Can We Be Practical About Faith?

Force or surrender?

Spiritual and religious teachings often speak in great length about “faith.” In times of challenges, people like to say “have faith.” And because we humans are fascinating beings, whenever something unhealthy is removed from our lives, and due to our attachment to it, again, we say “have faith.”

What is faith? From observing people’s uses and understanding of the word faith, two meanings are derived. One, people seem to use the word faith in its higher expression, one that encourages us to keep moving despite our hardships. Two, people use the word faith to clothe their resistance/nonacceptance of Life as it unfolds.

Throughout our lives, we go through different experiences that affect us in different ways. Sometimes, things go smoothly, according to our beliefs and expectations. But most of the time, nothing does. And the resulting conflicts make us store emotions of fears, sadness, anger, and so on within ourselves.

Wherever we are, and whatever we do, we are always “dragging” our past with us — our experiences, what hurt us, our limiting beliefs — and it is through this past that we are filtering and processing the world around us.

We are here to grow, evolve and transform. But we forget that. Our past feels secure, familiar, and so whenever Life presents us with new challenges, because we have stored so much hurts from our past, therefore believing that we can be hurt — we naturally stick with and cling to this past.

Through our attachment to the past, we resist the new. This resistance often finds expression in justifying our shortcomings, in being resentful, in wishing evil to someone, and all those passive-aggressive protocols.

Doing so results in us storing more negativity within ourselves, thereby missing the whole point of our experiences. Why do we have experiences? Experiences evoke emotions and thoughts within us to which we are responsible, and have to observe in order to grow in awareness.

So what is faith? In its most practical form, faith is the movement from the known, our past, to the unknown — what we have yet to learn in order to evolve.

It’s not an easy thing to observe this during an intense experience. The rule of thumb to develop real faith is to not take things personally. Whatever happens, happens. This doesn’t mean accepting anything from anyone, proper action are taken on the outside, but within, we remain unshakable.

The other thing to keep in mind is that all our power exists within. Life gave us more power within ourselves than over others and there’s a reason for that. It is through free will that we all grow in awareness, we can’t change people, let’s accept each other as we all are and focus on healing our resistance instead.

By embracing this, we bring all our energy back to ourselves, we remember that nothing is personal, and we keep in mind at all time that we are meant to evolve, which means daring to put our foot out of the known, and into the unknown.

It’s okay to “tip toe” in the beginning by the way. Have faith.

Related posts:

Effective teams pursue a common outcome and have a common goal they want to reach. Healthy teams have mutual respect between members of the team and management. Plus, team members value one another’s…

Many many problems with these coffee beans, shipped loose in plastic tubs to be scooped out and bagged, ideal for oxidising the beans, shipped in transparent plastic bags, sunlight will damage the…

For an undergraduate research project, I created a system based off of the one designed by Nathan Rooy. Many thanks to Nathan for having kept in touch with me via LinkedIn and helping me with any…