choice about their spirituality. It is a fundamental principle of HBR that anything we are avoiding is going to become a problem or limitation in our life. Whereas freedom can be found in true neutrality, and then we might even find ourselves embracing something (and loving it) that we had resisted for our entire life before that due to childhood wounds.
This is not the easiest topic for me to write about because most people won’t really be convinced unless they feel a shift in the way they feel about it. So for now I just invite you to open your mind to the possibilities. Tapping can be used as a super-charged form of prayer, where “ask and you will receive” actually becomes true on a regular basis. This will multiply the frequency and magnitude of your miracles (and we all do want miracles, right?? ;) ) Believe it or not, I have seen from extensive experience with clients that certain words (like “God” or “Universe” or “Garden of Eden” or “chi”) carry power with the subconscious mind — whether or not you consciously “believe” in God or anything else spiritual — so only by including those specific words in tapping sequences are we using tapping to maximum effect.
(Btw, if you get a lot of headaches, there’s a very good chance that you’ve got some anger with God that needs to be cleared … more on that in a later article.)
You can begin opening up this power for yourself by tapping on phrases like:
– Even though I’m angry about organized religion because … [add your personal list, stream of consciousness]
– Even though God let me down because …. [add your personal list and the list of injustices you’ve seen others experience]
– Even though I don’t believe in God because … [add your personal list]
– Even though I don’t want to talk about God because … [add your personal list]
This is also an area where “refusal tapping” can be very helpful … after tapping the negative beliefs, you can also address your inner rebel by tapping phrases like “I don’t want to hear about God,” “I refuse to be religious,” “I refuse to give my power away to organized religion,” and so forth.
Only after all of that baggage is cleared would I begin introducing a client to all the wonderful affirmations we can use to enlist the power of God to help guide us, support us, and bring us everything we need to live a joyful life.
Of course, you CAN get good results with tapping without ever referring to God … I just don’t see why anyone would want to skip over one of the most powerful tools we have, just because some authority figure in childhood gave religion a yucky name.
(In more advanced sequences, we can also use phrases and concepts from A Course in Miracles to accelerate tapping results dramatically. If you’d like to learn those, the best way is to sign up for my 15-Week Miracle coaching program.)
The most helpful way for me to demonstrate what I’m talking about in this article may be through some videos in the Gold Membership club. If you’re not yet a Gold member, be sure to upgrade now. And you can check for updates on this site about new tap-along videos that are being released.
Love,
About the Author and Expert EFT Tapping Coach Erika Awakening  Erika Awakening is a Harvard Law School graduate and former practicing attorney. She left the rat race to become a location-independent entrepreneur, holistic life coach, visionary, travel blogger, healer, and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT tapping) expert. Erika Awakening is one of the world's foremost experts on eradicating limiting beliefs and living life on your own terms. (Follow Erika on Google+ by clicking here.) |
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