When I was growing up I didn’t have much exposure to traditional religion. What little experience I did have was made up of a few visits to Sunday school and what amounted to less than a handful of visits to church. To this day I remember the rather musty smell of churches, a smell that I assume was derived from a combination of ancient wooden pews and ancient congregations; I remember the feel of thin pages in well thumbed bibles; the hard cushions that we knelt on to pray, I also remember how our voices swelled in fleeting unison when singing the comforting choruses of hymns and then how we mumbled our way through the rest of the song, grateful that at least the organist knew the words. The other thing that stays with me to this day is that my encounters with traditional religion were boring beyond belief, to me it was a dry, lifeless experience that seemed to captivate very few. As a child my world was full of colour and yet when I stepped into church all the colour seemed to drain from life.
Sitting here, writing this, I am aware of how different my experience of religion is today. The religion I practice today feels like true religion. It is never static and has a vibrancy and undeniable aliveness about it that keeps it constantly moving and changing. And when I say ‘practice’, there are nothing that I must read, nothing that I must recite, no rituals that I must perform, I don’t even have to pray; my practice is quite literally my life and the way that I choose to live it, no more and no less.
This massive shift in my experience and understanding of religion has come about through the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom as presented by Universal Medicine and although my view of religion has been greatly influenced by my relationship with Universal Medicine, it is very much MY understanding of religion, specific to me and my life. The reason why my relationship feels so very personal is because it has come from my relationship with myself, through my connection with my body. In fact, it is by re-connecting back to my body that I have remembered the true meaning of religion.
For me, true religion not only starts with a deeper intimacy with life but also leads to a deeper intimacy with life. A relationship with life (my life) that is constantly evolving, even when it feels static. I am finding that life is forever calling us back to our roots, calling us to live in a harmonious way with ourselves and others once again.
This pull to return to the truth of who we are never stops, so even if we live in the same way, week after week, year after year and even lifetime after lifetime, our relationship with life is constantly changing, even though the outside may look misleadingly the same. In fact we have to work extremely hard in order to keep it looking like it is the same and we can waste an inordinate amount of energy in trying to deny the fact that we all have a very naturally intimate relationship with life.
But for me the real magic begins once we wake up to the fact that we are in an active relationship with life. I now feel a much deeper responsiveness to life, I can feel how it is affected by the slightest movement that I make and by every word that I speak, and the honouring of this, feels like a very naturally religious way of being.
This is a state of religion, it is an ongoing and never ending oneness with everything, an intertwined, interwoven existence where there is no beginning and no end. To imagine that religion is something that we only ‘do’ at certain times is incomprehensible to my body as for me religion is our constant open ended relationship with life.
This massive shift in my experience and understanding of religion has come about through the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom as presented by Universal Medicine and although my view of religion has been greatly influenced by my relationship with Universal Medicine, it is very much MY understanding of religion, specific to me and my life. The reason why my relationship feels so very personal is because it has come from my relationship with myself, through my connection with my body. In fact, it is by re-connecting back to my body that I have remembered the true meaning of religion.
For me, true religion not only starts with a deeper intimacy with life but also leads to a deeper intimacy with life. A relationship with life (my life) that is constantly evolving, even when it feels static. I am finding that life is forever calling us back to our roots, calling us to live in a harmonious way with ourselves and others once again.
This pull to return to the truth of who we are never stops, so even if we live in the same way, week after week, year after year and even lifetime after lifetime, our relationship with life is constantly changing, even though the outside may look misleadingly the same. In fact we have to work extremely hard in order to keep it looking like it is the same and we can waste an inordinate amount of energy in trying to deny the fact that we all have a very naturally intimate relationship with life.
But for me the real magic begins once we wake up to the fact that we are in an active relationship with life. I now feel a much deeper responsiveness to life, I can feel how it is affected by the slightest movement that I make and by every word that I speak, and the honouring of this, feels like a very naturally religious way of being.
This is a state of religion, it is an ongoing and never ending oneness with everything, an intertwined, interwoven existence where there is no beginning and no end. To imagine that religion is something that we only ‘do’ at certain times is incomprehensible to my body as for me religion is our constant open ended relationship with life.