You Make Me Believe in Magic

Liz: Do you remember how in Season 1, episode 9 - and I can't believe I remember this because my memory is so poor - but there was something about this particular topic, and maybe when we were writing the book, especially trust was such a thing for you.

Rhea: Yeah. Trust was a huge thing for me.

Liz: So it stays in my mind that it was episode 9, and we talked about how there's the four, you call them the four pillars of trust. There's trust. There's faith. There's knowing, and hope.

Rhea: Trust is kind of believing that no matter what you do, how you do it, when you do it, once you do it, it'll always be in your highest good. Faith is believing that an unknown force or something else will intervene to ensure that you will achieve your highest good. Hope reflects your deepest desires. And knowing is this kind of deep inside almost you can't explain it, but understanding or knowledge of a certain thing, and you don't know how you know, you don't know why you know, but you just know, and yeah, it's absolute.

Liz: The end.

Rhea: Yeah, the end. But I have to tell you that for me, as I was even talking about them, trust. Yeah, I do trust, but I've managed to logic that one. Once I've done something, whatever it is. Yeah. I stand by it because I trust that whatever's going to come from that will be in my highest good. It's so weird. So the one thing that I struggled with the most, now internally I struggle with the least, and up until I make the decision, I can overthink and stress, but once the decision's been made, I trust it implicitly and I'm free from that decision and whatever happens, happens. I don't look back and think if only I'd done something differently usually. For me, I have an interesting relationship with hope because I'm almost afraid to hope if I'm very honest. And I think that one is just after you've been, (and I guess these are why they are the tenets of trust) because after you've been disappointed many times, hope becomes the enemy in some ways, because it's the route to that disappointment

Liz: Very much. In part, because we've conflated our hopes with our fantasies

Rhea: Maybe. But I think also in part that on this healing path that we all take; hope is what gets us through it but disappointment is what teaches us. If I was to think about the people around me who struggle with this topic, my argument would be that we struggle with hope, not with trust and not with knowing, but with hope, because I am more scared to hope than anything else. And even though, as we've discussed in these episodes, my life has changed and so much, and I can definitely see such a huge difference in how I operate and what happens around me, I am still scared to hope.

Liz: I mean, to be fair, I think a lot of people are really going to struggle with hope going forward after 2020.

Rhea: I think it's really a hard one.

Liz: It's a tough one to maintain at this point. I think it was really in part because expectations and hopes sometimes really got confused. How I think or expect some outcome didn't happen the way I thought, and therefore I don't believe it can be possible and therefore I cannot expect or hope anymore.

Rhea: My knowing is normally bang on. It's just, again, being able to tell the difference between my knowing and my fear sometimes, but I think deep down you do know the difference. Whereas faith, I struggle with

Liz: Yes. The other F-word.

Rhea: Yeah. I struggle with it. I don't know how much faith I have because it is so easy to see all the things that have changed in my life. I can see them from a psychological and logical perspective. I can see why they make sense. And frankly, I haven't seen any miracles in my life really. And for me, I think that that's what would make me have faith, to see magic, to see something incredible happen, and it doesn't. Life is kind of normal. And for every argument that you can make, which is, Oh, it was the universe. Oh, it was spiritual, blah, blah, blah. I believe you can make the same argument for it was logic and perspective.

Liz: It was gravity.

Rhea: Yeah, literally. And so, I kind of feel a bit like with hand on heart, ask me to jump off a cliff today and assume my faith would catch me. I don't think it would.

Liz: And as we talked about back in episode 9, you can have trust without faith. You can have knowing without hope. We're all varying degrees of these pillars at various times in our lives, and so you had vacillated. There were periods where you were like, I don't trust anything, but your faith was through the roof. It just made sense somehow whatever you were doing, you were really channeling that faith. You were dipping into that well, because you needed to source from that. Suddenly your trust is sky high and your faith is like, yeah, okay. Try me next week. Let's see where we're at.

Rhea: Because ultimately, I trust myself more than I trust anything else.

Liz: And that is ultimately the point. That's what we have needed to have challenged all of these different concepts in order to get to that point where we can begin to have trust and faith in ourselves, know ourselves so well that we can have a knowing that we may not necessarily understand the source of, and that we can then begin to develop that hope, which can only come from that place of peace, which is why we had to record this episode in Season 4. Because hope is . . . I mean, while we're not really here to discuss hope, hope does actually play into faith. So it used to be that people developed faith through miracles. It was magic. That you could only conceive of this unknown force or this thing or the universe, if you had some kind of concrete evidence. I need someone to walk on water. I need someone to bring somebody back from the dead, if you will. I need to know that you can do something that I believe only the "gods" can do. I need to know that you have extraordinary gifts that I do not have or cannot develop. So faith made everything seem possible.

Since 2016, if not sooner, but you can at least see that on this earth plane at least, 2016 marks the real unraveling of 3D. I mean, it's been unraveling over many years, but the real marked unraveling was 2016. So, part of that is that massive crisis of faith we've had, because one of the big tent poles of 3D has been religion and it no longer has the same hold as it did. But like any kind of power structure, because as we know, religion was really extremely powerful and influential, it is still holding on and holding on. But as we understand that there is no choice for anything that was really 3D power-based to survive in 5D, it's just going to continue to crumble. But as it crumbles, as we know anything that crumbles will leave a vacuum and nature abhors a vacuum, doesn't it? It's very much part of our human nature to want to rush and fill it. And so what have we been doing with it? We've been turning to anything. Social media, all I see is astrology. Suddenly, celebrities become elevated. They're here to save.

Rhea: As religion has been crumbling, everyone is doing other things. Whether it's yoga, breathwork, astrology, spiritual influencers are everywhere. Everyone's has some concept of spirituality, has some concept of . . . Everyone has something in their lives in some way or another, because in some respects, of course, we are all searching for some kind of meaning for this life, yet we're not buying into religion as that organized structure that it used to be because first of all, it's so corrupted, watching it crumble. And also, we're not that sheepie anymore. We're not sheep in the same way that we were.

Liz: But we are. We're just merely channeling that into something else and following blindly.

Rhea: Well, yes and no, because whereas religion, everyone was uniform. So we all believed in one God. We all believed in the same set of 10 Commandments within a group.

Liz: Whatever religion or whatever practice you've chosen to replace that becomes your religion. Then again, you generally sort of turn off your mind and follow again.

Rhea: But what I'm saying is the difference is that it will be different from the person sitting next to you and the person sitting next to him.

Liz: Oh completely. We're all different breeds of sheep.

Rhea: Yeah, exactly, whereas before we were all the same breed.

Liz: For the most part, yeah. I mean, there were different religions, but yes, that's fair. So you would know where your values lied by how much time you spent at a particular place. If you worshiped vanity, you were probably at the gym a lot. So it was less about spending time at church and more about spending time in the place where you liked to experience yourself the most. Wherever we would spend the most of the majority of our time, aside work, so we're not going to be like . . . I mean, it could be that you are a workaholic because that's where you derived a lot of your value. It could be that you spent a lot of time in the gym because you really wanted to spend all that time on yourself. It could be you spent a lot of time in a bar because you wanted to forget yourself. So while religion has shifted, our very interest in trying to connect to something still exists.

Rhea: Yeah. That makes sense.

Liz: We've just become very lost in that because of our crisis of faith.

Rhea: Which is why I've connected to myself.

Liz: And that's all it was ever meant to do. So all of that sort of soul crushing loss of faith that we'd experienced, either because of a really bad relationship or a family trauma, or we just lived religion. For me, I went to Catholic school and experienced some other unpleasant things and I thought, wow, this is religion? This is not for me. Thank you.

Rhea: Yeah, me too.

Liz: We might've all had just different or particular fall from grace, if you will. So there's all ways in which we had experienced this kind of loss of faith, but that was always to bring us back to ourselves and develop the faith in ourselves first, because only when you have that faith in yourself, could you even begin to conceive that there is something else out there, that there is some other energy or force that we are connected to that does have our back. Doesn't necessarily tell us what to do. Doesn't tell us how to live our lives. That's not the point, but that we can be connected to something greater beyond our human experience because we are than our human experience.

Rhea: That all makes sense. I just didn't realize until this moment how little faith I have.

Liz: We're still on that, huh?

Rhea: I'm shocked. Now I'm like, well, what I see, what I feel, what I hear is enough.

Liz: And that's part of the spiritual maturation process, and that's what we talked about in Season 2, that until you can actually come back to yourself and really question and allow all those underpinnings that we held on to, and all those belief systems until we could actually do without those and be okay without them, they really would never fully serve us because they become a crutch.

Rhea: We would be giving over our power. Yeah.

Liz: I mean, they just become crutches, don't they?

Rhea: Well, that's the problem, isn't it? When you go online and all these influencers and stuff, there are some who are amazing. And as we said in Season 2, there are the ones that kind of hold up the mirror and go, all right, where are you unhappy and where can you help yourself be happier?

Liz: And those are what we would call spiritual teachers.

Rhea: And they are great.

Liz: Yes

Rhea: But then you have the other style of people who are like, follow this, do X, Y, Z, and then you will have all the things you've always ever wanted. That's just another version of religion.

Liz: Completely, and read these books while you're at it.

Rhea: Yeah. That's just another version of religion all skewed. And I think that that's the thing is that for me anyway, from my experience, no one can promise that there's anything other than what we have.

Liz: No. Because only you can decide for yourself.

Rhea: Exactly. And so really the most anyone can ever do to help someone else is give them the tools to stand on their own two feet. I feel I spent way too much of my life worrying and wondering what other people think. I've spent way too much of my life listening to other people telling me what they think I should do. I'm kind of just happy only listening to myself. Now that doesn't mean that I don't take other people's feelings into consideration. It doesn't mean that I don't love. It doesn't mean that I'm not compassionate or that I don't want to compromise, or that other peoples' opinions and feelings don't matter to me. Not at all. They do. Other people still matter to me massively, but they aren't going to matter to me more than I matter to me, if that makes sense.

Liz: Completely. And that very much follows from our previous episode about sacrifice and relationship. We were taught to sacrifice in order to make ourselves worthy, in order to make ourselves redeemable, in order to enter that mythical place called heaven or the afterlife or whatever we want to call it. So we had to prove ourselves worthy. Without to tell us that we are worthy enough to be saved or redeemed, we've turned to spiritual influencers who say, just read this and you'll be happy. Our spiritual influencers have become our Holy people.

Rhea: Whereas spiritual teachers who are also on Instagram and on social media and who have courses, and there are some great people out there with some great messages, they're more the ones who are explaining for example what a boundary is, what a healthy emotional state looks like, the kind of questions you can ask yourself in order to help heal.

Liz: So spiritual teachers are the ones that are speaking to the relevant issues of the moment and aim to get people to be able to look inside, heal what needs to be healed in order to elevate themselves and move past it.

Rhea: So how can you tell the difference?

Liz: Aside discernment?

Rhea: Well, yeah. No, honestly, because yeah.

Liz: Well, because, you know, for instance, they're not necessarily spouting a bunch of stuff that they read about, right? They're not . . . again, they're not rehashing and quoting a bunch of other people. They're merely just taking one particular thing about, hey, can you just sit with your emotions right now, even if it's not comfortable?

Rhea: A platitude or a quote box with no explanation underneath it is not going to necessarily help me as much as clear, logical explanations for how I'm feeling, why I'm feeling it and how I can look into myself in order to transcend it. So for me, there's a very big difference between someone going, there's a light at the end of the tunnel and going, is this triggering you? Sit in it, look at it, allow it to pass and then ask yourself these three questions in general about them. For me, those are two totally different things, and you still have to do the work regardless if you believe in it or not. You still have to do the work. The work didn't happen to me because some universal force got involved in and sat me down, put a pen in my hand and forced me to go inside. I did that.

Liz: You did. You did. You decided that you were tired of your life being the way it was. That you were tired of feeling a certain way and you found a particular answer to it and that compelled you to work through your issues

Rhea: Exactly, and yes, in some respects, I'm so grateful. And I do wonder God, how strange that everyone who walked into my life in some way or another helped me heal something, and how even stranger that where I'm at today is almost like with the people in my life today. Isn't that so fucking weird? Yeah. I can say that much, but at the end of the day, I guess I may be having this real violent internal aversion to my own weakness, as it were to ask someone else to tell me what my future holds. And because I did that for so long and I still do that when I'm spiraling, I resent it almost because those answers never make me feel better. Those answers are usually not what happens in some way or another, or whether I could have followed them or not. For me, it's an exacerbation of my old pattern of feeling like shit, looking for someone else to tell me what to do to feel better, following them, and then relying on them in order to continue to feel better. And for me, that's not sustainable. That's not long term, and it makes me still reliant on someone else to live and I don't want to do that anymore. So long like whether it's religion or whether it's government or whether it's anything, we have just kept just giving over ourselves in order, because what do we hear? Life's a bitch and then you die. So please tell me how it's not a bitch to avoid me dying.

Liz: Yes. Or dying miserably. Let me have one happy moment.

Rhea: Literally. I remember begging for one happy moment to someone else. Like they could give it to me so I could learn to trust myself.

Liz: Right. And that is the precise reason that there's so many people who are having a crisis of faith because they equate faith with having to give over their power, to have to believe in something that doesn't necessarily resonate or fit with their own knowing. And that if there really isn't anyone who can save us in this lifetime and just ourselves, then what are you telling me to really believe in? If any of these power structures in 3D, as you mentioned - religion, government, society - that made me believe that I had to do X, Y, Z things to be redeemable and worthy. If none of that's going to matter, then where does faith fit? Maybe it just doesn't and we just say, fuck faith. Which is pretty much what you've been doing in your rants.

Rhea: I'm so sorry.

Liz: No, no. I think it's funny. It's awesome. I think it needs to be echoed because I do feel like people need to have that. They need to be able to express that.

Rhea: I just think that ultimately, regardless of whatever the story is, regardless of whatever the sentiment is, unless you are relying more on yourself and not in a, 'Oh no, I can't rely on anyone else. I must rely on me, poor me' way, but in a 'I am open and I'm vulnerable and I am unashamedly me and that's good enough', that comes from you anyway. Whatever stories take you there, well done. I don't care what they are. If I believed one thing and then I changed my mind and I believe something else, then I believe the third thing doesn't really matter because eventually that journey got me back to this point where I'm like, I am going to message you and tell you that I missed you. I am going to stand here and be vulnerable in whatever which way I am, because I am strong in my vulnerability because I own myself and there is nothing that can change that.

Liz: And when you own yourself, you are coming from the most empowered place possible. When you really are in your power is only when you can begin to really connect to that divine self, which we can also say is that point in you that says I am good enough.

Rhea: So where does faith fit in that then?

Liz: Faith is understanding that we are powerful enough to determine what will serve our highest good.

Rhea: So we have faith in ourselves.

Liz: Completely.

Rhea: And that's all we need

Liz: When we are really strong in our personal faith as in, I believe in my person, I believe I am powerful enough to determine the kind of life I really want, and that I'm capable enough to somehow get there and figure it out, even if I don't really know at this point in time.

Rhea: Even if everyone tells me the opposite.

Liz: Or that I'm crazy.

Rhea: Even the Guides. Even Liz.

Liz: Girl, you gotta do whatever you gotta do and you got to feel good about it, and I just want for you the clarity to feel good about it and that's all that matters. When you really are connected and have that personal faith in yourself, then you can really begin to - just begin, maybe - believe in the possibility that you are connected to something else.

Rhea: But you are an expression of that something else anyway. You are not ruled by that something else.

Liz: Exactly, exactly.

Rhea: So everything you do is just as omnipotent as that something else.

Liz: Completely.

Rhea: Because I guess once you really have faith in yourself, then you can see how powerful you are and then nothing is more powerful than you or less powerful than you. They're just as powerful as you.

Liz: Exactly.