Conscious Choice: Spirituality for Geeks

March 2004 | Body & Mind Health

Spirituality for Geeks

by Julia Mossbridge

At times, I feel like my life is one long coming-out process. The first time I shared a part of my life with someone else, it wasn’t pleasant. As a five-year-old, living in a rickety farmhouse in a conservative Midwestern suburb, I invited a friend over to make cookies. Later she told me she didn’t want to play with me anymore. Why? Our cookie sheets were not shiny — they were burned. I had unwittingly come out to her as a poor girl.

After the cookie sheet fiasco, I would have liked to stifle our family’s eccentricities, but I knew we had too many of them. I had a freaky physicist dad who cried at the drop of a hat, a hippie artist sister; we lived with my strident feminist grandmother and sulky grandfather, and later we lived with my lesbian mother and her partner. Eccentric example: in junior high, my girlfriends’ mothers were teaching them how to shave their legs and armpits. Meantime, my mother begged me not to shave, reminding me that I would miss this expression of my full woman-inity, or whatever she called it.

It wasn’t just my family; I had my own eccentric pursuits. As a teenager attending a picture-perfect high school on Chicago’s North Shore, I stayed up late doing symbolic logic puzzles, started an underground newspaper, created an activist student group and attended conferences about nuclear proliferation. Writing about these geeky adventures now, I realize I’m proud of them.

I guess I spent many of my early years learning a difficult lesson: when you know for sure that you can’t blend in, you realize you also can’t pass as normal. You can either truly honor your uniqueness or invalidate yourself.

In my adult life, I have come to celebrate exactly who I am as an expression of God’s creativity. But it’s been a long road getting there. For example, when I was a younger student of academic science, I began to explore a mystical path but I chose to keep it to myself. I knew that many scientists believed in God. But it seemed to me that among mainstream academic scientists, the underpinnings of God (mystical mechanisms if you will) were taboo when it comes to philosophical discussion and forbidden as research topics. I wanted to be counted among the serious scientists, not the "flakes" who studied that stuff, even though I was interested in mysticism. And I think some part of me believed that the mystical part of me couldn’t be trusted.

My experience points out the two basic fears that compel many people to hide their most beautiful selves. We fear that we will be alone and unloved if we express who we truly are, and we fear that the truth inside us is somehow bad. These fears can operate almost simultaneously. It seems as if in one moment we can believe in ourselves, but we don’t trust others to love us for who we are — and in the next moment we see that we are loved, but we can’t for the life of us figure out why.

I flipped back and forth between these fears for years until I’d had enough, and was willing to take the risk of being ostracized. Guess what I found? One of my colleagues attends conferences in channeling and energy healing, while another has a mystical relationship with God similar to mine. Still another encourages me to investigate the paranormal; several have asked me for a copy of my (not-very-scientific) book, and certainly more of them will read this column than will ever read my dissertation.

John Welwood, author of Love and Awakening: Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationship, says, "When we reveal ourselves...and find that this brings healing rather than harm, we make an important discovery — that intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are...This kind of unmasking — speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles and revealing our raw edges — is a sacred activity."

My experience echoes John Welwood’s point. When I claim myself, it helps everyone around me claim themselves as well. Contrary to my fears of being alone, expressing myself fully has created exactly the community I craved. It comes down to this: when the world outside disagrees with the truth inside of you, you can either be yourself and take the risk of feeling alone, or you can not be yourself and know with 100 percent certainty that you will feel alone all the time. There’s only one real choice here: come out, come out, whoever you are!

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is also a mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library www.unfolding.org).

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