Hello and welcome back to Unleash Your Peace.
My name is Ellie Shoja.
I am your host.
I am a positive mindset coach,
A personal transformation expert,
A deliberate creator,
And I am your peace trainer.
And this podcast right here,
Unleash Your Peace,
Is your peace training.
Every single week we pick a different topic about the internal world and we dive into it over the course of five consecutive episodes,
Which I then release Monday through Friday.
The episodes are super short.
They're under 10 minutes long,
So they can bring a little bit of inspiration for you first thing in the morning,
Get you thinking a little bit,
Go inward a little bit,
Just so you can find a little bit more peace.
You can start shedding all of this unwanted pain,
All this extra weight that you're carrying with you,
And you can finally live your best life yet.
When you live from this place of joy and peace and connectedness to that non-physical,
Infinite part of yourself,
You don't just incrementally improve the quality of your life.
You actually exponentially innovate every aspect of your experiences on this physical plane.
And that is my wish for you.
I want you to level up in a major way to become your whole beautiful,
Powerful self and to be an uplifter in your community,
In your family.
And that trickles out into the world.
And that is how we level up as a society.
We enter the next phase of our evolution by each of us doing this internal work on our own.
Now this week we have a pretty sensitive topic.
I published a blog about this this morning,
And I've already received all sorts of feedback on it from both sides of the fence.
It is kind of a topic that we either fall one side of the fence or the other side of the fence with it.
And it's difficult to talk about.
And that's why I think it's important to talk about these things,
Especially the topic for this week,
Which is religion versus spirituality.
It's a hard one for us to discuss without getting emotional,
Without getting defensive.
Why is that?
Why do we get so defensive when we talk about our beliefs around spirituality and around religion?
I believe it's because we tie a lot of our identity to our spiritual practices.
So we define ourselves as Christian,
A Jew,
An atheist,
A Muslim,
A Baha'i.
That's usually one of the first things we'll share about ourselves with people that we meet for the first time.
So then when somebody has a different opinion or questions something that we so steadfastly believe in,
We become offended.
It's almost as if they are questioning our identity.
It's almost as if they're questioning who we are at our core.
Now,
The way that I grew up,
I was actually exposed to a lot of different religions and I had kind of a complicated relationship with religion from a very young age because I grew up moving around quite a bit.
I grew up moving from country to country.
I was exposed to a lot of different types of religion on a pretty deep level.
And by the time I was 12 years old,
I decided there is no God because I just could not fathom a God who could allow children to suffer as I had suffered throughout my childhood.
I did not actually find my way back to God or divinity in a more traditional sense until later in life,
Until my 30s.
So for about 20 years,
I was an atheist.
And even though I was an atheist,
I did not believe in a God per se.
And I had actually a really hard time using that word God.
And even though I did not believe in that kind of structured religious God figure,
I was extremely spiritual.
I read books by Eckhart Tolle and Abraham Hicks.
I meditated.
I was healing internally.
I was spending a lot of time in that internal world and becoming familiar with all of these concepts that I am sharing with you through this podcast and through my website and the courses that I create.
Now my experiences,
My exposure to all of these different religions led me to kind of ask the question,
Well,
Where does the truth lie?
If all of these religions are saying different things,
Who is right and who is wrong?
It didn't make sense to me that one group would go to heaven and all these other billions of people would not.
And so I started looking into the different religions and kind of stacking them on top of each other and trying to see where they line up and is it possible to find that spine,
That thread that runs through all of them?
And to my amazement,
What I found is that all of them speak about love in a very specific,
Very particular way.
In the Bible,
God is love.
Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love.
That is a quote from the Bible.
Muhammad in Islam said,
You will not enter paradise until you believe and you will not believe until you love one another.
Hindus believe God is love and Buddhists have a concept for an unconditional love for all beings called metta.
That is a pretty deep spiritual practice.
And in A Course in Miracles,
There is nothing real other than love.
Nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists.
And that for me was such a revelation to realize that love is not actually an emotion,
But love is something so much more.
It is actually the thing that we are made of.
In this podcast,
We've been talking about love from a vibrational point of view.
We talk about how your inner being has an extremely high vibrational frequency and the highest vibration emotion that we can experience in this physical form is love.
Love literally connects us to our inner being.
It literally is what our inner being is.
And when we experience love,
We join with our inner being wherever our inner being is.
It's always steadfast in that vibration of love.
It doesn't go anywhere,
That inner knowledge,
That awareness,
That consciousness,
The inner being,
The true self,
Whatever you want to call it,
It doesn't go anywhere.
It stands steadfast in a pure vibration of infinite unconditional love for all beings.
And when we experience that,
We join in with it.
Now going back to this distinction between religion and spirituality,
I want to pose a question.
I want to leave you with a question today,
Regardless of what your religious beliefs are,
What you grew up with,
What you believe to be true,
I want to ask you a question.
Could it be possible that all of these individuals who were inspired,
So they received an inspired thought or revelation,
Could it be possible that they all had the same exact experience?
They all connected with the same exact source?
And could it be possible then that they all translated that connection,
That feeling into different ways of expression?
We have talked about inspiration on this podcast,
And we've talked about how inspiration,
When we connect with our inner being,
When we connect with that infinite consciousness that we are,
That is us,
We receive information,
We receive inspiration,
And the information we receive is in a big chunk.
Now in order to make sense of that chunk of information,
We have to translate it.
We translate it using our minds,
And we translate it into words and ideas that make sense to us.
Again,
My question is this.
Could it be possible that these individuals who have inspired all of these different religions and essentially at their core say the same thing?
Could it be possible that they all received the same information,
The same revelation,
The same inspired block,
And they all translated it in different ways to make sense in their own societies,
In their own communities?
So I want to simply leave you with that,
That it is in my mind a possibility that all of these people had spiritual episodes.
They had spiritual experiences that they translated in different ways,
And now we have all of these different religions.
And by the way,
For every person,
For every Muhammad,
And for every Buddha,
There are thousands and thousands of people who are awake,
Who do connect with their inner beings,
Who do become enlightened,
Who live very simple lives,
And nobody really knows about them except for those people closest to them.
Whatever your thoughts are on this,
I know it's a big topic.
It's a controversial topic.
It's a difficult topic to talk about because there are a lot of emotions attached to it.
So if you want to engage in dialogue with me,
I love hearing from you.
You can reach out to me through my website.
It's peaceunleashed.
Com.
You can also work with me at any capacity by checking out my website.
All the services I provide are on there.
And you can also find Peace Unleashed on Instagram.
And that is the platform where I share all of my love notes with you.
Those notes are meant to inspire and uplift you.
They come from my heart and they are rooted in my desire to see you thrive.
And if you are enjoying this dialogue and you want others to find out about it,
Do leave a review on iTunes.
Screenshot this as you're listening to it.
Post it on Instagram.
Tag me on there.
I love seeing those.
And until we come back tomorrow and we go even deeper into this topic,
I wish you a peace filled day.
