They thought I was losing my religion.
And in a very real sense, I was.
Not faith — I want to be clear about that. What I was losing was something smaller and more constructed than faith. I was losing the walls around it. The version of it I had inherited without choosing. The framework that had been handed to me before I was old enough to ask whether it fit.
What I was finding, in its place, was something I didn’t yet have a name for.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The stack of CDs
It was my mom who handed me the first thread.
She didn’t know what she was giving me. She had told a close friend at work that I was struggling — really struggling — and her friend had pressed a stack of CDs into her hands without much explanation. My mom passed them along the way you pass along anything when someone you love is suffering and you don’t know what else to do.
The CDs were Abraham Hicks.
I had never heard of them. I pressed play the way I had pressed play on Mary Maddux’s guided meditation — out of desperation, with no particular expectation, because I had run out of reasons not to.
What I heard stopped me.
Not because it was radical. Because it was familiar. Because somewhere underneath the new language and the new framework, it was pointing at the same thing I had glimpsed on my couch in the stillness. The same territory. A different map.
I wanted more maps.
Looking everywhere on purpose
By this point I had already decided something important: I was not going to land in one place alone.
Every path I had encountered so far — every tradition, every teacher, every framework — had something real to offer. But following any single one exclusively felt, to me, like joining something. And I had just spent years inside a framework that, for all it had given me, no longer felt like the whole story.
So I made a deliberate decision: I would look everywhere. And instead of looking for what divided things — which tradition was right, which was wrong, which was closer to the truth — I would look for what they shared.
I had been conditioned, for most of my life, to notice differences. My tradition versus others. Sacred versus dangerous. Us versus them. It was an unconscious lens, built slowly over years of being told that our truth was the truth. I hadn’t even known I was wearing it.
But now I was taking it off. And what I found underneath it changed everything.
The map that kept appearing
I read Louise Hay and found a woman teaching that the beliefs we carry about ourselves shape the reality we experience — that love, directed inward, is a form of healing. I found Joe Dispenza bridging neuroscience and meditation, showing in the language of brain science what the contemplatives had been saying for centuries: that we can literally rewire ourselves through conscious attention and stillness. I found Napoleon Hill, writing decades earlier, pointing at the same invisible forces. I found Eric Butterworth, a minister, teaching that the divine lives within each person rather than above and apart from them. I found Rumi — the Sufi poet, the mystic — writing about love and longing and the divine in language so alive it felt like it was written this morning.
And then I went further back. Further out.
The Tao Te Ching. The Upanishads. The Bhagavad Gita. Ancient texts from traditions completely separate from the one I had grown up in — different continents, different centuries, different languages, different everything.
And yet.
The Upanishads taught that the deepest self — what they called Atman — was not separate from ultimate reality but woven into it. The Bhagavad Gita taught that the divine dwells within all beings, that the true self is eternal and cannot be destroyed, that suffering comes not from circumstance but from mistaking the surface of things for the whole. The Tao taught that there is a current running beneath everything, and that wisdom is less about acquiring and more about clearing away what blocks it.
And then I found the Gospel of Thomas — an early Christian text, sayings attributed to Jesus, sitting just outside the edges of what I had been taught was the canon. In it, Jesus says: the kingdom is inside you and outside you. Not above you. Not withheld from you. Inside. Already there.
I sat with that for a long time.
Because it was exactly what I had felt on the couch.
The moment I understood what prayer actually was
Something was shifting in my practice.
I had grown up praying the way most people raised in a religious tradition pray — talking. Asking. Presenting needs and hopes and confessions upward, toward something outside and above. Prayer was a conversation in which I did most of the speaking.
And slowly, quietly, I was doing less of that.
Not because I had lost faith in the conversation. But because I had discovered the other half of it.
Meditation, I was beginning to understand, was not the opposite of prayer. It was the listening side of prayer. The surrender side. The part where you stop filling the space with words and requests and simply open — get out of your own head, out of your own way — and let something bigger than you move through the quiet.
And what arrived in that quiet was not what I had expected.
It wasn’t information. It wasn’t answers. It was a feeling.
Peace. Deep, inexplicable, unearned peace. The kind that didn’t depend on anything being resolved. The kind that was simply there, underneath everything, the moment I stopped talking long enough to notice it.
I recognized it later in a phrase from Philippians — a letter I had heard read aloud at mass my whole life without it ever quite landing:
The peace that surpasses all understanding.
That was it. That was exactly it. The tradition had the words for it all along. I had just found it somewhere I hadn’t been taught to look.
What the silence cost me
Not everyone was glad about where I was going.
As meditation became a more central part of my life — as I began, carefully, to share what I was exploring with people close to me — I was told to be careful. That quieting the mind that way opened doors better left closed. That questioning the tradition was dangerous. That I was drifting somewhere I shouldn’t go.
Be careful of the occult.
Don’t question what we’ve been given.
I understood where it was coming from. I had grown up inside the same walls. I knew how it felt to believe that the version of truth you had been handed was the only version — and that anyone stepping outside it was stepping into something dark.
But I also knew something else now. Something I couldn’t unknow.
I had been sitting in stillness and finding peace. I had been reading texts from a dozen different traditions and finding the same light in all of them. I had been getting quiet and hearing — feeling — something that didn’t feel remotely dark. Something that felt, unmistakably, like love.
There was something else too. Something I had been carrying for years without fully examining it.
Every Sunday mass, every service, the same words repeated until they were reflex: I am not worthy to receive you.
Said over and over. Ingrained. Absorbed into the body the way all repeated things eventually are. And I had believed it — not consciously, but somewhere underneath, in the way you believe things that have been said to you since childhood. That unworthiness was baked into the practice. That love was something to be earned or waited for. That the distance between yourself and the divine was the natural order of things.
And then I sat in stillness. And what arrived was not the God who withheld. Not the God who required worthiness before extending love.
What arrived was the opposite.
I began to understand — slowly, and then all at once — that the love I had been searching for, the love I had been told to prove myself worthy of, had never been withheld. Had never required proving. Had been there, in the stillness, all along.
The tradition was not wrong. It had simply handed me the description of something I had not yet experienced directly. And now I had experienced it. And the experience was larger than any single description of it.
I wasn’t losing my religion.
I was finding what it had always been pointing at.
What the convergence taught me
Here is what I know now, after years of looking everywhere:
Every tradition, in its own language, is pointing at the same thing.
The Upanishads call it Atman. The Tao calls it the Way. The mystics call it union. The neuroscientists call it a default mode network quieted by meditation. Rumi calls it the Beloved. Jesus, in the Gospel of Thomas, calls it the kingdom inside you. Paul, in Philippians, calls it the peace that surpasses understanding.
Different centuries. Different continents. Different everything.
The same territory.
What changed for me — the thing that changed everything — was the decision to stop looking for what divided all of this and start looking for what it shared. To set down the us-versus-them lens I had been handed without knowing I was wearing it. To follow the common threads instead of the differences.
The common thread, in every tradition I explored, was this:
There is something real beneath the surface of who you think you are. Something that was there before the conditioning arrived. Something that doesn’t change regardless of what life does to the layers above it. And the path back to it is not more noise, more striving, more worthiness-proving.
It is stillness. Surrender. The willingness to stop talking long enough to listen.
The willingness to receive what has always, already, been there.
What I want you to know
If you have ever felt the pull toward something your tradition didn’t account for — if you have followed a thread that led you somewhere unexpected, and felt the discomfort of being misunderstood by people you love —
You are not lost.
You are looking.
And looking, done honestly and with an open heart, always leads somewhere real. Not to a single answer. Not to one tradition above all others. But to the place all the honest searching eventually arrives:
The quiet. The peace. The something underneath everything that was never actually missing.
It was always here. It will always be here.
You only need to get still enough to notice it.