(Wk 8) Religion vs Spirituality Part 5 Of 5 - Unleash Your Peace

Hello and welcome back to Unleash Your Peace.

My name is Ali Shoja,

Your host.

I'm a positive mindset coach,

A personal transformation expert,

A deliberate creator,

And I am your peace trainer.

And this podcast,

Unleash Your Peace,

Is your peace training.

Every single week,

We pick a different topic about the internal world that we dive into over the course of five episodes.

We release those episodes Monday through Friday.

They're very short episodes,

Under 10 minutes each.

That way you have a burst of inspiration throughout your day just to lift you up and give you something profound to think about.

By going inward,

By turning that lens into ourselves,

We actually start shedding all of this unwanted pain that we've been carrying.

And we find lasting internal peace underneath all of that pain,

And we can live our best lives yet.

We live from this place of joy and peace and connectedness to that internal infinite beingness that is us.

We don't just incrementally improve the quality of our lives.

We actually exponentially innovate every aspect of our experiences on this physical plane.

We become whole.

We become powerful creators.

We become our authentic selves,

And we live our dreams.

My wish for you is to become your whole beautiful self so that you can live your dreams and you can inspire others to do the same.

Now this week,

Our topic was the most sensitive we've had so far.

We've had eight weeks together,

And this one was the toughest one,

I think.

It is spirituality versus religion,

Very tough topic simply because we get to set so much into the way we think about the role of spirituality and religion in our lives.

But hopefully you found this dialogue stimulating and interesting.

I hope that if it pushed you a little bit outside of your comfort zone,

You were able to use that contrast to refine your beliefs around these topics and embrace something that makes even more sense in your life right now.

In this fifth and final episode,

I do want to make it a little bit more personal.

I want to talk to you a little bit about my personal beliefs around spirituality.

I think it comes across in everything pretty much that I do,

And if you are listening,

I think that maybe it resonates with you.

It is something that you're thinking about as well.

I do not think that we learn anything new in this path of spirituality.

We're always just remembering everything that we already know.

We are born with this knowledge.

We're born with the connection with our internal beingness,

With that infinite part of ourselves,

With that non-physical part of ourselves.

And we somehow along the way lose that connection,

And somehow later in life,

A lot of times,

We feel compelled to find our way back and we inch our way back towards it.

But we're never learning anything new.

We're always just remembering.

And the way we remember is that when we come in the vibrational vicinity of the knowledge that we need in order to take us a little bit deeper into ourselves,

We are able to hear it,

And then when we hear it,

It resonates and it unlocks another piece of memory that is locked within us.

So in that sense,

Our journey through life is part what we do in this world,

In the physical world,

But also in a large part our connection with the non-physical world from whence we have come.

And the interesting thing is that the deeper we go into this world of spirituality and the more we remember about what we are,

That infinite beingness that we are,

And the more we connect to that beingness of ourselves,

The more our lives in the physical world expand.

We experience expansion even without a spiritual connection,

But when we have that spiritual connectedness,

Our expansion becomes deliberate.

We then are able to become deliberate creators and really take advantage of the law of attraction in a conscious way rather than in a passive or accidental way.

So my personal belief around religion and spirituality is this,

That religion,

As I mentioned in episode 1,

Is a really beautiful pathway into spirituality.

It provides an opportunity for us to enter into spirituality if spirituality is not present.

So it gives us a language,

It gives us practices,

All religions have a form of prayer or a form of meditation,

For example,

And we talked yesterday about how important meditation is in connecting us to our inner being.

They have some kind of a faith system,

You know,

So you believe something even though it's not present,

And that is straight up law of attraction.

So religions have within them tools that can help us find spirituality in our lives,

In ourselves.

However,

I do believe that they are only one avenue into it.

Other avenues are endless.

Art,

Science,

Music,

Anything being in the present moment,

Anything you participate in in the present moment could potentially be a way for you to connect into spirituality.

And there is no better teacher of spirituality than contrast.

And this is evidenced in our world all the time.

Some of the most spiritual,

Some of the most connected,

Some of the most successful people are those who have experienced the most amount of adversity.

And that's because contrast,

Things going wrong in your life,

Pain has within it the opportunity to tap into a spiritual connection.

It pushes you to the point of knowing exactly what you don't want and gives you an opportunity to turn around and define what you do want.

And in that transition is a window through which you can find your connection with that infinite possibility within yourself.

But as wonderful as religion is,

In my opinion,

It stops making sense when we stop being tribal creatures,

When our world expands outside of our immediate circle of friends,

Our community,

Our city,

Even our country,

When people start moving to other countries,

When ideas start spreading,

When we live through the technology revolution,

When we can talk to people across the world,

Religion stops making sense.

Because religion has within it social constructs that are built,

That are defined for a group of people.

And when we shrink the world and you can be here one moment and then across the globe the next moment,

Religion no longer makes sense because it creates more conflict than connectedness.

So in that sense,

My personal opinion is that spirituality is an evolution of religion.

So if we buy into this idea that there is a God and that this God created us in its own image,

Then we have to stop looking at all of the things in which we are different.

The color of our skin,

The shape of our bodies,

Our gender,

Our religious preferences,

The languages we speak,

These are no different than the clothes we choose to wear,

The haircuts we choose to get,

Or the food that we prefer.

Anything that makes us different cannot be God.

So if that's the case,

Then what is God?

What is this thing,

This consciousness that created us?

To answer this question,

We have to look at where we are all the same,

Where we are all similar.

And for me,

Asking that question has brought me to this idea of spiritual connectedness because I have seen that regardless of what religion you are,

Regardless of what color you are and what language you speak,

We all connect the same way.

Love feels the same,

Whether you are a Buddhist,

A Jew,

A Muslim,

A Baha'i,

Whether you are black or white or yellow or orange or purple,

It doesn't matter what you are,

Love feels the same.

And I think defining this connection to that spirit,

To that infinite,

To that divine,

To that non-physical with a term like spirituality allows us to have more open dialogue,

Allows us to be more inclusive in our beliefs,

It allows us to worship together rather than separately and it allows us to talk about our experiences,

Our connection with the divine,

With the whatever it is that you're connecting with in a more universal way.

It is a step forward in my opinion in our evolution because it provides a language that we can use that unites us,

It connects us,

It dissolves the borders between us rather than separate us.

So I will leave you with this very personal note.

I hope it is well received.

If you have any thoughts,

Opinions,

Questions about it,

Do reach out to me.

My website is peace unleashed.

I love hearing from you.

You can also find my love notes on Instagram under peace unleashed.

Those are purely meant to uplift you,

To brighten up your day.

I hope that's exactly what they do for you.

And until next week when we come back with yet another topic,

I wish you a peace filled weekend.