My Nana died from suicide when I was a young teenager. When Mum came back from her trip to New Zealand to plan her mother’s funeral, she told us that Nana had been in Transcendental Meditation before she died. This information was a massive relief to Mum. That’s why Nana did this. Transcendental Meditation was dangerous. It was evil, risky behaviour that danced with the devil.
Somehow, the severe mental health issues Nana faced her whole life were forgotten. And the fact that her husband committed suicide a few years earlier. That’s not why she went down this path. It was meditation’s fault.
This was an expected reaction from my mum. I grew up church-hopping around the pentecostal scene of the Gold Coast (my parents were in lockstep with each other, and the church) and their message was clear: ‘New Age’ is an ever-present danger to be fearful of.
New Age was a big, scary word that covered a range of practices that, I was told, was a highway line to hell. Literally. Yoga, reiki, crystals, meditation, clairvoyance. I was taught that these practices could make you feel really good, but it was a trick. The happy feeling you feel while meditating was actually demons masquerading as feel good vibes to suck you in.
I think the worst part of this scary and forbidden category was that it was everywhere outside the walls of church and home. It was friends talking about crystals or karate classes. It was a Sweet Valley Twins book with an Ouija board plot point, it was a teacher talking about meditation. Not partaking in these practices didn’t seem to be safe enough – talking about them or learning about them was enough to be in the category of dabbling. I thought it may somehow sneak up and get me if I didn’t concentrate hard enough to stay away from it all.
Growing up with this rhetoric, what you learn most importantly is this: don’t trust your feelings.
Don’t trust yourself. Of all the things my religious upbringing taught me, I think that the lack of critical thinking and trust in my own thoughts was the most damaging.
The world is a scary place when you are not taught to trust your emotions and feelings. ‘They’ could be lying to you. YOU could be lying to you. Who and what do you trust in this unseen terrifying world of demons luring you into a yoga mat? What if it makes you feel good? It’s not real, it’s a distraction from God.
April 2020 is when I dipped my toe into the New Age basket for the first time. I tried yoga. I was 39 years old.
What led me to this risky practice in the first place was the severe 8-week lock down we had in NZ at the very start of the pandemic. I have anxiety and exercise every day is a necessity for me to feel good – no exceptions. This need to move my body at home led me to YouTube workouts. It is here that I stumbled onto a YouTube yoga class. Immediately, I was on high alert and ready to shut it down if my spidey senses picked up any un-godly vibes. Apart from the occasional inner dialogue of me screaming to myself ‘YOU’RE DOING YOGA, BE CAREFUL’, I loved it. Any fear or trepidation I brought to that first class was stamped out by how centred I felt almost straight away.
Yoga was ‘wrong’. Yet, after leaving my yoga mat I felt calmer and more connected with myself and the world around me than I’d ever felt after a church service. I have found a spiritual practice that grounds me back to myself, my breath and me. I don’t even know if saying ‘back to’ is an appropriate thing to say as I’ve never really met myself in this way.
Practising yoga was the start of a journey that enabled me to see with clarity the depths that the beliefs of the church and my parents had on my life. Those beliefs were as much outward as they were inward. The grip was strong. The fear was strong.
What I understand to be stronger than those things now, is the grounding in myself. I understand now that I am a strong woman, and like all women, I have the superpower of my own intuition. I’m learning to trust that.
I’ve been doing yoga almost every day for 2 years, and I still have some fleeting moments of childhood coding in me that wonders if God will smite me for it. Deconstruction and rewiring is a long, slow journey.
As for me and God? I still don’t know the answer, but now in my 40’s I’m really evaluating it for the first time. What I do know is that I don’t need to consult a church elder or someone spiritually above me to make decisions about my own precious life. I’m not frozen by the fear of making the wrong decision: obsessively praying for the direction God would want me to take. I still talk to trusted people, but the prerequisite for who to go to for advice has nothing to do with how close to God they appear to be.
Most importantly, I go inwards to find the right direction and decisions. I trust that – I trust me. I’m not living with the fear of my feelings tricking me. The God I now feel safe with is a She. She is wise and powerful and She is also me. Oh the audacity of this statement for a younger me to read!
One of the places I meet Her, is on my Yoga mat. I am relieved.
Breathe.
Calm.
Namaste.
