[DAWN GABRIELS]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, host of Faith Fringes Podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado, not only where I love to live, but I also work as the owner of a counseling center in the historic downtown. This podcast is a place to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. For those desiring deeper connection with God and engaging their spirituality in new ways, this will be a safe place to allow doubt, questions and curiosity, without judgment. We will be creating intentional space to listen in on other’s faith journeys, whether that is deconstruction or reconstruction, with the hope of traveling alongside you on your own spiritual path. If you’re interested in getting even more out of this podcast, grab my free email course Spiritual Reflections on my website, faithfringes.com. Welcome to the podcast.
[DAWN]
Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network.

Hello and welcome back to Faith Fringes. I’m so excited to have you guys here today. I am so excited, today we are going to be diving into a story of deconstruction and spirituality and just hearing from one of our guests. This is a special guest to me. He’s one of my mentors, my consultant, and I’m sure some of you have heard of him. His name is Joe Sanok. He is kind of famous for being Practice of the Practice. He does the number one podcast for business consulting for people who want to grow a practice. He also has done TEDx speaking and he has an amazing podcast. It’s actually the number one podcast for counselors. He also writes for Psych Central, has been featured on Huffington Post, Forbes, Reader’s Digest, Entrepreneur On Fire, but the newest thing that I’m really excited about is he has a new book coming out in October called Thursday is the New Friday. His book will be actually able to pre-order in June and it’s going to launch in October. So we’re excited. We’re going to ask him about that as well, but I just wanted to waste no more time and say, Joe, welcome to the Faith Fringes podcast. How are you doing?
[JOE SANOK]
Oh, I’m doing well Dawn. This is so awesome. I’m so glad to be on the show.
[DAWN]
Thank you. I’m so excited to have you. There’s a lot of things we’re going to dive into today and I’m just, actually, I’m excited to hear about it because I know we’ve been talking for a while and a lot of times you’ll say, “Oh, but that’s for another story or that’s for another day.” Finally, today’s that day I get to hear more of your faith journey and your spirituality story. So I’m so excited about that.
[JOE]
Yes. It’s like when you’re doing business consulting people probably get glimpses of, “oh, I wonder if this is what he’s really saying behind that or this or this.” And it’s like, I haven’t really talked to that publicly about my faith journey. So this is really exciting for me to just kind of pull back the curtain.
[DAWN]
Yes, I was wondering, I actually thought of that last night, I was like, I wonder if he’s ever shared some of this publicly. So I’m excited to actually hear more. So why don’t you start with just giving us a little bit of background of how you grew up and then we can dive into what it looked like as you started deconstructing, maybe your faith.
[JOE]
I think in a lot of ways. I was born out of conflict in the sense that my dad was a Polish Catholic and my mom was Presbyterian and they talk about how my dad’s siblings and some of the family members were really upset that my dad was marrying a non-Catholic. And my mom, she had been in an abusive relationship that she, it was like a year long and she ended up divorcing that her first husband. And so that was like salt to the wound for my dad marrying a divorcee. So my parents moved out to Utah for my dad to do his PhD in Psychology and so I was raised in this house where I went to Catholic school, K-12 and it was sort of like during the school year I was Catholic and then in the summer, my mom would take us to a bunch of different types of churches.

It was interesting to watch, like now as an adult, reflecting back on that kind of conflict with my parents, like thinking of them as my parents, as a kid they’re older and all that, but then thinking of them as 20 and 30 and 40 somethings sorting through their own faith. And my father ended up leaving the Catholic faith, not because of my mom, because of just a lot of things in the Catholic faith that he left. And my mom, like she, during kind of her midlife went into like all this like Taoism and I remember her like throwing pennies to figure out how her day was going to go. And it was like, she was always spiritually exploring, but now she’s kind of, she’s the most active one in our family.

She’s going to like Bible study online and stuff like that. And they’re wonderful people and that, I think service has really been big and we’ll get into that. But my mom, she went to Haiti in her forties and she was never the one that like traveled. It was always my dad saying, “Hey, for spring break, let’s go to Florida or let’s do something.” And out of nowhere, she decided to go to Haiti, which is kind of a big part of some of my deconstruction because we spent a lot of time in Haiti. But I think it’s interesting because in late high school I had an experience where I accepted Jesus, spoke in tongues, like got super involved in the kind of charismatic evangelical world, and we can kind of deconstruct whatever you want to talk about within that, but then in my mid-twenties, I started to really kind of leave faith and kind of explore a lot of other things. I mean, there’s all sorts of stories and things that happened during that time, but that’s the big picture, raised Catholic, became evangelical left, the faith.
[DAWN]
Wow. Yes. So starting with your parents, even, like you had two different models of what that looked like and doing one thing during the school year and then summers, but then it sounded like things changed when your mom went to Haiti and it sounds like you went with her. Is that how that worked?
[JOE]
Yes, so I actually had, I think we, as a family were just kind of, in the church you hear like lukewarm. I mean, we were lukewarm Catholics, lukewarm Presbyterian. Like nobody really gave a rip about faith. We didn’t have a lot of those discussions, but then really it was when I was 16, I was working at a boy scout summer camp and then that’s where someone “introduced me to Jesus” and then I said the prayer and all of that, and really like dove in, started going to youth group and going to conferences. And so I was the one that in the church, they said he was on fire for God. And then I sat down with my brother and sister and said like, “You’re going to hell if you don’t accept Jesus.” I mean, my sister was in like fourth grade. So she’s like, “Then I want to pray that prayer. I don’t want to go to hell.”

My brother was like in eighth and ninth grade. So then it was like my brother and I started out Christian punk band. I mean all the kind of things in the nineties people that we went on tour for a while down through like Texas and all over the place and kind of college. But I do think that what happened was like my siblings and I all kind of found different churches to go to that connected with us. And then my dad got really involved with kind of being a Eucharistic minister in the Catholic church when my grandpa was kind of dying and living with my parents and that was really important to my grandfather to be involved in the Catholic church. My dad, like something sparked in him and I think in that then my mom started going to the unity church. So like on Christmas or Easter, it was like, “Who’s church are we going to go to, because we have five different churches the five of us?”

There’d always be these discussions and finally we ended up kind of saying we’re going to go to mass in the Catholic church, just as long as grandpa’s around and that was fine and sometimes on Easter we go to whatever church I was going to. So it kind of had us all recalibrate what we thought and then I think we’ve all kind of since then also moved away. I mean, my parents have always been so open-minded, and even though my dad wanted us to be Catholic, it was never like a, “You have to be Catholic because that’s the right thing.” I think it was more, it was a structure. He knew it was a good school system and now you’ve been talking to them like, “How did you pick St. Francis? Was it that you wanted me to be Catholic?” And now they’re like, ‘No, we didn’t care.” I think that would have been awesome to know in my whole childhood, because I thought you wanted me to be Catholic.
[DAWN]
Yes. So I’m hearing like a lot of openness, like you said, and I don’t see that a lot where, you said five different churches. That’s amazing that your parents were very free with that, but then you still thought I’m supposed to be Catholic in the middle of all that.
[JOE]
Yes. And then, I mean, I definitely went through a phase from after I “accepted Christ” as a 16-year-old where I was angry at the church. Like, you didn’t teach me the gospel and you had this story, you know St. Peter and you’ve lost the story. And I mean, a lot of that mid kind of early life anx came out towards the Catholic church and I would say very unnecessarily. But then I think a lot of things helped me look at all religion and just kind of point to it in a different way than I had. And there’s a lot of spiritual guides, I think, through that process that helped me understand like what I actually believe.
[DAWN]
Okay. So yes, I’m hearing you use a lot of Christianese terms. You’re saying like I accepted Jesus, I prayed the prayer, I was on fire. So that really resonated with you in high school, but then something kind of opened your eyes to more, you’re saying?
[JOE]
Yes. I mean, I think that one of the biggest things that just shifted things for me, so my mom, she had gone to Haiti and she came back just like, “Okay, 200 miles from Florida is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. And if we’re going to take this, love your neighbor seriously, how can we have Haitians down there just totally dying because of hunger and medical care?” I mean, most of them didn’t have access to clean water and were dying of things that are totally preventable. And my mom’s a nurse practitioner and so I said to her, “I really want to go to Haiti.” And so the next summer I decided I was going to go to Haiti with her, raise some money and went, and it was sort of like a children’s book because it was me and my mom and then the guy that had started this mission there, he was a Baptist from like the rust belt, I mean, I don’t remember what state he’s from, but he also brought with him a pastor, a plumber and an electrician.

It just, it was like, we’re all there and these three guys, it just, I don’t know. They like when we would eat dinner together, for example they would all try to be last in line because they were like the last will be first and the first will be last and I want to like save up for having now. And it was like, “What?” And I remember walking with, I remember this moment, I’m walking past a voodoo priest house, his name’s Cedric. I loved this guy. He was just so interesting. and he was seeking me out to just have conversations with our translator and it just to me was fascinating, because I was also a comparative religion major as well as psychology. And it was just so interesting to be talking to a voodoo priest and really trying to understand that world.

And I said to the pastors who were walking past the Cedric’s house and like, “We’re 200 miles from the US and these people are in such poverty and there’s so many political dynamics of what the French did and then how the US did things and they’re just like, it’s unnecessary.” And he said to me, “If they would just accept Jesus, then this would all go away.” And it just felt so icky. It felt like what? Like that’s the thing? And I mean, we kept track of how many people said the prayer, so they could go back to their church and say, we got a thousand souls saved and all this stuff. And it just, I think that really was the shift where I realized that the kind of evangelical approach to spirituality of like, I’m going to get other people to get in the door so they can get other people to get in the door. So it’s just like a big pyramid scheme.

The more I thought about it, the more icky it felt and I think that because I wasn’t raised in it, I had this outsider’s point of view where it was like a skeptical illness that I didn’t know if it was because I was new to it. I just didn’t know, like, this is the right way and I’m new to it and I shouldn’t question, or if it was, this is a dysfunctional way of talking about spirituality and faith and I’m as an outsider, recognizing that. Over time I built kind of my confidence as I read and learned and talked to people and found people that more aligned with what I was feeling. They kind of cracked open the flaws and a lot of that approach to faith and spirituality that it just moved me in a different direction.
[DAWN]
Yes. Wow. I mean, at first, when you started talking, I was thinking, “Oh, that’s awesome. They brought a plumber, electrician, they’re serving these people and then all of a sudden it did, it shifted for me too when you said, if they just accepted Jesus, all this would be gone. And I’m like, that’s not true. That’s not how I have experienced life or as I sit with people in extreme pain. It’s kind of like, we’ve talked about before the prosperity gospel. Like if you accept God, your whole life will be better. And that’s not how I experienced it as a therapist. As Dawn personally, like that’s not how I experienced life, like if you believe in God or Jesus, then life is great. So that, I mean, it started out good, like the intention of bringing people to help and to serve the Haitians, but then yes, the [crosstalk] went on with it. Yes.
[JOE]
It was agenda driven, like if we build a medical clinic, then they’ll come and get medical help. And then they have to sit with us and pray the prayer and hear about Jesus and then they can go home. And in retrospect, of course, these people are going to listen to you and respect you out of you just came and brought them medical care and their child’s now not dying. Like, of course, like you now have cough syrup for your kid that’s been coughing for two months and you walked a day carrying your grandpa on a bed from the mountains on the back of a donkey. Like, of course they’re going to accept Jesus. Of course, they’re going to listen to you. They’re not going to do something that’s going to make you move to a different town. And it just, that’s where the shift really started for me.
[DAWN]
Sure. I mean, what do you think it would have been different if they just went and served the people and helped?
[JOE]
I mean, I think, at least where I’m at now, I feel like when people that don’t take the time to build their own awareness and grounding and beliefs, when they don’t do their own work the ego just comes out in so many different unhealthy ways. And so, I mean, really it’s, I mean, it’s this pastor that he has this big ego where he just wants to go tell this church and look like he’s famous and amazing. That’s where he’s at. He’s responsible for his own work. Like his, what really resonates with me is ,I’ve heard this line “We’re not humans experiencing energy or life or the universe. We’re the universe experiencing what it’s like to be human.” And that idea that however, it works where there’s this dow or this life force or this energy or hum of the universe, in some way that hum has decided to manifest itself within a person, Joe Sanok, Dawn, other people to experience something that it couldn’t experience in being that hum.

If you aren’t thinking through how the hum of the universe is you, is part of you is able to experience something in humanity, through the hurt and the pain and everything that you go through, then you’re going to hurt other people. You’re going to do things out of that humanness. And so to just serve is probably going to help it, not probably, it will help those people, but even more so it’ll crack you open in ways that maybe you’ve been shying away from. And so to just look at the pain and the universe and work on it, I mean, that’s a really good thing. I mean, the rabbis taught basically the core of everything is that you find something broken and you try to heal it. You just do your best, do that over and over to leave things better than you found it. I mean, that’s such a strong teaching and it’s so simple to just say like, what gets in the way of that? Is it my material possessions? Is it unhealthy relationships? Is it my ego? And to shed that in a variety of ways, I mean, that’s the work of being human in my opinion, more than convincing someone that your way that you happen to have been born into is the right way.
[DAWN]
Yes. I love that. Just like almost like you want to treat people with love and compassion because of a human shared experience rather than your own agenda, your own stuff. And sure, our own stuff is going to come up, but when there’s even a bigger agenda of it has to look like this and they have to use Christianese and they have to talk like this and accept this specific religion versus I feel compelled to help because that’s who we are. And in the meantime, you’re saying even your own brokenness comes out in that. I think that’s so powerful to wrestle with your own brokenness in the midst of someone else’s.
[JOE]
Yes, yes.
[DAWN]
Yes. Wow. So that is, and you were in the meantime studying comparative religion, and so you were definitely questioning a lot of things. So tell me what happened after Haiti. Like what was the next stop on your, so to speak on your deconstruction journey, as you were realizing this isn’t matching up with what I am thinking and feeling?
[JOE]
Yes. You know, the year between undergrad and grad school, like they didn’t have the term gap year, but I decided to take a year to fall in love with learning again, because I hated it. I was just, ‘This is terrible.” So that year I did a lot of things. So I surprised my grandma and took her to Paris for a long weekend. She had always wanted to go there. I went back to Haiti, led a group there to just do service and not be doing all the, like pray the prayer stuff. And I had my own group, didn’t have to have that other pastor, but we just went and we served, got to know Cedric even more. I went to Nepal for four weeks and when I was in Nepal, it was interesting because I still was very much in that evangelical mindset.

It’s interesting. I was traveling with my friend Todd and Todd was a staunch atheist. I had known him since middle school and so we had, he had watched me and some of the friends become super evangelical and he really pushed back on that and there was a lot of healthy and unhealthy back and forth. But he was free to go to Nepal and I thought, great. Like the two of us will go. So we go there and I had looked into bringing some Nepali Bibles. So I had bought, I think, 20 Nepali Bibles. I think some people in my Bible study had helped pay for it too, as part of it. And at the time the law was that for any Bible that’s in a language that you don’t speak, you get five years in prison.

So I had like 12 or 15 Bibles and I was fully like, if I need to go to prison for 70 years, like this is what God’s calling me to. And so we get to the border and we’re coming in and I have this, and Todd didn’t know this. I mean, atheist is with me and I’m like, I don’t want him to be in prison for seven years. That’s like a very long time for an atheist to be in prison with a guy that smuggled in Bibles. So I’m like, “I’m carrying the backpacks through customs. Like, go ahead.” Like kind of like showing him ahead of me so that if something does go down, he’s like not responsible.
[DAWN]
Already through.
[JOE]
So it’s like every single person is like, their backpacks, like getting scanned and they’re like opening it up and going through and the next person waves me through and doesn’t open my backpack at all and just like nothing happens. I mean, as an evangelical, it’s like, “That was the Holy Spirit working. I’m not going to prison.” Well, as we’re unpacking in our hotel room in Katmandu, Todd finds the Bibles and we have this huge fight. I mean, we’re, we’ve been traveling for like 40 hours and had like a layover and Taipei and slept on the floor, I mean, we’re both just exhausted, but he finds this Bible and he is furious. And at the time I’m like, “This is what God’s called me to do,” but now, like in retrospect, it’s just, to think about that sort of thing of, I don’t know. I still haven’t really sorted through what that means to me.

But as we went through Nepal, I felt a lot of things shift where I saw like lukewarm Buddhists, you know, people that, they had Dalai Lama on the wall, but like they weren’t practicing. And in my head, like everyone in Nepal was this like spiritual guru and they were all meditating and they were all following the Four Noble Truths and they all went to the temple. And I mean, you’re at the base of Mount Everest and there’s temples there and you would just think that, “Oh my gosh, like these people are going to be so enlightened and living,” but no, they were regular people feeding their family, having businesses to serve travelers. And it was interesting because we were in this temple as we were coming down the mountain and we had been able to witness like Nepali burial, where they brought in like 40 monks and they just meditated over the body and just these crazy experiences where it was sort of like, it was starting to click for me that humans do their do their best to describe things that are beyond themselves, but they only have their cultural language, their experiences, their family to use as reference points.

So in Nepal, like they don’t have wood, a lot of above the tree line and so all of their rituals are around rock and so they use rocks as metaphors to speak about the divine. They use a lot of things that are in their landscape, in their culture. And it started to come together where it was like, okay. So if people are using the best language and culture that they have to describe something that ultimately is unknowable and beyond what we can comprehend, like what does that mean about the sacred texts? What does that mean about all the rituals? Like are those really just signposts to something bigger or to something beyond or something that ultimately can’t be described and that have just been handed down over and over and over? And then over time we just say, “Hey, this tradition has been here. It must be important, so we should just keep doing it.” There was a story that I heard over there of this guru who went to this temple like once a week. Sorry if there’s some yelling in the background. Someone in the RV park lost their dog and they’re running around.
[DAWN]
Oh that’s totally fine.
[JOE]
We’re leaving on the road, those of you that don’t know. He had this pet kind of cat and he would tie this cat up to the Bodhi tree outside of the temple, and then he’d go into the temple and then he’d leave. And then when he died like all of his disciples, they would bring their cats and they would tie them up to the Bodhi tree. And then like over generation after generation people would bring cats and tie them to the Bodhi tree whenever they were in the template. It became this ritual, but it was only because the original guru had just had a cat that he didn’t want to lose that he tied up to a tree.
[DAWN]
So nothing deep about it.
[JOE]
Right. And so then it’s like, well, there’s these stories of things that we do, but we don’t really dig into like, what does that mean for me? What’s the awareness I’m building in myself? And like, how does that look in the universe in relation to a lot of things? So I think that that started to crack open when I was in Nepal to just really question everything about my faith to move from bringing Bibles to Nepal, to then by the end of it feeling really bad and guilty that I brought such attention to my atheist friend that I was traveling with.
[DAWN]
Wow. Yes. So I just feel like there’s a lot there that I’m curious about, like with, I’m trying to think like, so you’re saying this all now, but were you actually experiencing that when you were there like saying my faith has to change? Or was it more afterwards looking back?
[JOE]
I mean, I think in the middle of it, it felt more disorienting and confusing. And when I’m feeling that way, I am a information seeker, it’s like, “I need to know the checklist. I need to know what the Greek and Hebrew said in the Bible about these things. Is this true? Like what are the best commentaries from a Jewish perspective on the Bible and what are the best commentaries from scholars?” I mean, I dove in. I mean, I read, I don’t know how many books, but I mean, I read this one book that was like 2000 pages that looked at the entire Greek and Roman empire kind of through the times of Jesus and like, even just learning little things about like Caesar was called Lord of Lords and the son of God and all these propaganda things that were then put in the Bible and now we’re like, “Jesus is the son of man. Jesus is like the king of Kings.”

And it was propaganda, for Caesar that they stole and then used for Jesus. And so like discovering all these little nuances to make things make sense in the culture started to help me understand it. So like even “turn the other cheek,” I remember we were at Rob Bell’s church for awhile, Mars Hill in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he was talking about how in kind of Roman culture, someone that was your same status, so like two Roman soldiers. If I was mad at my friend and I could slap him with the palm side of my hand, I couldn’t use my knuckle side, so I could hit him with the palm side, whereas a slave, a Jew, someone below me, I could use my knuckle side of my hand. So I could backhand them.

So if I backhand that person and then they’re like, “What the heck?” they have a choice. They can fight back and probably get killed or put in jail. They can just take it and be kind of a pacifist or what Jesus teaches is this third way Theology of where then you turn the other cheek, which what are you doing if you just got handed and then you turn your other cheek, you’re saying, use the palm side of your hand. And so in doing that, you’re then elevating as an equal to this Roman soldier and you’re confronting the power injustice by not fighting back and not just taking it, but instead standing up for yourself as an equal. And like the verses right after that, whereas like go the extra mile and we hear that all the time. Like just go the extra mile. We think it’s just work harder.

But in Roman law, a Roman soldier could come to you and say, “I want you to carry my 80 pound backpack.” You could be going in the opposite direction, heading to the market, and if a Roman soldier says, “I need you to walk a mile extra in the other direction,” you have to do it. So you carry the 70 pound backpack, a mile in the wrong direction, you give it back to him, then you walk back the mile, you’re back at your starting point. You’ve walked two extra miles on your way to the market and who knows what’s happened to all your food or whatever you’re taking to the market. So what happens then if you go the extra mile? The law says that that Roman soldier can only have you carry that pack for a mile. So then that soldiers general or Colonel is going to say, “This guy’s been carrying your pack for two miles. What are you doing? You know that’s against the law.” It flips the power by not fighting back, not being a pacifist, but by calling out the injustice through your actions. So as I discovered those sorts of things, it just was like, wait, we’ve been looking at all of this in like 2D, black and white. And there is this entire holographic universe out there, the backstory of just the Bible. But then it’s like, well, what about all the other texts? So then I’m just going to go down this huge road of discovery.
[DAWN]
Wow. So yes, you suddenly, like you were saying, I’m not going to just take the words and the culture that I heard them in. I’m going to really study and let my mind be open to what it’s actually saying. I love that the power injustice, like Jesus was saying, “Let’s just really look at the system and let’s look at the injustice here and call it out. Let’s address it straight on.”
[JOE]
Yes. Yes, and I feel like it started with knowledge acquisition, but really it shifted for me, like when our second child was born. That’s when I think when we really shifted in not just trying to understand within the church, but to be moving away from the church.
[DAWN]
What happened when your second child was born? Why was that such a powerful shifting?
[JOE]
Well, I mean, so our first child, in 2012, she had open heart surgery. I mean, that was like a year long journey in our kind of first year of parenting which was really tough. The people in the church supported us in a lot of ways and then I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer that year. So I think there’s a lot that I was re-evaluating during that time, but then when our second child was born, she also had heart issues. She didn’t need full heart surgery, but she had to have a heart procedure where they could do it with a catheter. And as we were sitting in church, we both realized how much time went into that in like a limited busy family to just be in church, a couple hours to get the kids ready early, to get there.

Of course you’re supposed to help serve. So we’re on like coffee duty or set up duty because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to like contribute to a church. So you’ve got a couple hours then you’re in church and then you’ve got a couple hours afterwards kind of recovering. And I’m like, “We’re spending a good quarter of our weekend doing church activities.” Is this even making me a quarter happier or a quarter more spiritual or a quarter more like, just from a math standpoint, what’s the ROI on my time for going to church? I’ll go back to the analytical.
[DAWN]
Yes, I love that about you, though. It’s fine. I love it.
[JOE]
And we were like, “No, we’re more stressed out. We feel more out of kilter.” And so we just decided for a period of time, let’s just step back from doing anything with church. At first it was just like a nice break. It was a temporary sabbatical from church and then kind of came a phase of guilt like, “Oh, should we be going to church? How are we going to raise our kids? What does this mean?” And then it was like, I don’t even want to go to church. I don’t feel like I even believe a lot of this stuff anymore. I don’t feel like this is as needed as I once thought it was. And then it kind of moved into, well, if my Christian friends like questioned me, like I want to have an answer to tell them what I actually believe. So then I spent a bunch of time, like how do I answer them in regards to like, so they don’t think I’m unhealthy, that they don’t think I’m spiritually lost and it was very external focused so going through that kind of period of time. Then it kind of shifted into, there’s a term like nones, like people that have no church affiliation, but they might go back at some point and then there’s dones. So nones and dones
[DAWN]
I have heard of that. I love it.
[JOE]
Yes. So we found some other dones, Paul and Diane. Paul actually took my job at the community college when I left. I left to do full-time private practice and consulting and then through that process met Paula and Diane and they’re by far our best friends. They’re dones. He’s a former pastor. He has really left the faith and it’s like, they became our people that we hash stuff out with and like what we’re learning, what we’re sharing and just the back and forth. And I think that emerged into something that felt like the healthiest, strongest most divine time. Like after leaving the church where it felt like genuine spirituality for myself that could not have happened had I not left. That doesn’t mean that’s everyone else’s story. That just means that for me that really worked to kind of crack open in a much different way.
[DAWN]
So that’s where you connected more spiritually? It was just sitting with them and talking through these things and a safe place to just hash it out and say, “This isn’t working. Let’s figure this out. We need to really process this with trusted, safe people,” who also came from that background.
[JOE]
With lots of wine and gin and tequila.
[DAWN]
Yes, it kind of opens the mind.
[JOE]
Not other ones [crosstalk]
[DAWN]
That would make you sick.
[JOE]
Here’s a new drink that’s disgusting for all of you atheists.
[DAWN]
Yes, we’ll be featuring that on the Faith Fringes podcast. This is the new drink of the month. So yes, I’m curious though, like as you were sharing that story, I was like, “Oh my gosh.” It like hit me in my heart because I feel like COVID, coming off a year of COVID we’re entering into March soon, which is when everything stopped, we stopped going to church and to be honest, Joe, we haven’t been back and I’ve been, my husband and I have been really discussing. I’ve been discussing with some of my friends, like what’s up with this. And I’ve totally like looked at churches before and went through what’s the purpose of church and all that. So it’s not new to me, but I had really liked my church and it’s just interesting how much I don’t miss it this last year. I’ve been really ,some of the same questions that you were saying in the guilt and the should we, should we not is a lot of time consuming. I just, as you were saying that, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, he’s speaking my thoughts. What’s happening right now?” So yes, I’m in the middle of that right now, trying to figure it out and yes, it is even externally —
[JOE]
Well, you just sit down and say, “Why do I feel guilty? Like, do I feel guilty because Christina’s parents think we should go to church? Do I feel guilty because I should have my kids there? Well, why should I have my kids there? Like, is it the culture pushing it on me? If I were to just have no faith background, would I choose to go to church?” Just taking the time to dive into that and hash through it with Christina and with our friends, I mean, it really helped. I mean, I feel more spiritually grounded and happy and connected with the universe than I ever have. And it is totally different and non-traditional than how most people do it, but I honestly don’t care. I feel free.
[DAWN]
Yes. And that’s huge of saying like, yes, do you have the courage? And you do to jump in and say, “Where is this coming from? Why do I feel guilty?” And you said earlier, it’s external. It’s not real what I believe, it’s external stuff. And so I think that’s what I love about what I’m hoping this podcast does for people is just allow them space to question and have the courage to dive in deeper and really look around. And for you, I am curious, like where do you land now? Like how would you say spirituality is, I know we’re getting close to the end of our time, but where is spirituality now for you? How would you describe it? You’ve said something like left the faith. Like, do you have a faith? You know what I mean? Any of those questions? I know I just asked like 10.
[JOE]
No, no, I mean, I think it’s a nuanced thing. I mean, a lot of people, it’s interesting even how you frame your, like, where you landed versus then you’re like, can I ask some other questions? I think there is that tendency to say like, “What can you stand firm on?” And that’s the part that I think I’ve really switched my mindset on in that we all know this is a journey. We all know that you hopefully are a different person than you were when you were 21. Hopefully you’re a different person than you were before COVID. Hopefully like, so if we know we’re going to change, then our faith view is going to change and like, the experience of evolving to me is more important than saying, “What are the tenants that I stand on?” And I know that you’re not asking the tenants I stand on, but it’s, to me where I’m at right now is, I mean, there’s a lot of cracking open that’s happening.

Being on the road since September with my family in a camper has been fun in so many ways and has also, like anything that you put pressure on that puts a lot of pressure on all sorts of things. So from a faith perspective or a spirituality perspective, figuring out like who am I in the world and what can guide me and build my awareness? So I mean, things that I would say feel true but may not be true are that, there’s some energy in the universe that I don’t think is personal. I don’t think it’s like one God, but that there’s some sort of energy. I did some psychedelic work with a guide that I had some, several very intense experiences that felt very true to me and may have just been brain manifestations. But it’s interesting because the things I experienced in those psychedelic journeys are almost identical to a lot of the teachings in Daoism.

So to just say, wait a second, I was in this psychedelic journey and I was going from the energy or we-ness versus meanness. Like it was sort of this feeling of a collective we energy that I was just absorbed into and then I was like birthing into the illusion of separateness and time. I mean, there’s moments in it where I became a fly. There were moments I became a Fox and then died and then a human then died, a sound wave, then died. I mean, it was crazy, and then I experienced the pain of that death and it was interesting how in that psychedelic journey, there was so much pain with the death on the human side or on the three-dimensional illusion of separateness side. But then when I got through to the we or the energy, there was such joy of like, “Oh my gosh, I feel like I’m home. I’ve missed us. I’ve missed all of this energy and just being nothingness and everythingness.”

And then there would be pain when I left there as if I was dying, going back into the illusion of separateness in time. And to me, whether or not that’s true, I don’t care and from like, I don’t care if anyone believes me. I don’t care if anyone does those things. There’s just no attachment to it, but it feels meaningful to me. And just this idea of almost like the yin-yang, where you’re going in and out, and there’s pain on one side and joy on the other and noticing that and just saying, okay, in life right now there’s a lot of pain personally and collectively and in the world and then there’s also a lot of joy and we so often want to fast forward through that, find the hack, find the, like, that’s what I do as a consultant. I help people shortcut everything, but that doesn’t work a lot of times with pain.

A lot of times you just sit in it and you observe it and you meditate and you find what works today and it makes you feel better or not. And that just points to that being a human is messy and terrible and beautiful and muddy and just like everything. And if we are the energy of the universe, just experiencing what it’s being like to be human, it’s interesting how after that psychedelic experience, it was almost as if the spiritual journey for me, I wouldn’t say ended, but that almost compulsion to learn and figure it out and name it and have tenants to stand on it analyze like completely dissipated for me, where it feels like I’m growing and just the awareness of just who I am in this moment and like the appreciation of the crappiness to be human at times and the appreciation of the joys and the sorrows and the asshitting the fan. That’s not easy. It’s sucks at times. It’s really, really, really hard, but it also is like, everyone’s human story. We all have trauma, we all have pain. We all have joys. We all have ups and downs and ping pong between emotions and to get to the point that that is okay. And when it doesn’t feel okay, I just observe it. Like, I mean, it feels so freeing in so many different ways.
[DAWN]
Wow. Yes, that sounds like a huge experience just really bringing you to kind of some contentment of just being, instead of trying to figure it out, analyze it, and just like you said, observing it happening rather than trying to name it and put a tenant on it. Yes, that’s wow. That’s powerful.
[JOE]
Thank you.
[DAWN]
Yes. So yes, I like though how you said, even in my questions, I was trying to be like, yes, where have you landed? Where are you at? And I realized like, yes, that may be not that I’m, I don’t know if I want to ask that question that way again, of like nail it down, but more, where are you at now? And I loved hearing where you’re at now and just kind of understanding. It sounds like you’re just very open and kind of seeing what’s really important to you and coming back to family and emotions and values and just really kind of looking at that and how that interacts with your life because you’re living on the road right now traveling the country.
[JOE]
It’s interesting. I’ve been working with this Daoist coach from Hawaii that specifically works with people in their mid-life. He’s really big. I mean, in Daoism, it’s all about like, not forcing things, not pushing things, allowing things to emerge. I had this kind of metaphor come to mind of like how clean water systems happen, how they clean water in cities and you get all this gunky gross water and it sits at the water treatment plant and all the gunk goes to the bottom and some sort of clean water goes to the top and flows over into another tank and then that sort of clean water sits and all the little sediment goes to the bottom and then it goes to another tank and then they finally purify it at the end and add some stuff to make it super clean for drinking.

Just that idea that stillness and time are the things that take the crap out of the water is so anti-Joe. Like, I want to move fast. I want that hack, but the next day I was reading Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching, I think is how you say it and there was this verse in there that said “muddy water becomes clean when it sits.” And it was just like, oh my word, like what is happening in the universe? Like, come on. So I just feel like that’s like my main thing of sitting with myself, even though I’m this extroverted fast running person that hates sitting with himself that, as my therapist often tells me, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.”
[DAWN]
Yes. And that’s so hard for your personality, and mine. Actually I’m the same way. No, I can’t just sit in it. I need to do something. Wow. Well, I know we are near the end of our time, so thank you so much, Joe, for coming on and sharing your journey. I have really enjoyed just getting to know more of this side of you and just hearing your story. Of course, it makes me want to ask like 500 more questions.
[JOE]
Well, you can have me come back.
[DAWN]
Yes, that’s what I was going to say. You’ll have to come back. And I know this is going to sound random, but I like to ask people and I forgot to tell you this, I’d love to know if you have any transformational trails that you have hiked or walked or a journey that you can just kind of shout out to, “This trail was awesome and this is why.” Hiking is one of my pivotal, one of my pillars on Faith Fringes. So I just was curious.
[JOE]
I would say Pyramid Point in Northern Michigan, that overlooks Lake Michigan and North and South Manitou Island and the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, National Lake Shore. That and Empire Bluffs, which is just on the road. They’re all part of the same National Lake Shore. They’re my happy place.
[DAWN]
I love it. I just love, I kind of want to have listeners if they live in Michigan, now they can go check that out. I just think it’s fun to ask people as we’re ending. Well, thank you, Joe. I really appreciate your time and I’ll be looking forward to hearing more from you.
[JOE]
Sounds great. Thanks so much, Dawn.
[DAWN]
All right. Take care.

Thank you for listening today at Faith Fringes podcast. If you want to explore more of your own faith journey, I offer my free eight week email course called spiritual reflections, where you take a deeper dive into your own story included as a journaling workbook that has guided exercises. So if you want to explore more of what you were brought up to believe, or even look at where you may have been disillusioned or hurt, but yet still deep down you desire to authentically connect with God, then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com to sign up.

Also, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can reach me at dawn@faithfringes.com.

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