A colleague recently asked me if I was religious. I responded with a joyous yes, and then in that moment of silence after responding I found myself wanting to fill up the space with an explanation. I realised he felt awkward and that I was picking up on this, wanting to make it better. I stopped myself before going into what would have essentially been a justification and defence of why and how I was religious – and very importantly, how I was not a nutcase.
In the past, religion was synonymous with being a nutcase. Not necessarily consciously, but I would have baulked at the suggestion that I might be religious and would certainly never admit it openly. It was a no-go zone. History books I devoured at school were all about religious wars and people being slain and tortured in the name of God. I also grew up in a so-called religious ‘hotspot’ in the northern part of Greece which was always on guard lest the Turkish invasion happened all over again in modern times and we were taken over by the scary Muslims. The town in which I grew up was apparently and disconcertingly being overtaken by the Muslim population – because Turkish families would have more children than Greek families. Simple arithmetic really, but it didn’t change the fact that there was an expectation we would walk on eggshells around each other, because at a national and institutional ‘religious’ level it was pretty much stipulated that we were to be enemies.
So, religion was a messy business. And it wasn’t really embraced at home while I was growing up either – how could God, I was told, actually exist and be a loving and caring dude, when there is so much suffering in the world?
The thing is, even though that might have been a rational argument that shut me up as a young and inquisitive child, I kept wondering and questioning what I could see around me because it was totally and utterly contrary to what I was feeling inside of me. All the rational arguments in the world and all the ugliness I could witness and read about in times past and present, couldn’t make me settle and stop me asking myself – because there seemed to be no one else I could ask – if really, this is all there is to life, to us, to the wider universe I could feel and see all around me. Was the notion of God really just like Santa Claus? Another make-believe fantasy figure that would leave me feeling flat, when it was blatantly obvious he did not exist?
In the silence of just being with myself, even as a little girl – amidst the many whirlwinds and commotions I seemed to experience – I knew the answer. I knew that there was so much more to the physical delineation that me, and all the adults and my siblings who were my immediate world back then, appeared to be. There was a knowing that was crystal clear when I looked up at the vastness of the night sky and the phases of the moon. To the rational mind that was being greatly encouraged in school and at home, it made no sense. But to the sensitivity inside, it made all the sense in the world. There was another communication I could tune into, where I would feel connected to and part of something grand, immensely loving, and very familiar.
Until I came across The Way of The Livingness, I would have cringed at the suggestion that this communication was my communion with God, and with my Soul. But – that God was not a white-bearded guy with a lightning rod in his hand he would slam down on the damned and the ugly, but an all-mighty energetic field of beholding love that occupies every crevice of this universe in which we reside, including the particles of our own bodies, whether we deny it and fight it or not – was never something I needed to be convinced of via a so-called clever argument. I felt it through the cells of my own body, and the knowing that I had – ever since I literally popped out of the womb – was once again the irrefutable truth.
The Livingness reminded me of the religion I have always known – this lifetime and many more before. That there is a way I can live, which allows for the nurturing and fostering of the most precious relationship I can ever have – the relationship with my Soul.
When we make our way of life religious, life becomes a ceremony, a ritual with so much richness that nothing is mundane. Function is replaced by a way of being that sees the magic in the smallest of gestures. Nothing is nothing, everything has a consequence because it either means greater access to the Soul, or lesser. The temple of worship is the physical body I am in, in the humble acknowledgement more and more, that this fleshy apparatus that takes me to work and back and to everything in life that needs to be done and accessed, is my pathway back to the divinity I am from, and am.
My religious way has no rules or rights and wrongs. It holds dear the truth that is communicated through my body. God is not outside of me. He is in my movements when I align to the divine energy that moves me when I am obedient to it. Then I feel God in every particle and every cell, tangibly and irrefutably. The divinity I am is awakened, reconnected to and on the way to being embodied. My religion is my dedication to this; to living in such a way that the Soul can be embodied and lived on this earthly plane of ours, which needs the Soul more than anything else.
So am I deeply religious you may ask? Yes, yes and yes again. No defence or justification required. Simply a forever deepening communion with the divine communication within.
