What do you put your faith in? (Part 1)

“Don’t downgrade your dream to match your reality. Upgrade your faith to match your destiny.”  DeVon Franklin

I heard the above quote recently and it triggered a mighty reflection. I started asking everyone around me this question …

What do you put your faith in? 

If you want to make any changes in your life, this question is a critical one to ask. 

Why? 

Because, ultimately our lives are the outpicturing of a long, long stream of thoughts –  conscious, subconscious and unconscious – including the thoughts and beliefs of our ancestors, our family, our religion, and our culture (along with many other influences).

If we want to make change, we need to understand how faith has been operating in our lives, and discover a new path of trained conscious thought – a new faith – that will ultimately shape our lives to come. This isn’t always easy, but understanding how it works is a good place to start.

“…trained thought is more powerful than untrained …” Ernest Holmes

I always considered faith a positive word, but now I see it as more neutral. In fact, the direction of my thoughts – along with the momentum (consistency) and intensity (emotion)  of that thought is what makes it positive or negative. In other words, we can anticipate good things, or we can worry. Both are a kind of faith. 

This stream of consistent thought is the direct cause of our experience (even if it takes years to unfold), and we have the power (and responsibility) to shape and direct it on a positive trajectory. As we direct it, we can generate a whole new experience. 

I didn’t always understand this well, and I continue to refine my understanding as life unfolds. In fact, until relatively recently I wasn’t at all conscious of the ways faith was playing a role in my world, even though “faith” was a big deal.

Growing up in a devout religious family, faith was a great subject of discussion – where God (big, bearded guy, judgy, sometimes loving, sometimes fearsome, Up There Somewhere) must be met with unquestioned faith – faith in the rules He laid out. If I followed the rules, I would be loved, and after I die, I would go to heaven. 

More than anything, I wanted to be loved … So with unstinting effort, I met the demands, did the good deeds, put others’ needs before my own, and prayed to God to help me be worthy of love. And Life, as it must, responded to my faith as I carried out the rules – I had friends and my family loved me. Many good things came along. 

However, my “good deeds” weren’t always authentic. They were offered with a sense of obligation, duty and at times, resentment. But it was the deal with God – I do this, you love me back. It created some seriously icky dynamics in my human relationships. 

I put my faith in the authority and feedback of others which sometimes worked (I got good grades, got scholarships and had relative success in my work, had friends, etc.) but it also harvested an enormous sense of fear, exhaustion, instability, anxiety and depression. Burnout.

I worried (again, a negative stream of thoughts, with lots of feeling!) that  if I stopped giving, all the good things would go away. Guess what? They went away anyway. 

My first seriously codependent marriage ended in divorce. I lost jobs, money, and other relationships. I experienced financial hardship, I burned out many times and not that long ago, I had a health challenge with cancer. Was it because I was a bad person? No. Was it because I didn’t give enough? No. Perhaps, though it was a result of misunderstanding the word “faith.”

I began to learn that my faith in “God” was only faith in my adherence to the rules … not in the actual Source of Life Itself, where true love and security lies. I had no sense of myself as an expression of the Divine. It never occurred to me that I was an outpouring of a Loving Creator. That I am Love Itself. That awareness came much later in life.

Over time, and with a lot of mentorship and training, I came to understand that worthiness and love are innate aspects of all creation – myself included – and that faith is the well-worn path of ideas and beliefs that I invest in, consciously and unconsciously. This is what determines the direction of my life and the experiences I have.

“A man consists of the faith that is in him. Whatever his faith is, he is.” Krishna, Bagavad Gita, v 17

Now, the main effort is the discipline to observe my thoughts and subsequent feelings (through meditation, journaling, self awareness, study, mentorship and myriad spiritual practices) to determine where I have been misdirecting my faith towards a false truth – in this case –  giving power to others to determine my value and my lovability. There are many other false truths that we invest in (body image, security, money, success, work, relationships and so forth) which are topics for other blogs.

Now I know I can change the trajectory of my thoughts, and this understanding brings with it enormous power and motivation to create a whole different experience of life …one where I understand that I have always been, and always will be loved … that this love depends not upon my “goodness” or performance, but on my capacity to allow goodness to flow through me. 

Now my spiritual work is to experiment and take risks with new, more authentic forms of love and self-expression, and help others do that too. I get to build my faith muscle (trained thought), building a new path leading to deeper experiences of contentment, fulfillment, security, joy and of course, love. 

It’s a choice available to all of us, though it takes time and commitment. But the starting point is here:

 

What do you put your faith in? 

I would love to hear from you about your sense of faith and how it’s creating your current experience. Please share your comments!

“Faith means a belief in the presence of an invisible principle and law which directly and specifically responds to us.” Ernest Holmes