Hard Believing

There is a phrase we use in our family – “hard believing”- which means forcing ourselves to believe in something that we have little faith in, usually for the benefit of someone else. It is not the same as “hard to believe” which is used to conversely express a challenging belief in something, like an unexpected situation or occurrence, for example.

The majority if not all of my family are some form of Christian, whether it is catholic or protestant. Neither of the terms above applies to that belief. That belief is indoctrinated belief. It is an inherited belief. It is assumed to be true through consensus and tradition of the family. It is usually not shakable and is only challenged by oneself internally.  Our usage of the term “hard believing’ is a force of belief not readily given. It could be compared to a situation similar to a father forcing himself to believe that everything will be ok when his daughter marries a man he dislikes and does not respect. It is the “letting go” of the concern that results in the hard belief; you decide to trust that it will all work for the best even if it is incredibly hard to believe.

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The reason this is coming to mind is that I find myself at this point where sometimes hard believing is required. I have been very open about my skepticism at times and my struggles with it. In this case, what I am talking about is hard believing in a practice of spirituality that I engage in. Something I call the divine prayer of healing. It is possessing a will to believe in a prayer that in the past has worked in my favor even though I find myself wanting to doubt it and my inner skeptic wants to call it anything else but what it seems to be to work in the way that it has.

If I had not changed my beliefs about “god” and moved toward my own spiritual truths this prayer would not have been something I would even have considered. But once I took on a different point of view and began thinking in terms of the self as the creator of the life experience it allowed me to utilize this prayer method and the comfort that it provides. Incredibly for me, there is an odd comfort in believing -or rather not allowing myself not to believe- that it will work out. And when results have occurred that I attribute to the prayer, there is a sense of easiness and contentment that all is well in my small “uni”-verse.

New Age ideology may alternatively refer to this prayer as the law of attraction or manifested destiny; whereas a more secular thinker may call it a result of the power of suggestion, and some may even call it delusional fancy. It doesn’t matter to me what anyone calls it, or how anyone else perceives it. What matters to me is that it seems to work for me.

I am not a follower of religious doctrines and rituals, nor am I a hardcore new-age advocate. In fact, I think that new-age philosophies are becoming corrupted by social media and the lure of money and in many ways has become much the same as traditional religion in that respect. My beliefs, weakened as they can be at times, are a form of personal ideology based on the influences of a hodgepodge of a different understanding of ‘Jesus-teachings’, mysticism, eastern philosophies, new age, and theoretical science, but mostly insights acquired from personal contemplations.

I usually use the term “lean into” as opposed to the term “believe” because I feel like all my beliefs are seasoned with some measure of skepticism. However, I have some hard truths in my spirituality which emerged during focused contemplations as a strong sense of intuitive knowing. I just know deep in my being that it rings resoundingly true for me, and these strongly held beliefs have all been confirmed later through a series of synchronicities. Primarily, I am referring to my belief in the Oneness of The All, everything is connected, a part of the whole of existence, and I believe that whole to be the Source of all creation, or as I usually call it for reasons of simplicity- “God”. But I am not speaking about the Abrahamic God, or Hindu Gods, or any other form of human-derived God. I am speaking of the singular point of creation as an Intelligent force of matter or form of being.

As I have previously noted in my posts, I believe that spirituality is an individual experience. It is uniquely subjective and true to each of us individually. Whether you believe in something spiritual or believe that everything is materialistic, it is your personal choice to believe how you so choose. If you are a nonbeliever it matters not to me that you disagree with anything I write and I fully support your right to believe or not believe however you do.

Letting go of doubt has always been an issue for me whether it is concerning religion, politics, other people, certain situations, and so on in my everyday ordinary life. It can be particularly hard for me to trust without proof, and it can be extremely liberating when I do.

Sometimes I must simply let go of the doubt, accept my measure of hard-believing, and trust that all will be well in my “uni”-verse existing within a “multi”-verse of infinite possibility.