Are You Still a Slave?

3 Signs that Religious Programming Still Contains You

It’s been said that the worst form of slavery is the one that tricks you into thinking you’re free. Imagine going through the second half of life thinking you have been freed from the mental shackles of religion, but years or decades later finding out that you were wrong. What a waste of spiritual and creative potential! It would be infuriating to think that we gave one more ounce our life force to religion. But for many of us, these mental strongholds can go unnoticed or unrecognized for what they are.

Sign #1: You still reject some aspects of yourself (“you are flawed”).
Even after deconstructing a lot of the damaging aspects of religion, including ones surrounding our inherent worth, there can be remnants of this lie keeping us locked (and contained) in disguised prisons.

For most of us who deconstructed the damaging aspects of religion, we came to realize that we are not “sinners saved by grace” and we came to reject most of the mental and spiritual abuse surrounding the concepts of original sin, our shadows, and our overall worth. But what about looking for the ways we were shamed for our gifts and positive traits? I wonder how many of us are still unconscious to the ways we were (and still are) held back from being spectacular, wildly successful versions of ourselves? It’s one thing to be shamed for your insufficiencies, but what about the damage of being shamed or knocked down for your brilliance?

One example. Religion told me that, as a woman, I was to be hospitable, serving, and reserved with my opinions, especially around men. I was supposed to be the inferior gender in the household, submitting to the authority of my husband, and letting him be the primary breadwinner. I was supposed to be conscious of not “making” men lust after me with the clothes I wore or the perceived flirtatious energy I emanated into the world. I was to fit into gender roles, sexuality roles, and success roles where it seemed the man always came out on top (pun intended).

Throughout my life, I was brainwashed by these kinds of expectations, and anything outside these constricting confines was considered a flaw in my character. But I always struggled with the glaring, unpalatable problem that some supreme Deity made me—crafted me—a certain way and then told me that it was sinful and wrong to be that way. That I had to reject my core, innate being in order to please God. (I felt the same about the problem that men are biologically and evolutionarily wired to notice and desire women, yet the Christian God—or rather the modern, error-riddled translations of Bibles portraying the Christian God—made it a moral sin for them to notice and desire women. Blimey!)

For example, the personality I was given at birth, which has a lot of fiery Aries qualities of leadership, courage, boldness, stir-the-pot inclinations, competitiveness, and assertiveness, is almost all at odds with Christian teachings—especially as a woman. I have many brilliant, insightful opinions about many topics that used to get shushed or scoffed at by men.

I have never enjoyed hospitality or generally serving people just because Jesus said so (only on my own terms). I tend to be possessive with things and people that I love, a quality I used to see as “sinful,” and now I see as just a personality trait. I am not the inferior, submissive, roll over and play dead type. I have a strong presence through being proactive, a go-getter, a questioner of authority, and a firestarter to help others do the same. This is the whole purpose of an Aries, the first sign of the Zodiac, paving the way for others! This is who I was made to be, and who I am falling in love with as I see her stepping out in her newfound power and unshushable voice.

According to the quiet, submissive, doormat Biblical model for women, you don’t get any more flawed than the woman described above! So why would some Creator God create me with certain, specific traits at my very core, and then later tell me I can’t be that way if I want to have his approval or blessing on my life? What a sick game (and a sick god) that would be to suggest that my core personhood was innately flawed and that I must spend my life reforming my natural inclinations to become someone that I am not.

I did realize, finally, what a crock of shit this was. Imagine me giving birth to a child with blond hair and blue eyes, yet telling that child from the time they are conscious that blond hair and blue eyes are sinful. Only brown hair with brown eyes are acceptable, and they must always work at changing them in order to get my approval. Effed up, I tell ya.

But here’s the rub. I deconstructed a lot of this bull hockey more than fifteen years ago, yet I still find myself shying away from my full potential at times with a certain amount of self-shaming for fear of outshining others with my inborn gifts and personality (especially men), or for not serving others enough, or for being too independent, or not sharing enough, or for being too successful.

These self-shaming energies that pop up occasionally are subtle, almost imperceivable because they are so familiar via the self-editing and self-deprecation that became “normal” tapes from early in life. We’re so used to thinking small and compliant, like good slaves, we don’t even recognize it in ourselves.

The highest truth about how you are living your life and whether you are choosing a path that is worthy and acceptable or not is so simple a child can grasp it, yet so profound it cannot be improved upon. Every action, every decision, every intention, every character quality can be measured against these two touchstones:

1. Does this thing lead toward me toward love (as in, love your neighbor as you love yourself)? The simple test of love is: would I want this action, intention, decision, or behavior used on me? If in good conscience, you believe you are loving your neighbor with a certain action but later find out your neighbor doesn’t see it that way, this is where “love covers a multitude of sins.” Like, say you bought your neighbor a ham for Christmas, and then learned later that your neighbor is Jewish and they did not appreciate the gesture. If your intent was love, even if the action was not perceived as loving by your neighbor, your intention of love and goodwill is more powerful than the perceived failure. There is no wrongdoing in trying to do the right thing and falling short out of innocence or ignorance.

2. Does this action/intention lead toward liberation? Liberation is not just about your liberation, but about the liberation of all involved. Is this action/intent meant to restrict or control someone, or is it meant to foster their greatest potential, free agent choice, and soul expansion?

When I am operating out of my inborn gifts of bold opinions, leadership, courage, or being assertive, I can always take one of two roads. The high road uses all of these gifts and resources for the love and liberation of myself and others—to inspire, impart courage, guide, ignite, or support. The low road uses them for selfish gain, or as tools of arrogance, divisiveness, conquering the will of others, and control. Every action we choose leads us either toward love and liberation, or away from these two highest truths.

The highest truth about you is that you were crafted to be exactly who you are. You are far from flawed. You are perfectly who you were made to be. There is nothing that can threaten your deepest worth and importance in this Story—except you submitting to authorities outside yourself. The only question is, how will you live out this one gloriously wild and beautiful life? In service to self or in service to others? Toward the love and liberation of all, or for selfish gain?

Sign #2: You feel isolated (“you are separate”).
Remember how much effort went into reinforcing your separateness from God? All those years, I felt like I was on the outside of something infinitely important, looking in. I always felt like the outsider, the servant who could never gain entrance or acceptance into the family. After a lonely childhood, my feelings of separation from the Divine Source felt like despair.

All those teachings about how God was untouchable, unapproachable, unable to look at such a filthy sinner as I (e.g. “your heart is desperately wicked…your righteousness is like filthy rags…”). The chasm could not be crossed, and only reinforced the loneliness in this world. Sure, Jesus supposedly bridged the gap so that God could finally look at us and even fellowship with us, but still the fact was that God was untouchable.

What kind of a God would go to the trouble to make a creation of billions of his own children and then reinforce his separateness from them? Doesn’t that sound like a deadbeat dad rather than a loving father? This guy should not have created children if he was only going to distance himself from them or even abandon them (reminds me of the Pink song, “What About Us?”). Even the Jewish teachings that preceded the Christian perspectives depict God as a loving father, very engaged in the care and development of his children.

I remember studying the human body in nursing school at the cellular level, learning about the intelligence and even consciousness of cells throughout the body to perform exact, specific functions with laser precision in order to keep the body functioning. I thought about how there is the overarching consciousness orchestrating and synchronizing the whole body to function together as a whole. I realized that is a parallel picture of God and humanity. The God (consciousness as operated through the brain) is the transcendent consciousness over “humanity” as the cells of his body. It helped me to heal a little bit of the orphan trauma I felt in this world, knowing that every individual cell (human) is part of the body of God, and the body would be remiss without even one of the cells because it takes all of them to function properly.

In Genesis 2:7 it says that God breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul. We subsist on the breath of God. Our breath is God’s breath, breathing not just through us, but as us. When my mom took her last breath, I was sitting by her bedside about two feet away, reading to her. When she exhaled for the last time, I felt a subtle wind pass by my face, on its way back to its Source from whence that breath came sixty-nine years earlier.

Put another way, we are all drops in an ocean. We are not separate from the essence of the ocean, as we contain the identical ingredients as the ocean, yet in a microcosmic form.

One of the Jewish Kabbalah teachings are the two natures of God. The Transcendent—above and beyond, already perfect nature of God—and the Immanent here and now, becoming perfect in and as us. We are the immanent God. You…you are an expression, a fractal of God here and now, having an experience. There is no part of you or your experience that could possibly be separate from the safe embodiment of the Transcendent God!

The Immanent God is why we can’t really blame evil and suffering on a “God out there.” We are that God trying to wake up to our perfect state. Genesis says that Adam fell into a deep sleep after he was brought into mortality yet there is no indication that he ever woke up. The story of Adam (the Hebrew word that means both humanity and earth, as in the earthen vessel) is our story of God-particles being submerged into forgetfulness/deep sleep to forge a journey back to our Transcendent Source through many lifetimes of experiences and lessons. It’s important to remember, these “lessons” and experiences are for play and fun, and no one ultimately gets hurt.

Sign #3: You react to life instead of creating life (“you are subject to fate”).
It’s obvious that we come into a story that seems like we are dealt a hand of cards that constrains our options of play. There is clearly a big disparity in the cards dealt to people around the earth and it seems that most people might not choose the cards they were dealt had they been given “free will.” Most of us live our lives feeling like we are subject to the whims and fate of the will of God.

And then life throws all kinds of unwelcome situations and unexpected events that we also have to navigate—financial struggles, health problems, relationship endings, emotional highs and lows, personal crises, addictions, and even deaths. In short, life feels pretty fated and disempowering a lot of the time. We didn’t choose our family, country, religion, intelligence, aptitude, addictions (some are much more problematic than others), phenotype (what traits we express such as hair and eye color), or a plethora of other variables, right?

Like I said, we were clearly dealt a hand. But Who dealt the cards? God? Or could it have been YOU—your own Higher Self who knew exactly what lessons and challenges you would want to experience in this lifetime, and so You prearranged or attracted a particular body, family, community, and environment at birth?

If you’re wondering how this is possible, learning astrology has helped me see how the planets each emit distinct psychological energies on us. If you look at a natal birth chart, it’s a circle around the moment you were born and where the planets (distinct personalities) were aligned exactly, (in what constellation/zodiac energies and on what stages of life) which would prearrange the cosmic blueprint of your life, including your personality, your life lesson, your wounds, your trajectory across lifetimes, and current energies of the planets interacting with your original blueprint, etc.

Trust me, I used to be a skeptic (actually disbeliever) until I started studying my own chart and could not believe how accurate it was in all the areas mentioned above!

I’m not certain about anything, but I’m beginning to suspect that we do (and did) have a say in the challenges and details of the life we’re living, as much as some of us don’t want to believe we would do such a thing to ourselves. I felt this way for a long time.

Even without astrology, it has taken me decades to come to acceptance and even approval of my life lessons, because they have been hard. If my hypothesis is true above, and we deliberately fall into this realm, reflected by our birth chart, at the exact moment that will align with our soul’s purpose, it means that I picked Pluto as my chart ruler! I mean, what kind of a sadistic person would ever pick Pluto for one’s life teacher—Pluto the planet associated with destruction, death, rebirth, power struggles, looking your deepest fears in the face, confronting the most hidden (painful) areas of your psyche, and all of the remaining pain that goes along with transformation—unless my soul wanted to grow exponentially during this lifetime?

Me thinks we can’t have a lot of these kinds of hyper-growth lifetimes back to back…it would crush a soul. But in this lifetime—I do believe now—I chose to overcome my greatest fears, perhaps carried over from previous lifetimes, and to take back my power that had been lost in the same. Add to that, I gave myself a huge dose of courage and fortitude (both sun and moon in the sign of Aries) to offer extraordinary assistance in this pursuit. I love that I gave myself such incredible tools—tools that religion tried to rob from me.

I have written extensively about many of the things I have overcome in this lifetime: physical abuse and emotional abandonment issues as a child, religious abuse and trauma, multiple profound losses, layers and layers of paralyzing, irrational fears, loss of power, isolation, etc. As they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Understand, my life has not been all difficult. I have had many seasons of great enjoyment and peace as well. But the years of work have been deep, dark, and painful (thanks, Pluto!).

The greatest thing I have learned through all of my losses and lessons is that I am not a victim—of other people, of my fears, of the cards I was dealt, of God’s will, or of any other force. All of the power struggles are located between my ears, and I have the ability to change narratives and retrieve my power at any given time if I am conscious.

“Life is not happening to you. You are happening to life.” ~Neville Goddard

The idea of waiting for some external God to dictate your next steps, causing you to always be at the mercy of his will and plans, does not account for the Godness he hid inside of you. You were designed to be a co-creator with God, not a passive, subservient observer. The moment you wake up to this truth, you set yourself on a path of wild discovery, wielding the freedom to create whatever you want in this malleable, plastic (simulation) realm that is readily anticipating your conscious acts of creating. Remember, the simulation is not your prison; it’s your playground.

Can we work toward being objective and accepting about the hardships of our lives instead of bitter? If we can conceive that we live in a safe Universe and that we have been given the true free will to create the life we want (read my New Thought post), what could possibly impede our eventual peace, happiness, and raging success? We have the tools to complete the job of freeing our minds from the last tentacles of religion by taking responsibility for ourselves, our beliefs, and our experiences.

Regardless of whether astrology is true, or whether you deliberately chose your lessons of this lifetime (or they were chosen for you by God), your life is what it is. You are not flawed, you are not alone, and your life is not dictated as if you were a heavenly puppet. One truth I’ve seen that stands the test of time: If you wait long enough, you will be able to look back, understand the purpose of your lessons, and even appreciate all the steps—painful and beautiful—that led to your growth.

Now that’s freedom!