All of us have crossed roads. Okay, hit roadblocks, no, brick walls from time to time: religious friends and family members whose eyes either glaze over, widen with fear, or narrow in scorn whenever we talk about our spiritual beliefs. Well, Erik has some, ahem, advice for us for the next time we stumble on this challenge.

Me: When a religious person asks for help reconciling their religious beliefs with spirituality, what do we tell them? How do we help?

Jamie: He’s already answering, but it’s so inappropriate.

Me (sighing): I bet.

Jamie: He’s horsing around. He says, “You look at ‘em and you tell ‘em, “Baptists are full of bullshit!”

Me: Erik!

Jamie: He’s laughing.

Me: Oh, Whitney Houston is not going to like that, because she was a devout Baptist. By the way, Robert channels Whitney all the time and she keeps referring to herself as Nippy. That’s kind of funny.

Jamie giggles.

Me: Anyway, sorry that I digressed. Go ahead.

Erik: So, everybody, human wise, feels comfortable if there are similarities, and within every religion, there is a mystic vein. And within that mystic vein is where there is all the spirituality, where there are all the morals, where there is everything is that “spiritual people” live by, and so you encourage them to find that vein within their own religion. Once they can identify that within their own religion, it’ll make them comfortable with the ideas and they might start seeing how their original religion is starting to confine them.

Me: Ah.

Erik: Confining them in ways they’re not comfortable with.

Me: Yeah. Interesting.

Jamie: He’s talking about how in the case of the Jewish religion it would be the Kabbalah—

Erik: It’s straight in the Bible. There’s everything. How about The Book of the Dead?

Me: From the Tibetans?

Erik: You know there are documents older than this that even talk about how spirituality doesn’t need to be confined by religion to be valued.

Me: Yeah, exactly.

Erik: Really, that’s what people are looking for. But if they’re already seated in a religion, I would encourage them to go through that religion to find the underbelly of spirituality. You can’t knock somebody out of a religion and encourage them to embrace only spirituality. That’s so fucking lame. That’s the biggest bullshit you’ll ever hear. You can’t encourage someone to be spiritual They’re doing it on their own. You can’t say, “Come to our team!” There’s no fucking team. Religions do that shit, not spirituality. There’s the difference. 

Me: So no proselytizing. 

Erik: Yep.

By the way, I just finished reading blog member, Sheri Perl’s book, Healing From the Inside Out, and recommend it to anyone interested in healing illnesses in ways that Erik has shared with us time and time again: nontraditionally, spiritually. I’ve also read her book Lost and Found: A Mother Connects Up With Her Son iIn Spirit shortly after Erik died. Because her son, Danny, lost his life to suicide, I found it heart wrenching, but because it gave me evidence of life after life, I also found it uplifting. A good read. Thanks, Sheri.