Belief

When I was around 5-6-7 years old, a question was asked inside me.  "Who am I?"  There was sort of a conversation between the question and my mind.  Mind would answer based on information I knew.  "I'm Ginger", "I live in San Angelo", "My family is...", "I look like...", "I have...",  In response to each answer, the question would repeat.  It was different than any other question I had ever asked or been asked and there was no judgement in it.  It was just an invitation.  There was a distinct body feel to the question.  Intimacy.  As I lay there, eyes closed in the dark, every answer about me being met with the same spacious question, my consciousness released from everything I knew.  I wondered if I was dead but it didn't scare me.  It was peace.  

Life went on, we moved from San Angelo to Temple, my parents divorced, I started 3rd grade, made friends, I probably forgot about the question. In middle school I was aware that the Baptist Church was talking about salvation and God.  I was good at following instructions and pleasing adults and I took to laying in my bed at night praying praying praying until I fell asleep.  I was trying and reaching and asking their story of God for connection and I just got tired.  Maybe I recognized something I had forgotten and was wondering where it was.

When I was probably 15, sitting in the passenger seat with my dad driving down Gen. Bruce Drive to the Walmart or somewhere for the 400th time, looking out the side window at mowed brown grass, a very distinct question spoke in my body - "God, is this all there is?!"  But the question had a familiar, intimate tone, spoken so clearly inside me that I wasn't sure if it had broadcast into the car.  I looked over at Dad but he just kept driving.  

Our culture is great at pretending. We're built for social connection and we follow what others do until we have enough sense of our reality to start following our own inner callings, these spiritual questions. They get our attention and direct us back to ourselves.  When we listen and allow, in that internal way, what we eventually run up against is our beliefs - those readymade answers that are given to us by society, our families and our own conditioned minds.   

Healing takes courage.  It's not exactly comfortable to release beliefs so that we can find out what else, but that is exactly where the healing process will take us if we let it.  It's up to us how and when we'll let it, so it's unique for everyone. And we help each other find the courage when we share how it actually is to move beyond beliefs. As a matter of experience, once a belief is disintegrated we can look back and realize just how fearful and limited our lives had been when the belief was running the show.  We wind up hunkering down and defending the story in some way and that divides us from what's actually happening.  It could seem like an impossible or terrible proposition to let go of defended beliefs, to pause and look at just what it is we're believing, but reality doesn't need us to believe in order to exist.  Existence and reality are just one movement, no belief needed.  I don't have a belief in sitting here.  I don't believe in breathing.  It's just what's happening.  So who am I when I'm not believing a story about myself?