Becoming a Nun Transcript

Liz: How many lives have you ever seen changed by a quote? There's a lot more work if work needs to be done than it can ever really be truly dealt with by a quote. So I struggle when personalities talk about their paths. I came into this through this form of meditation. I came into this happiness and joy in my life because I met so-and-so and read their book and it changed my entire life.

Rhea: But that happens.

Liz: It happens . . .

Rhea: And it can happen to someone else too.

Liz: Oh, it certainly can, but it's not about then devoting yourself to that teacher.

Rhea: No. It's about trying it and seeing if it works for you and if it doesn't, it being okay.

Liz: Right.

Rhea: I had a very similar experience. I started doing a lot of meditation and I followed a specific practice of someone.

Liz: Oh, you did?

Rhea: Who I think is excellent. I didn't give away my agency to someone else or worship a guru. I took the tools that they were giving and took advantage of them, basically to get closer to me. What I noticed is a lot of the people around me are starting to tend to spirituality instead of religion, but the problem is that whilst we've lost the light of religion, we seem to have almost kept its shadow. The shadowy practices that I associate with religion in some ways I see now echoed in people's relationship with spirituality.

Liz: Oh yes, because it's just transference.

Rhea: So it's all or nothing everywhere I go, and whilst ironically for me who I am, an extreme addictive person, this never sat right with me. This idea that in order to be new age spiritually, you have to be vegan, you have to wear sun blocking glasses, you have to stay away from electronics. It became another extreme.

Liz: Yes, very much.

Rhea: And it almost felt like it was invalidating people who were either just exploring it for the first time or who liked parts of it and didn't like others.

Liz: Who really liked eating meat.

Rhea: It also was putting a lot of people off.

Liz: Oh, I'm not surprised. It puts me off.

Rhea: Yeah, it's the hangover from religion, of devotion that we've now put into spirituality in the same way.

Liz: We've just gone from one end of the spectrum to the other and it's not necessarily about finding middle ground either. It's just about finding where you are and where you want to be on that spectrum. What keeps people really in that space of complete and utter devotion, but to the point where they're renouncing their sense of self is fear that if I'm wrong, if I listen to my own desires, then something bad can happen to me and I can't handle that kind of responsibility, when true spiritual maturity is to be able to say, I am responsible for my entire life. At the end of the day, it's not about necessarily taking on a practice. These practices are only meant to bring you back to yourself and when you are fully in yourself, in your energy, in your light, and loving yourself, that practice is done. And when we're finding ourselves in this level of extreme devotion, you're not in flow.

Rhea: No, you're operating from fear.

Liz: Absolutely. And as I see people falling into these practices, whether they be a kind of religion or a sort of new-agey, spiritual whatever, or the somewhat in between, I just keep seeing people get lost in the message. What works is just to throw it all out and start from zero, which is look at yourself in the mirror. Look at the ways in which you've been inauthentic with yourself and look at yourself with great compassion and ask, where have I been completely authentic with myself? Just like you said before, even though I know sometimes when I go against the rules I might be hurting myself, I have to be true to myself.

Rhea: I do.

Liz: And that's how you are able to live with yourself and that is how you are able to live in integrity. And so when we're falling into these new age spiritual practices or this religion, that's not a mirror to us. It's a mirror of an ideal to us.

Rhea: It's also a bandage, and I'm very guilty of this, and I think it's why I have such faith and trust issues around this stuff. If it's really real, how much of my devotion does it require?

Liz: My answer would always be zero, except to yourself.

Rhea: We're in a place where we can question some of this stuff and go, does it ring true to me? And kind of pick and choose the bits that make us feel good or make us feel love.

Liz: We do, but that's the point of this is we don't need any of those anymore. They are merely crutches. While they were seen as tools before doing without them we're better off.

Rhea: So without them, we’re what though? What do we have then?

Liz: We have ourselves. We have the love and support of our family and friends. The core issue around the need for devotion to subscribe to a particular place in this religious spiritual spectrum is fear, and that fear comes from doubting our purpose, and it tells us you're going to sacrifice who you are, who you know yourself to be for the sake of this relationship between you and this "church". And by church I don't mean a structure. I mean whatever this collective is.

Rhea: But on top of that, it's also so you can feel connection to others. I know a lot of people who will join different meditation practices or whatever it is because they are a collective themselves. It comes with friends with like-minded beliefs.

Liz: Right.

Rhea: So it's not just you have a connection to something bigger. You also have a connection to your fellow human.

Liz: Yes, and that kind of connection to the collective is only genuine and authentic when you've already formed that relationship to yourself. You do not get to that relationship to yourself through other people and through another practice. So there's no harm in joining groups once you are in your whole place.

Rhea: I don't know if I agree with that. In order to sometimes find yourself, you need a key. Whilst I'm not saying the whole journey will be in one practice or one thing, definitely different practices, different things will open up different bits of you to you. That's why you outgrow things and you find new things from a manifestation practice to listening to intuitiveness, to reading books, to journaling, to astrology, to this. I've done it all. I'm an information whore, but part of it was using those things to unlock bits of me to learn more about me, because I'm not going to be able to sit at home and just be like, oh yes. That I know. I won't.

Liz: Yes. No. Well to be fair, you are a dabbler. Did you need it all? No. Part of what also drove you to it is not just curiosity, but because, and some fear, if I get this wrong, I at least need to have some tool. So there's a lack of trust that also drove you into some of those.

Rhea: Totally.

Liz: Right.

Rhea: But the benefits of going into those things, I don't know if I would've found out some of that stuff without it.

Liz: But my point is that going forward, the benefits do not outweigh the negatives, because what's happening more and more as a lot of these 3D constructs are falling apart, people are desperately trying to have something to anchor them and then that spiritual practice or that religious practice or whatever, that becomes their reality. That's their life preserver.

Rhea: And what's so bad about that?

Liz: It's not the truth. It narrows one's path to the divine because it's still looking outwardly, not inwardly. I'm not trying to say that people are wrong in what they're gravitating towards. What I am trying to say is stop for a minute and think about why you are. What is driving you towards this? I mean, I know enough people who dabble, dabble, dabble. Spend years and years and a ton of money on all these practices, going to seminars, going on retreats, and I’ll tell you that after ten years they've barely made any progress. They're not filled with their truth. They're not filled with their light. They're not filled with their knowledge. They're filled with everybody else's knowledge. When you've been able to really connect with yourself and your purpose, you have all the knowledge you need because the truth is so much deeper than that. The truth takes you so much farther than that, and there are so few practices in existence at this moment that get you there. Only the ones that really help strip away all those layers and blocks to your own self knowing.

Rhea: So what you're saying is it's really about reconnecting to yourself. Instead of giving my agency and power to something outside of me which could make me feel good but might not be my truth, I am going to start my divinity inside, sometimes questioning why I'm looking outwards instead of inwards, and facing those fears.

Liz: Absolutely, and block out the noise. Block out what so many people are trying to tell you.

Rhea: Because once you know your own truth, then you can respect other peoples', then you can know your own love. Stop asking for someone else to tell you what's wrong, even the guides, even your best friends, even anyone outside of you. You've just got to follow what feels right to you because that's the piece.

Liz: It is.

Rhea: And then if you fuck it up . . .

Liz: And the peace. It's the missing piece and it's the peace, the inner peace. There's too much noise right now and there's even more and more noise because people are searching. They are desperately searching, more than they have been at any other given time because we sense that it's important. We sense that it's Now. We sense that time has come for this, but yet we've been so blinded and we've been living in that 3D reality for so long, we've lost our way and so we want some light. We need somebody to kind of point us the way. Actually we are all, within that collective, we all have that truth and we can each find our own way.

Rhea: And we're all going to interpret it differently.

Liz: Oh yes!

Rhea: So there's this beautiful theory that I learned in my first year or second year of university. This is the intellectual portion of the podcast, and it was about communication and pure communication and how unless you are standing in front of someone who had had all the exact same experiences, knowledge, emotions, feelings, interpretations, everything is you. There was no way you could ever say anything to them and for them to understand it in exactly the way you meant it, because no matter who you are or no matter how you are, you are always going to listen to it with the lens of your own perceptions, stories and experience, rather than what the other person is saying. It's just human nature. It's just who we are. I guess it's the same for this is that you could meet someone who really has got it all figured out.

Liz: Find me that person.

Rhea: Find me them, but you could. Let's say in a very hypothetical world, but unless you've got it all figured out too, you're not going to understand them anyway.

Liz: Not fully, and the missing piece for many of these teachers and students is compassion, because compassion is what allows you to understand that person even if you haven't been in their exact shoes and done everything that they've ever done, because it's saying, I see where you're at and that is okay and I see you without judgment.

Rhea: There's so much out there. To be happy, you've got to do X, Y, Z, A, B, C, and we'll throw in the kitchen sink. But actually what it is doing is it's also creating more anxiety for people.

Liz: So much!

Rhea: Is it like the fear, the punitive part of religion I carry today, although I don't believe the other part of religion. So I'm still waiting for someone to come and smite me.

Liz: Well, cause that stuff stays with us and it's in our wiring. To be fair, it's still in many people's DNA, but epigeneticists will tell you trauma from lifetimes, it still is expressed in our DNA. When we're talking about religious and devotion, iasmuch as it's in our wiring to believe in punishment and stuff, it's also in our wiring to believe in the divine, to want the light. When you're in it, you feel a glow, you feel love. It's all so lovely and so all of these other things have just been channels to the divine. We don't need these channels anymore though. We don't, because we're finding that we are the light of the divine and that it resides in each and every one of us and it always has.

Rhea: So really the light of the divine can be found—not to sound like a fucking greeting card—but . . .

Liz: No, seriously.

Rhea: I'm going to do it, when you share a laughing moment with your best friend or when you see someone that you haven't seen in a while and you feel your soul light up.

Liz: It's any moment of love is really what it is. It's not just sort of like flow in terms of creative flow or anything. It's really when you are in a moment of love

Rhea: And whether that love is for yourself or someone else, but that love for someone else can only be achieved once you love yourself.

Liz: Absolutely.

Rhea: So the first step is to love yourself and in order to love yourself, you can't really give someone else your devotion, because what you're doing is you're saying, I trust you to tell me how to love me, rather than I trust myself to tell me how to love me.

Liz: And they will let whatever it is that you're exuding, which could be love, right? I mean, the love of gurus often are the ones who transmit that. I'm going to let that love replace my own.

Rhea: And then what happens is, is that you will always need that love to feel light whereas if you have the love from yourself, then not only are you carrying it around, but it's not going to leave you. In fact, it can only get stronger.

Liz: Exactly. Because that's not the co-dependent relationship. So the reason why this is called “Becoming a Nun” is because when you become a nun, you remove yourself from the world, right? You join a cloister and you devote yourself entirely. That's not what the world needs. It's not about being in any kind of singular collective or choosing to remove yourself and sitting on a hilltop somewhere in Lotus position, meditating. What the world demands of all of us right now is to be completely engaged with it. But the only way in which we can see and experience a new world and create a more peaceful world for our children's generation and their children's generation and so forth, is that we do that from a place of light. We do that from a healed place because if all we're doing by engaging in the world is just throwing all of our shit out there, all of our shadow, then we're not changing the world for the better. It's about getting your shit right, right now, and better to engage with real human beings than through these self-help books.

Rhea: Yeah, or stories in your mind. So really now is the time to find yourself, to trust yourself and in doing so, to really love yourself. You might be inspired by other people's wisdom, but you're not going to absorb it as your own until you understand it as your own and the more practice you do of facing your fears, facing your shadows, connecting with other people, loving other people, and loving yourself, that's the only devotion that you need ‘cause that's a devotion to yourself.

Liz: Always ask yourself, why am I subscribing to this belief system? What is this belief system telling me about myself? Are the messages positive because it reinforces all the beliefs that I have about myself, or are they positive messages that make me feel better ‘cause really deep down I feel like shit? But here I am just waiting for redemption. And I think until you can answer yourself honestly, none of those communities are going to really work for you. They're merely just going to band-aid the issue that drove you to them in the first place.

Rhea: Because if you love something, own it.

Liz: Yes, absolutely.

Rhea: If you love parts of something, own the parts.

Liz: Or is there a fear? Because most of the time when we're afraid to leave that particular place or we don't want to leave that particular teacher, we're afraid to move on. But I will tell you that everything serves its purpose and has an expiration date, except for you, that your evolution never ends. Every lesson needs to bring you back to yourself. Self-devotion, devoting yourself to your truth and your purpose will get you there.