“I’d like to establish a new relationship with God.”
It felt like an out-of-body experience as it dropped from my mouth. At the start of the year, sitting in a circle of women, blankets draped and markers scattered across the floor, we shared our aspirations.
“Wha? Excuse me?” My inside self said, now, slightly embarrassed. I could have just gone with get a new car, write a new book, or plan that family vay-cay.
Instead, I swung for the fences. Perhaps more aptly, the gates. The pearly (golden?) ones.
My relationship with God has been, how should I say, a wee complicado.
I grew up in the Catholic Church. And as a kid, I loved going to church. Not because of the messages, the priests, or the Bible. I loved the space of church. I loved all the babies and families. The stained glass and high ceilings. Even the gruff nuns who loved you underneath their stern facades. I loved when we’d be instructed to say hello to those around us during mass.
Peace be with you…
And also with you…
I wasn’t particularly seeking something else when I jumped ship to Buddhism. I still frequented church groups even on my college campus when desiring community.
But I struggled with the idea of God, who, in my mind, was some bearded old man in the sky. I wasn’t a fan that the gays were being excluded, all whilst little children were being abused at the hands of trusted religious authorities.
So many things felt off to me.
At 20, sitting at a lecture in Kathmandu, sipping chiyaa and listening to a Rinpoche speak on Buddhist philosophy felt like divine intervention, to say the least.
I was transfixed.
I fell hard for karma, non-attachment, non-duality, and the absence of a singular creator God. It felt like every doubt I had ever held about my childhood faith had finally been answered. Or at least elegantly rerouted.
Perhaps this was it.
With the same fervor I bring to everything, I went in hard. Super duper. By the end of my semester abroad, I had taken refuge in a new faith. I’d been given the name Tsering Yangzom, meaning “fearless.”
Behold, I was a Buddhist now. And a super Buddhist, at that.
And for a long while, it fit.
To this day, I am still deeply moved by Buddhist philosophy and the practice of meditation. It shaped me. Saved me, even. But over time, the religion part of it began to lose some of its luster. Not because the teachings stopped mattering, but because I started to see that the contradictions I had once found in Catholicism were there too.
Just in a different costume.
Different incense. Same humans.
So, there I sat. A recovering yogini. A Catholic school dropout. A disillusioned dharma darling.
A seeker, nonetheless.
But this time, I wanted something different. Not your parents’ kind of God. Nor the dreadlocked hippie chic down the street’s loosey goosey talk about the universe and vibes and things (though I do love that).
A way of understanding God that could hold the beauty of the Bodhisattva path, the intelligence of meditation, the mystery of dreamwork, the shimmer of the cosmos, and still leave room for the word God without me wanting to crawl out of my skin.
Could it be possible?
This weekend, I returned home from a week-long retreat. If you’ve ever retreated, you know it’s hard to put into words the impact these experiences have on your life.
It was fantastic. Also, it was hard. I met my limitations. I climbed the walls of my mind. I hated things that were happening, and then pretended it was those things instead of my own mind.
And then, I settled the heck down.
I sat with myself for longer than I wanted to. I came out the other end. I remembered how humbling and powerful meditation is. And how far I’d strayed from having it be an important part of my life. I’d been treating it more like a brief knuckle bump, and less like the long-held soul hug that gives you chills.
I’ve been falsely believing this material existence is all there is.
But then, something opened.
This retreat helped me remember…
Lying on the floor in the middle of meditation, it hit me. God, the kind that I’ve been seeking, has been with me all along. All I needed to do was reflect. The breadcrumbs had always been there, proof in my life that I am, and have always been, guided.
We all are.
In the family I was born into. In my siblings. In the landscape that raised me. In this body of mine. In lifelong friends and new ones. In my husband. In my children. In my callings. In my failures. In the people who have hurt me and the people who have healed me. In our animals. In these mountains. In every beautiful and brutal turn my life has taken.
All of it. Every last bit.
That is God. He/she/it (they? - so progressive) is just on the other side of the veil. In you and in me. There in every moment. Never apart. No church, or monastery, or slyly coercive youth group leaders, or Easter Sunday outfits necessary.
Praise be.
As I write this, I realize I am trying to explain a realization that hit me like a ton of bricks, but that reads like a gentle bit of influencer faff. Like trying to explain the entirety of your mushroom journey to your friends over coffee the next day.
I SAW God. Like for reals. (Cue dreadlocked neighbor in moon pants.)
At any rate, it felt big.
And I come home feeling more trust in my life, and ease in my heart knowing that I don’t have to grind quite so hard. It is already written. God is in every last bit of everything.
And so I will allow myself to cuddle my cat who never leaves my lap, instead of pushing her aside so I can “get back to work,” and let the conversations with my parents on the phone linger for longer than I believe I have time for. I massage my kids’ backs for another minute longer at night because they still want me to. Because in every single exchange, it’s just another example of God colluding with God, every mundane moment just as holy as the next.
To the Divine in all of us,
To find out more about my retreats, writing, and other offerings, please see my website.
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