That parent-child relationship stopped working for me

“A lot of changes started happening when I started meditating, and that’s when I experienced God in a different way than my Mormon way of experiencing God. I was able to separate myself from the conditioning I grew up with.

“Meditation really changed my relationship with God, my relationship with life. It was a complete 180. I started to believe in reincarnation, and started to think Eastern religions might be right about other things too. It takes longer than one life to learn the things you need to learn. So you keep traveling back until you learn the basic things you’re meant to learn—to love and forgive. And I think that’s all God really cares about. All the other stuff, the rules, the puritanical things we worry about in the church—I don’t think those matter to God.

“I don’t think of God as a father anymore. That parent-child relationship stopped working for me. Compared to meditating where you feel like God is in you and outside of you, and you’re in God; he’s surrounding you and you’re surrounding him—or her, or it—instead of God being up there and you being down here, begging for things. It felt really empowering to realize I’m encompassed by it and it’s encompassed by me. I like feeling that way about God, compared to the idea that I’m this dependent child. Now I feel healthier than the co-dependent person I was before.”