Me and my Shadow

Whenever I try to post about this, it gets too long and I get bored before it's even finished. So I'll try again, and try to be brief. I do not belong to a mainstream religion. I do not consider myself to be religious. Once upon a time I did, and it was very important to me, but it was for all the wrong reasons. I used church as a sanctuary from my dad's insanity. I went to church to socialize and sing and have fun. I never, ever went to church to learn about God, or Christ, or the Bible. That wasn't why I was there. As soon as I realized that, I stopped going. And started thinking.

The more I thought, the less sense any of it made. In spite of going through Confirmation in 8th grade, I knew very little of the background to the doctrine the church had always taught me. I know more now. It still makes no sense to me. My first reaction was to try and create a religion that did make sense. If you ever visited the jediism home page and read their creed before they took it down, what I came up with was very similar; i.e. a melange of half-understood ideas that appealed to me. When I realized I had no more reason to believe in my system than I had to believe in the church's, I gave up. I felt I had no alternative but to become an atheist.

I didn't particularly want to be an atheist. I felt strange and isolated. About a year later, I stopped being an atheist. As I was walking back from class that day, I happened to look up into the sky, and for the barest moment I felt something, something powerful, something bigger than myself. And I knew that there was something out there that I might as well call God. Now I would call it Tao, but I didn't know anything about Taoism at that point. (Are Tao and God the same? I don't have a good answer. The God described by most Christians is clearly different from Tao, though.)

I spent the next several years trying to find a name for what I had experienced. I tended to avoid anything even remotely Christian, because the Christian POV still didn't make any sense to me. I looked into paganism, wicca, shamanism, yoga... Only a few years ago, I would have described myself as a "shamanistic yogini with pagan tendencies." Obvious note: anyone who so describes herself is obviously still searching. So how did I get into Taoism? Well, it was mostly by accident.

While exploring the internet, I stumbled across verses from the Tao te Ching. They made sense to me in a way that nothing in Christianity (or paganism, for that matter) ever had. So I went hunting for a physical copy of the book. I got the smallest, cheapest one I could find. It's not a good translation, but I still treasure that little book. At the time, I saw the verses as mostly a curiosity. A beautiful curiosity, but still only a curiosity. Time passed. I joined the Aikido club my senior year of college, and graduated, hungry for more. No aikido to be found in Pocatello, so I tried jujitsu. Didn't care for it. I tried taiji, and knew that I had found something worthwhile.

The deeper I got into taiji, the more I found the principles of the Tao te Ching embodied within it. Not that all (or even most) taiji practitioners are Taoist, but it's hard to do good taiji without understanding at least some of Taoism. The deeper I got into Taoism, the more I found that I liked. So that now I describe myself as a Taoist without hesitation. I do not see myself as religious, though, as I do not consider Taoism a religion. It is a way of life: a way of looking at life, of experiencing life, of cultivating awareness. A 'religion' is like an oak tree; it is strong, and resists any attempt to move it, so when the hurricane comes it snaps. As a 'Taoist,' my aim is to emulate the bamboo. It is a weak plant, and the hurricane blows it flat, but it is resilient enough to recover.