Showing Up Whole

Embrace Your Unique Spiritual Path: A Journey Beyond Labels

• Christina Fletcher • Season 4 • Episode 13

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Ever feel like you're trying to fit into a spiritual label that just doesn't fit?
 Join me as I recount my own journey through the maze of religious and spiritual paths. From singing in a church choir that never truly resonated with me to converting to Catholicism and exploring Hinduism during my university years, my quest for spiritual belonging has been anything but straightforward.

In this episode, we delve into the significance of embracing your unique spiritual identity, breaking free from societal labels, and finding your true divine connection. Discover vivid stories of profound experiences, like the night I witnessed a flock of white birds at midnight, serving as a powerful validation of my spiritual journey.
We'll also discuss the challenge of communicating such experiences to those who might not understand and the crucial role of online communities like the Spiritually Aware Living Community.

Whether you're just starting your spiritual journey or looking to deepen your connection, this episode encourages you to embrace your individuality and authentic spiritual path. 
Tune in to explore how our true divine essence remains steadfast, irrespective of the spiritual or religious cloaks we wear. 
Don't miss out on this inspiring discussion that celebrates your unique spiritual journey and the freedom to be your authentic self.

Christina Fletcher is a Spiritual Alignment coach, energy worker, author, speaker and host of the podcast Showing Up Whole.
She specialises in practical spirituality and integrating inner work with outer living, so you can get self development off of the hobby shelf and integrated as a powerful fuel to your life.

Through mindset, spiritual connection, intuitive guidance, manifestation, and mindfulness techniques Christina helps her clients overcome overwhelm and shame to find a place of flow, ease, and deep heart-centered connection.
Christina has been a spiritual alignment coach, healer and spiritually aware parent coach for 7 years and trained in Therapeutic Touch 8 years ago. She is also a meditation teacher and speaker.
For more information please visit her website www.spirituallyawareliving.com

Want to uncover where you need the most energy alignment?
Take her new Energy Alignment Quiz to identify which of your energetic worlds (mind, body, heart or spirit) needs aligning the most!

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Christina:

Hi and welcome back to Showing Up Whole, the place where we discuss alignment in mind, body, heart and spirit, in every aspect of ourselves. Today I'm actually going to take you a little bit on a personal journey. I was asked to discuss my own spiritual path and the different rabbit holes, the different doors I've opened, the other doors I've closed, and what it really means to practice spiritual awareness, practice mysticism and show up whole. Hi, I have to say I always set up this beautiful schedule of things that I'm going to talk about over the coming weeks and then it never fails that a client will come up to me and say, yeah, but can you tell us a little bit about that? And it always makes me really excited. So when I start to get excited then it means that that list kind of gets pushed aside and I just want to dive in.

Christina:

This question really kind of came out of nowhere, as I was talking on a session with a client and we were talking about the various doors that are open to explore in the world of spirituality. We were also talking about the different houses of religion and the different perspectives or frameworks that can be offered, in that I always like to see spiritual belief or religion, like different clothes that you wear or a different room that you walk in. It always seems to me that you have to go with where you feel the most comfortable and you have to listen to that own heart-centered inner calling to go where you feel pulled to. That, quite frankly, comes from a lifetime of being pulled into various doors, of trying on different suits of clothes, and yet what I know is this is that whatever clothes you put on, you're always the person beneath the clothes. There's an inner truth, an inner connection, an inner self, and that is your divine spark. So before I kind of embark on a little bit of exploring this with you, I want you to know right, first and foremost, that your divine spark, your light, who you are, who you came to be, that is you. That is your unique perspective. Everything else is the language you speak, the clothes you wear. Language is a really, really good explanation or description or analogy of how to see different beliefs. So let's look at the different languages of spirituality that I've embarked on, and then I'm going to just go a little bit further into how to really separate your personal path from everybody else's.

Christina:

So I was raised in a very liberal Christian perspective. My father was an atheist, is an atheist, my mother Christian. We went to church, even though other members of the family before I came along as the youngest didn't go to church. My mother decided that I was going to be the one that finally got raised in the church and, quite frankly, from like five years old, I felt uncomfortable there. I used to put a hat on and insist that I had to wear a hat to church because when the minister would give me a blessing, I didn't like him touching my head. And I was thinking about this actually the other day and I was thinking that's so interesting because I think I just felt incredibly uncomfortable having someone else in my energetic field. I just didn't know that that's what I was experiencing. So most of my time in church as a small child consisted of having this hat on my head or sitting in a pew, taking it off and bashing it into various shapes until it was time to walk up to the altar.

Christina:

The only thing that I knew was that I loved to sing. To me, singing was this divine experience, and that was when I actually would connect to this concept of divine. It felt like whenever I was singing, especially in a space that was being dedicated to acknowledging divine, that I was communicating with that divine. So, yes, I called it singing for God. I called it singing, or perhaps even worshiping, and so that led to me becoming a member of a children's choir, and I liked nothing better than to sing in the choir. I felt split in two. There was the time that I had with God when I was singing, and then there was the time when everyone else was talking about stuff that just didn't land with me. It just didn't resonate in my heart and in my soul. So I spent a long time really quite confused about where my home was.

Christina:

As I got older, I moved into worlds of like theater and other teenagers, and I knew that something felt uncomfortable, that I needed a label. I didn't know what label that was. I actually converted to Catholicism when I was 17 as a way of trying to stake a claim. I suppose it was a question of trying to stand up for something, and yet then, as I was going to these classes, I couldn't, and I knew that the beliefs that were being discussed weren't my own, knew that the beliefs that were being discussed weren't my own. It was this fascinating thing to explore as a teenager, and especially in a very close-knit college class, in theater school, when people would say, oh so you believe this and I'd go no. And they'd say, oh so you believe this and I'd say no. And they'd say, so, you're calling yourself this, so that must mean that you believe this.

Christina:

And I realized that the label that I was trying to find a home in didn't fit. It was wearing a different clothes. It was wearing an outfit that felt just wrong. It felt so uncomfortable to me and yet I was witnessing other people, including members of my family, who felt incredibly comfortable in these clothes and incredibly free, and it honestly led to quite a bit of envy and jealousy at times. So, in pursuit of that, I actually started studying religious studies when I went to university and the goal was to become and find a home.

Christina:

I was very close to actually becoming a regular attendee of a Hindu temple, because I loved some of the concepts of Dharma and some of the ideas that they seemed to really resonate with, and I loved the. You know I'd go down after to the basement and there was big meals and everyone was connecting and I loved some of that. But I also again, didn't feel at home. I just felt uncomfortable everywhere I went and as this was proceeding, as I was exploring all of these different worlds, clothes rooms, as I was exploring different languages, to express what divine was to me, underneath all of that was this core thread of my personal relationship to divine. I really started to communicate in a way of awe. I mean even dating back before, when I was a young child. I would go outside and I would listen to the birds and I would just talk to divine and I would explore how to make that connection stronger. And I had witnessed people meditating. So I would lock myself into the family bathroom and drive family members crazy because I would close the door and meditate in there for you know an hour until someone would knock on. It was a question of what is this, this energy that nobody's talking about, this calling to something that I can't express.

Christina:

One of the strongest revelations that I made when I was studying religious studies in university was the story of the four wise men, who were four blind wise men who were asked to describe an elephant, and the four blind men are stood in front of an elephant, all at different parts, and so the first blind man describes the elephant as a tree trunk. It's standing at its foot and it feels its leg and it's like this is a strong tree trunk, it feels solid and wide. Another one is standing at the body. It's like, yes, it is wide, it's like a wall, this is so wide. Another one was standing at its tail and it could feel it's like it's like a snake I don't know what everyone's talking about. It feels this long and slender and thin. And then the other one would be at the ear and be like oh, it's like a fan, it's thin and weighty. None of them could fully describe the elephant. They were all just describing one aspects of it, and this has become an analogy of world religions, of concepts of divine.

Christina:

The divine is something that's so vast that our human brains cannot fully comprehend it. We can feel it, it can resonate deep within us, we are part of it and as part of it, like, attracts, like, and we can feel it resonating deep within us. It's an energy force, it's love. So therefore, it's something you sense, and yet the brain is just not capable. So we look for different ways of describing it and parring it down so that we can discuss it and weigh it up. And then there's also the element of wanting to put rules on it and wanting to tell people how to do it right and wanting to tell people what is wrong and then taking other people's experiences of that divine and saying, okay, they did it, so we need to do it the way they did it, because then we'll get it right when the truth is.

Christina:

Where I felt most comfortable was when I got my brain out of the way and luckily, when I was in religious studies, I had a wonderful, glorious Jesuit priest teacher who sat down with me and said Christina, you have to give this pursuit up. Stop looking for the label, stop looking for that simple answer that you tell people what you are. You're a mystic. And I can vividly remember saying to him but what do mystics call themselves when they are talking to other people? And he bluntly looked at me and said Christina, mystics don't care. And it was a splash of cold water on my face because, quite frankly, I'd spent a huge portion of my life looking for the place to fit in and whereas, on one hand, I felt this vast freedom where, all of a sudden, someone had given me permission to follow my inner callings and to embrace the divine connection that I was building and he said it's like you're building a relationship with God. That's what a mystic does. Give up trying to define it. And he'd given me the freedom to do that and the permission to follow that inner calling. And at the same time, I had to immediately give up the idea of finding that community, of finding that language that I would share with other people, of finding that space where I could go weekly and do what everybody else was doing. And I think, whereas I might have told you a few times the story of being told this, I don't think we've ever really dived in how lonely that could be. And so what did I do?

Christina:

As any mystic probably finds out they do I threw myself into the relationship with the vine and it was like a light switch when, all of a sudden, things started to piece together. I started connecting to angels, I started journaling directly to divine sources, I started connecting and praying and meditating and doing my yoga and sitting out on my balcony for hours and hours. And the more I connected and put out, the more I was receiving validation that I was on a path. I can still remember asking on my balcony, just saying I just need some validation, some sign that I am on my path. And all of a sudden it was like this echo in my heart and in my mind that just said Christina, look up right now. And I looked up into the sky and there was a flock. And this was like 12 o'clock at night this was. It was dark. It was a flock of white birds that flew over my head and it was so vivid and so clear I literally burst into tears. And those are the things that started to unfold in front of me and suddenly it was making sense, until I decided to try to talk about it to people. And that was when, all of a sudden, I realized I needed to experience it first and be aware of other people's languages.

Christina:

Do you feel like you are continually seeking, trying to embody, to heal, to fix and show up, but you always find yourself running on empty? Let's look at finding you more energetic alignment. There's a good chance that one of your energetic worlds either your mental, emotional, spiritual or physical is out of balance, and with the right practice, you'll have you back in flow in no time. I'm Christina Fletcher, an energy alignment coach, and I want you to know that self-development doesn't always have to be another trip down a rabbit hole. Rather, let's figure out where your flow is blocked and go from there. Check out my free quiz over at spirituallyawarelivingcom backslash quiz and find out where you do need more energetic alignment. Then we can explore what simple practice will give you that shift. None of us are in alignment all the time, so let's get you what you need to be back in flow wherever you need. You know, a young client of mine is currently walking through this transition as well, and we've been doing a lot of talking, and we've been talking about the frustrations of when the people you love don't necessarily understand what you are going through, the fact that it is like speaking other languages and sometimes the people in your life speak a very different language.

Christina:

I was lucky to have a mother who had explored a variety of different perspectives. She'd done church shopping, as she liked to call it, and she'd done a vast amount of reading, and so we would talk. On one hand, my connection to angels, my connection to energy, the sense of what I was feeling wasn't necessarily within the vocabulary, and it was an interesting thing to see how it unfolded and, quite honestly, I am actually very, very thankful that nobody else was speaking my language at that time, because it gave me the sense of surrendering and faith. It gave me that sense of awe and wonder and just have it just for yourself, to not feel like you have to share it, because you're actually just so deep in awe with your connection with the divine. I'm not going to give you my whole history. We could be here for a very long time. So instead, let's just notice that I was noticing the aspects of my life that were coming together by following my heart, by listening to what was felt in my bones a deep knowing. When I say feeling, I don't want you to see it as just emotions. Emotions can fluctuate based on the knowledge we need. Our hearts use emotion to convey spirit messages. I want you to see it as a deeper feeling of deep knowing in your bones. And so one thing led to another and by following that knowing in my bones, I did end up meeting my husband and together, once we got in sync, we started to explore quantum fields.

Christina:

We started learning more about law of attraction. To explore quantum fields, we started learning more about law of attraction. We started realizing that we had manifested the meeting each other. So we looked more into that and how energy actually responded to energy. I then learned energy healing. I then started understanding. It was like the pieces of the puzzle started to come together and I realized that I was being pulled forth on a path. I don't know if there was one door that I opened or one world that I explored or one language that I that didn't serve me in some way. It has supported my journey and it continues to do so. Recently I discovered Kabbalah, which is a phenomenal way of speaking of the divine. It's a phenomenal language of understanding energetic flow.

Christina:

Even I love Gnostic Gospels, gospel of Mary.

Christina:

I love to explore ancient texts. I love to see and learn about other people's languages to describe the spiritual experience. I love reading other mystics and seeing how they define their experience. I love to see how I can expand. I love to grow, and yet what I do know is that the head gets in the way, and what I've witnessed for years is the fact that if you try to understand cognitively spirituality, that's when the rabbit holes can often get sucked in. That's when, all of a sudden, the stack of books end up on your shelf and you're like oh yeah, I need to read that and I need to do that and I need to understand what that actually means. And the brain leads you on tangents and then you hear things like, oh, embodying. Or you hear things about integration, or you hear things about downloads, or you hear things about all the different varieties of words that other people speak, and it becomes confusing. Speak and it becomes confusing. You know, ages ago I used to talk about how I think actually I started writing a chapter in a book once that was just talking about loving from the inside out.

Christina:

Loving from the inside out means that you experience the perceptions first. You experience the love first and you allow it to flow out from you and then, after it's outside of you, then you can put it in those pieces of puzzles, you can piece the things together, whereas if you look at other things and bring them on to you, then you have to try to make them your own from the other side, and I think there's a natural tendency for us to crave a sense of belonging. So, because of that, we gather the information from outside of us and we go, okay, I'm actually going to be that of that. We gather the information from outside of us and we go, okay, I'm actually going to be that, and then it's like gathering it all and putting on the clothes and then trying and trying to make it our own. Well, if you stop and listen, you can actually take and leave whatever you need. You can take little pieces of everything.

Christina:

If you go into my office, you'll see crystals, you'll see a Buddhist mala, you'll see a Tibetan mala, you'll see oracle cards, you'll see pictures of Mary, you'll see books about Mary Magdalene, you'll see various texts, it's all of it. Oh, and one thing that I always carry with me is the Hindu three monkeys of. I see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil, because I read somewhere that Gandhi was carried that around and that was the only thing. And I've had that one little statue of monkeys for almost 30 years and it just carries around. I barely look at it, but still he's there. And it just carries her out. I barely look at it, but still he's there.

Christina:

It's a fun path, you know. It's a delightful path, it's a joyful path and it is like a patchwork quilt that you bring with yourself everywhere you go, because it holds and embeds in your heart and then someday you wake up and you go oh, actually I don't need that anymore, or oh, actually I'm going to see that from a different angle. And oh, you know what I actually feel called to do this. And then you check in with your divine source and your divine source says fingers up, that's perfect, go for it, thumbs up. It's about flow and it's about your experience At least that's how I see it. And guess what, if you're listening to this and you're like Christina, I don't know, that doesn't sound quite right then it's not for you. And that's what the other part of the joy is. If it's not for you, it's not for you and that's totally fine. And if you find a house or a language that matches you and you feel so at home when you're in whatever belief structure that is, then celebrate it and honor it and be proud of it and make it your own. Yeah, it's a journey of life and I am so incredibly thankful for all the different houses I've walked on. Now, funny little side note, because you know we always need a funny little side note, right, I had to laugh the other day because my daughter was speaking to her boyfriend's mother and she relayed this conversation to me when she had mentioned that you know that I had been volunteering in Glastonbury.

Christina:

Now Glastonbury is an eclectic collection of at least it always has stood for. It's a town here in the UK which is known for its variety of belief. You have a Christian abbey, you have Christian churches. You have a deep, rich history of Christianity. There's stories of Jesus coming to Glastonbury with his uncle, joseph of Erythmea. You have stories of Mary Magdalene visiting Glastonbury. You also have an ancient Druid history where, long before Christians arrived, the Druids would worship there and connect there and it's on energetic ley lines worship there and connect there and it's on energetic ley lines. And so, because of the history of Glastonbury itself, you have a range of pilgrims and a range of journeys and a range of seekers that come to this town. What that's also led to is a multitude of crystal shops and a multitude of witch shops and a multitude of different classes and rituals and solstice ceremonies and absolutely everything. Also, there's also some darker stuff which shows up time to time. You also have a music festival that is world famous and that's actually not even in Glastonbury, it's actually shortly outside.

Christina:

So when you say Glastonbury to someone, there is certain stereotypes that fall into place, and it was a fascinating thing to witness my own processing of my daughter saying that I was volunteering in Glastonbury to her boyfriend's mother Because immediately I assumed the language which would be assumed that I spoke, and there's nothing wrong with that language. And yet I crave authenticity, I crave my multitude of colors and my patchwork quilts and I crave for people to know who I am. And it was a fascinating little ego struggle to think that I would not be perceived as me first and that assumptions would be found. And I tell you that because I want you to know that I still wrestle labels to the ground and I still crave occasionally, that stamp that says, oh, you do this. None of them fit. And so, to wrap up, I say that because I want you to know that if you don't fit in a label, you are so not alone.

Christina:

I'm very thankful of social media, honestly, because us without homes have probably found more homes.

Christina:

I look at my Facebook group and I actually just tweaked the name of it to actually make sure that people knew that there was a space of modern day seekers, that it doesn't matter what house you live in, what language you speak. However you see the divine, you are welcome in my world, even my online world it is. I want to know what your divine experiences are, and there's no right and wrong way for that. There's your experience. I don't often speak this way, I think, but I think we live in a world now where it's really important to know that things aren't black and white and there's not one box that you need to fit in, and actually we live in a world where it's vitally important that you create your own box and you're proud of it and then tell me about it because, quite frankly, I'm incredibly proud of mine. I'm sending you all my love and light for your future journey forward, and I hope to see you in my Facebook group, the Spiritually Rare Living Community for Modern Day Seekers.