I grew up believing in this thing called The Holy Ghost- and now I understand how that sounds as an outsider, but it definitely did not register as weird at the time of my growing up. Usually referred to as The Spirit, we believed that it was basically the voice of the Lord speaking to each of us for guidance, warning, comfort, yadayada. It was a nice concept when you actually believed it, but it was also confusing and at times, a little gaslighty.

The good:

1. Made you feel connected to God, like you had your own telephone help line.
2. Encouraged stillness, prayer, meditation, and observation to recognize said voice.
3. There was an emphasis on if the thought or feeling is good, then it’s from God. This was pretty vague, but it was meant to help you just take action on good things without overthinking.
4. Encouraged living well and feeling well in your body because someone who feels consumed by their body probably can’t pay great attention to the Still Small Voice.

My belief in The Spirit was really helpful in a lot of ways growing up. For example, I remember being around 8 years old, and my parents were watching a WWII documentary about the atom bomb on Hiroshima. There were stories of people’s skin falling off their bones and shadows being burned onto the buildings. Truly the stuff of nightmares (and it still is), but for me at 8 years old, I didn’t understand that times were different. All I knew was 9/11, my parents seemed distressed, and atom bombs. I lay in bed every night for weeks listening for the sound of every airplane passing overhead, feeling there was every possibility one of them carried an atom bomb destined to melt my skin and cause a slow, painful death to us all. But church had given me tools. I prayed, I hummed church songs, and tried to let that feeling of comfort come. And sometimes, it honestly did work. Believing there was a higher power watching over me really did calm the nervous system- and it did feel something like warmth and peace. Moments like that validated the belief. It didn’t occur to me at that age that a little 8 year old girl in Hiroshima Japan might’ve done the same thing as me with a very different result. For the time, it was a gift for me, but not for others.

The bad:

1. Spiritual promptings were the basis for pretty much every decision from the individual to high up leadership. This made things really confusing when you felt the Spirit was saying something different to you than your leaders and authority figures.
2. Sharing spiritual experiences was commonplace and encouraged. People regularly aggrandized small experiences, not to deceive but because it was easy to conflate emotions as voices of the Spirit. Since everything is based on feeling, you get people to believe your experience by being emotionally convincing them it was valid and true for you.
3. If other people are conflating their spiritual experiences and you are aware that your experiences are nothing like theirs- it’s confusing. It makes you feel you’re doing something wrong OR it makes you start conflating your own experiences as well without real awareness about what you’re doing. And the validation you receive when you do that is really strong- everyone loves a testimony that validates the collective story, so we validate the person who shares it well.
4. There are of course a lot of people who struggle to feel this still small voice, and who feel like they’re searching really hard for something that isn’t there for them. So naturally, there are also a lot of explanations and reasons given for why that might be happening:
   • Are you following all the rules? Keeping God’s commandments?
   • Are you praying and studying the Holy Scriptures and giving Him a chance to talk to you?
   • Are you insisting on a certain answer?
   • Are you being patient?
   • Sometimes…God just withholds an answer in His wisdom and we gotta have faith.

Now what is the real harm in this? It all seems somewhat inconsequential and arbitrary right? But from this way of viewing the world comes many people who:

• Believe something is true because they want to believe it’s true.
• Are compelled to place more importance on the advice and opinions of authority figures who are thought to have special “Gifts of the Spirit” on behalf of those they serve, when in reality, leadership is often rewarded to those who are gifted at emotional persuasion more than anything. The same people who struggle finding their own answers might be called to a position of leadership where they are now expected to get answers for everybody.
• Are susceptible and vulnerable to manipulation and deception by bad actors because they trust sincerity and have hushed the voice of skepticism in order to be more open to the still small voice.
• Live much more comfortably with cognitive dissonance because you inevitably get people receiving different answers and believing different truths, which shouldn’t be as commonplace if there was really one Spirit speaking through one God to everyone. It gets even more confusing when it’s revealed that people who were great spiritual teachers were actually really shitty human beings. If their words really spiritually impacted you and felt like the words of God, what are you suppose to do with that information?
• People who are highly prone to self shaming and gaslighting (the phrase “worthy of the Spirit” is super commonplace, AKA to not feel the spirit like everyone else who is crying as they testify of miracles means you must be doing something wrong.
• People on the opposite end of the spectrum who figure out early on that emotional performance as well as spiritual certainty and confidence gets rewarded with respect, title, and admiration. And people who are inclined to want those three things are usually people inclined to take it too far.

But the biggest consequence of this way of thinking and believing is one that I’m still trying to heal- and that is being familiar with the voice of my intuition. I’ve started calling it the voice OMI. This is the actual still small voice, and it’s still and small because it comes from within you, and it has to cut through the noise of your thinking and emotions to reach you. It does not come from a third party or a god in the sky. It’s a moving compass, like Jack Sparrow’s, always pointing you toward true expansion and joy.

My connection with my intuition was severely damaged when I lost the faith I was raised with. I had trust issues. I did not trust myself. How could I be trusted when I had believed so wrongly for so long about so much? I had resolved that I would probably never get to spiritual again because I would want it to be true, and it would silence the healthy skeptic in me that I was trying to nurture back to strength. I’m happy to say that my intuition and my skepticism are happy partners in a long-term relationship now. I feel that I am a spiritual being having a human experience and yet I don’t believe anyone else needs validate me for it to feel right.