Rediscovering Spirituality with Nick Literski

Many conversations assume that LGBTQ people and religious people are two separate identity groups. There is a heteronormative religious culture that falsely claims that queer people can’t be religious or spiritual. Some queer people absolutely need to walk away from religion in order to heal and become whole, but others are seeking a spiritual path that is different from what they grew up with. Dr. Nick Literski joins Jen on today’s episode of In the Den to talk about how to rediscover a personal spirituality that is unique, expansive, and LGBTQ inclusive.

Special Guest: 

Nicholas S. Literski, JD, PhD, is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a professional spiritual guide. Nick holds a doctorate in Depth Psychology with Emphasis in Jungian and Archetypal Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as a master’s in Spiritual Guidance from Sofia University. Their research interests include in depth psychological reflections on spirituality, Paleolithic cave art, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Nick’s work has been published in the FARMS Review of Books on The Book of Mormon; Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought; Immanence: The Journal of Applied Mythology, Legend, and Folklore; Somatics Magazine-Journal of the Mind-Body Arts and Sciences; and the recent compilation, The Reality of Fragmentation and the Yearning for Healing: Jungian Perspectives on Democracy, Power, and Illusion in Contemporary Politics.  Their recent book, Method Infinite: Freemasonry and the Mormon Restoration, was published by Greg Kofford Books in 2022.

Links from the show:

• Five Steps to Rediscovering Spirituality as an LGBT Person: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/five-steps-to-rediscoveri_b_8373220 
• Dr. Literski’s website: https://www.dancingancestors.com/ 
• Join MamaDragons today at www.mamadragons.org 

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Transcript

JEN:   Hello and welcome. You are listening to In the Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created out of our desire to walk and talk with you through this journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. We are so happy that you’re here with us.

For as long as I can remember, the conversations I heard held LGBTQ people as one group and religious people as another group -- two separate circles.  There was something often cruel about the way LGBTQ people learned about divinity and it seemed as if there was almost no way to find a healthy spiritual life in a world where heteronormative culture was clearly claiming there was no space for people outside of that.  And I think there’s a lot of pressure for LGBTQ people to “pick a team,” for lack of better phrasing. Some queer people absolutely need to walk away from any sort of spirituality in order to heal and become whole.  I would never pretend to speak for what is best for any other person.  But others are seeking a spiritual path that is different from what they might have grown up with.  And our guest today is going to help us with some of those options.

 About 8 years ago, I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Nick, first online and eventually in person. And I was so impressed with the way they made their own spirituality and understanding completely expansive and unique.  I loved the way they claimed and owned the theology of the ages from a myriad of cultures.  It was completely new and, frankly, mind-blowing for me, and I’ve been excited to share it with all of you guys for months! Dr. Nicholas Literski is an adjunct lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies and a Jungian scholar. They hold a PhD in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, along with a Masters in Spiritual Guidance from Sofia University. They are a professional spiritual guide, working primarily with the LGBTQ community to help the individuals discover and deepen their relationship with The Divine.

 Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Dr. Nick!!

NICK:        Thank you. I’m glad to be here today.

JEN:          I’m so excited to have you here. To start us off, can you tell us about your own personal religious roots and how you were impacted by your early spiritual practices?

NICK:        So I was a strange child who was very interested in spirituality from the cradle. So I have been told that at the age of five, I would stand outside of church meetings at the end in the parking lot, with a circle of adults around me as I talked about the day’s sermon. So, you know, my relationship with spirituality has always been an important one for me. I was raised in various Christian denominations and nondenominational churches. And I eventually, as a young teenager, joined the LDS church and spent many years in that tradition.

Time came, when I could no longer continue that. I struggled for a long time as I had an increasing awareness of my own sexuality. And I reached a point where a change had to happen, where the tradition I had was no longer sustaining me and helping me but instead was threatening my life instead. And so I did leave that tradition. I, then, about had a four-year purge, quite honestly. I visited a lot of different religious traditions, had great admiration for many things that I saw, but I didn’t have the energy, yet, to dive into any particular tradition.

And finally, I was actually participating in a gay men’s retreat where I had an opportunity to take on a spiritual leadership role. And that really reawakened some things for me and I began to realize that my own spirituality was really inherent with me and had nothing to do with an outside organization or structure. I proceeded to take three years of training in shamanic work. I learned a great deal of many wonderful things there. And after three years, I did step away from that spiritual community, in part because they were very intent on a positivity movement. You could not express frustration or anger because that meant that you weren’t spiritual. And so I needed to step away from that group.

Ultimately, in the last several years, I’ve picked up an interest I actually had for decades in ceremonial magic. And that has ended up for me, really fulfilling both personally and with community that I’ve began to find out here in Portland, Oregon. So my spirituality has had many phases, if you will, and continues to draw from many different sources. And that really is my spiritual identity today is the ability to stand in control of my spirituality and draw from the many ideas and traditions that have existed throughout the world.

JEN:          I love the idea of five-year-old Nick leading some sermons in the parking lot, now practicing magic and embracing all of it as a really healthy personal journey. It doesn’t sound like you’re expressing a lot of regret for any portion.

NICK:        You know, it’s easy to feel that way. And, I think especially as an LGBT person who finds themselves outside of a long-standing spiritual tradition, those are the natural feelings, sadness, regret, anger. And really, we have to allow ourselves to grieve whenever that happens. Even if we leave completely by choice -- sometimes we don’t leave by choice -- Even if we made that choice completely on our own and we’re happy about the choice, there’s still a part of us that has to grieve the loss of community, the loss of tradition, the loss of something that’s been a big part of our lives. And if we allow ourselves to go through that grief process, we really can come to a place of saying, “Wow, that was an important part of my own spiritual path.”

JEN:          I like that.

NICK:        And we can appreciate what was good about it as we move forward into other things.

JEN:          I appreciate that. You kind of touched on this, and I mentioned it also in the opening, but can you expand on why spirituality in the United States -- LGBTQ people sometimes have this difficult time developing their sense of spirituality. Can you kind of talk about that, elaborate a little bit more than what we’ve already said?

NICK:        So what I’ve observed in working with some of my LGBTQ clients in spiritual guidance is they tend, very often, to be sort of overachievers in their spiritual traditions. Many gay men were the best little boys in church.

JEN:          That’s so true.

NICK:        Yeah, and we see that. And so because they have been that model inherent, when they find themselves outside that tradition, they can feel really groundless. They can feel like they no longer have the ability to connect with spirituality because they have been taught and trained that spirituality looks like one thing. And if who they are doesn’t align with that one thing that they were originally taught, it’s easy to feel like there’s no space. And so I find many of my clients don’t know how to express spirituality any longer, and don’t know really where to go because they’re entire image of the divine that they’ve been taught, was an image that did not accept who they are and did not include who they are.

JEN:          So you talked a little bit about the retreat and how that started to open your mind to spirituality. Without ever speaking to you, I don't know that it would’ve ever occurred to me to look at spirituality that was more expansive. Was there something specific at that event that kind of blew your mind open to “Wait a minute. There’s other options here.” or was it something you’d kind of always wrestled with?

NICK:        I think I always wrestled with that a little bit. I’ve been interested in various forms of spirituality, again, since I was a little kid. I was the nerdy kid watching documentaries and reading books about other traditions. So I always had a little bit of that. And, in fact, did incorporate some other traditions in my personal spiritual practice even though I was part of a strongly conservative Christian background.

JEN:          Fascinating.

NICK:        But, it was interesting though, when I went to that retreat, I was asked to lead a morning ritual. And it was so funny because the night before I was thinking about what I would do with the other people in the group. And I was sort of in that liminal state in between being awake and asleep. And I find that, sometimes, is kind of a spiritual download time. And I instantly knew exactly what to do. And much to my surprise, it incorporated a small bit of ritual from my prior spiritual tradition in terms of physical ritual.  And it turned out to be a very meaningful ritual and the other participants were commenting to me, people that did not come from that tradition by the way. So they didn’t recognize that I had drawn those pieces. But it was like, “Oh, Wow. I can take this little segment here and reframe it in a way that brings purpose and unity to this group.” And so that was kind of a powerful awakening.

JEN:          I love that. I love that story. So, talk to me, I find this subject so fascinating and I’m sure you’re like, “I have a college degree in this and you’re giving me ten minutes.” But talk to me about the idea of some deities that are not quite so heteronormative.

NICK:        Oh, absolutely.

JEN :          I want to hear about some of them.

NICK:        Sure. To preface that, I just want to say that my own way of framing all of this is that The Divine is The Divine and as very limited humans, we’re not going to comprehend The Divine fully. But, to me, The Divine wears a thousand masks. So we have this rich, amazing history throughout thousands of years of different faces and different beings and different entities that people have used as ways to frame The Divine. So when I work with clients, particularly clients very often who come from a Christian background or related that have a really, I hate to say, have been taught a very narrow idea where The Divine wears one mask, if you will.

JEN:          Yeah. That makes sense.

NICK:        Again, that mask they’ve been taught is heteronormative, patriarchal, frankly usually white, and male --  We can get really specific about this -- cisgender. So they don’t always realize that we have this amazing history to draw from. So, for just a couple of examples, in Greek history there’s a prophet by the name of Tiresias. I never pronounce that quite correctly. But he actually got into a fight with some magical snakes and as a result he was transformed from a man to a woman. And he spent seven years as a woman.

JEN:          Was it like a punishment?

NICK:        Basically, yes.

JEN:          Okay.

NICK:        In that particular frame. But he spent about seven years as a woman until Zeus transformed him back. And in the legends, he even commented actually that he had enjoyed sex more as a woman. But he experienced both genders in that sense. And in the Greek tradition, the so called “Hermaphrodite” we don’t like that word anymore but that’s the classical term. The intersex person was considered especially divine. They were considered something very sacred. So there’s that sort of tradition.

Another, if we go in terms of Asian religion backgrounds, is Guanyin. Guanyin was a male Bodhisattva, a sacred holy person. And Guanyin became very devoted to the idea of compassion and practicing it and studying it and understanding it more fully. And in this process Guanyin transitioned to become a female goddess. So, these are, for example, trans masks of divinity.

Mercury was a very transformative figure. He shows up in different genders and different sexualities. The Greek Gods are really good for different sexualities, quite frankly. Zeus had relationships with men and women. Dionysis is one of my favorite images. Dionysis, I identify as nonbinary. Dionysis was born twice. He’s referred to as twice born because his mother was killed and Zeus, the father, immediately took the fetus and sewed it up in his thigh is the language that’s used – it’s probably not his thigh. And allowed the baby to come to term and it was born from Zeus. Well, Dionysis is described by the poets as the man woman or the womanly. And he finally has this episode where he returns to Thebes the city that should be worshiping him, and many people refuse to believe that he’s  god.

And it’s brought in front of the king, Pentheus. And Pentheus is examining him. And there’s this long passage from the poet where Pentheus is really clearly both repulsed and aroused by the fact that Dionysis is very much gender fluid, that Dionysis has many feminine aspects. One of the props that was used in theater to represent Dionisis was a staff with a bearded mask and woman’s gown. So that’s just a sample. But there are many images of the divine throughout all the world's traditions that play with gender, play with sexuality. The story of Zeus and Ganymede is actually an amazing story of a gay relationship. Many of the Greek goddesses had relationships with women. And so we could see these throughout and begin to work with those as images of The Divine that we can connect to as LGBT persons.

JEN:          Are there examples in like Celtic traditions or Pagan traditions or other similar examples in some of those traditions?

NICK:        Sure. So in Celtic traditions and other European traditions, you have Cernunnos – I actually have a tattoo of Cernunnos myself – Cernunnos, who is a god of the forest, if you will, a god of the wild things, the horned god. It goes back to the ideas of Pan and many other of these nature gods if you will. But Cernunnos, his sexuality is completely fluid. Cernunnos is what we would call now, pansexual. And it’s really interesting, I hear from a number of people who bring Cernunnos into their personal spiritual practice and identity who have had dreams and similar experiences with Cernunnos that are, in fact, sexual both heterosexual and same sex relationships. So he's a figure that seems to be very malleable in that way.

There are also deities in both North and South America that play with this same sort of thing. A lot of the trickster deities, in fact, throughout traditions have this gender fluidity or sexual fluidity showing up. And that’s almost a special gift of the trickster, if you will, because the trickster isn’t tied to the rules all the time.

JEN:          How does one tap into these kind of stories that don’t belong to their own culture. Obviously, we want to avoid appropriating things that don’t belong to us. And I grew up hearing about these Greek gods and goddesses not necessarily in the way you’re talking about them here. But they were fairy tales, right? Like Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh and Zeus were kind of like all together. So how does one tap into these stories without appropriating but also in an appreciative way without feeling like they’re trying to participate in a fairy tale?

NICK:        Great question. Appropriation is an important topic, and important question. And there is sort of an invisible line somewhere, honestly. I talked about the fact that I took three years of training in shamanic traditions. And those were based in Lakota tradition with some Celtic influences. Frankly, they also had some flat-out invented material that was being attributed to indigenous people without being completely, that’s common in the neo-shamonic movement.

But, for me, I became a little uncomfortable with making that shamonic work the whole of my spiritual experience or even the major part of it because it did feel that I was taking from instead of being part of. That said, there’s a lovely tradition among some native peoples in North America suggesting that The Divine, or Great Spirit however it’s framed, gave different gifts to different people in different parts of the earth with the intention that there would someday be a conference of all of us together and we would share what we had learned between these groups.

JEN:          I like this idea.

NICK:        Those who were given the gift of fire would teach those who had been given the gift of water and vice versa, and all these things would come together. So, to me, that’s the model I look to. I really believe that we can enrich one another with our stories and our traditions. And that, yes, we can take – take is an unfortunate word there. We can adopt. Let’s put it that way – we can adopt things that we learn from each other and do so in a respectful way without claiming that we invented them, without claiming that they came from our own imaginations and be able to move forward in that way and be enriched.

In the United States, our culture is a set of borrowing. We don’t have a mono-culture. We have a collection of many, many traditions that today we think are natural to us, but they’re not. They came from different groups. So, in building our spiritual practice, you said you hear many of these as fairy tales, they come from outside your own tradition. Again, I really encourage people to think about them as masks. Think about them as ways to think about The Divine. Many of these masks or these different divine personages seem to focus around a particular trait. So you have Aphrodite is the Goddess of Love. You have Guanyin as the Goddess of Compassion. You have Mercury, a God of Speed and Communication and Commerce.

As we are trying to develop certain aspects in our own lives, we could look to these particular masks of The Divine. And it doesn’t have to be about whether they are real. I kind of put real in quotes. One of the things that I personally really had to learn in my own spiritual journey is, I had spent many years in a tradition that claimed to be the truth with a capital T, okay. And there was certainty in that. There was this idea that we have the answers. We know what’s going on. And that way, we’re safe. Well, I’ve had to learn that, number one, it’s okay to let go of that certainty. In fact, it can be liberating. It can actually be wonderful and beautiful to be uncertain.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what’s going to happen after this life. I have some ideas. I’ll know when I get there. And oddly enough these days, I’m okay with that where before I had this whole road map for Eons ahead. It’s okay to be in the uncertainty. And part of what – you mentioned earlier that I’m a Jungian scholar, part of what drew me to Jung, was in my own spiritual practice of meditation I had encountered ancestral beings. And actually had, this is sort of a meditation almost dream state, but I had these encounters in which they told me things that were mind blowing. And I found myself in this really weird place of saying, “Okay. I don’t know that these beings are real in an objective sense. I think I imagined them. But on the other hand, they’re telling me these things. There’s something going on here.” and so that question, the dichotomy was part of what brought me to Jung.

And I learned a lot since then about the unconscious and about the collective unconscious and come to realize that the question isn’t whether they’re real. The question is, does this work. So we can work with these different masks of Deity and use them as tools and in some cases, those masks will become very real to us in terms of our experience, will become really powerful ways that we engage The Divine.

Now, like this morning, it’s Wednesday. Wednesday is the day of Mercury. I have a very special relationship with Mercury. So this morning, I lit candles. I lit incense. And I have a herm, which is in the Greek tradition there were these rectangular pillars that had the head of the god and typically, oddly enough the penis, and that was oddly enough the only features on these.

JEN:          Just the important parts.

NICK :        Exactly. Both heads, whatever. And they would be placed at crossroads to mark the way. And so the herm is a sacred symbol of Mercury. So on my alter this morning, I burnt candles, burnt incense – some frankincense which has been associated with Mercury – and I have a herm on the alter. And I had my conversation with Mercury. Now, does that make Mercury real in the sense of absolute, objective reality? No. And yet, I have a relationship with this idea, this particular face of deity that has become really powerful for me. And so those are the sort of things that we can develop in time always realizing that that is our own spirituality, our own experience. And that yours can vary from mine and that’s okay.

JEN:          So, given your own background in Christianity and Mormonism, I’m assuming you understand some of the fears people might be having while they’re listening to this like the – I’m going to call it a fear. I don’t know what else to call it – maybe a discomfort with the idea of other approaches to The Divine. And particularly the idea of their offspring. We hear often some panic from parents who are worried that their kids, for example, won’t believe in Jesus anymore or whatever. Can you speak to that fear?

NICK:        Sure. It’s natural. It’s absolutely understandable. Again, though, even from that tradition, you can begin to open up those masks a little bit. As you read the Bible, there are some really interesting things going on. There’s the strong relationship between Jesus and one of his apostles, John the Beloved, the apostle whom Jesus loved who laid on his breast. There’s interesting things going on that may not have been quite the rigid cis-normative, heteronormative view that today Christianity tends to hold.

Another example in the Old Testament, you have Ruth and Naomi. You know, Naomi was Ruth’s mother-in-law. Ruth became a widow. A relationship builds between them that is very, very powerful. And, again, makes you almost wonder the shape of that. David has his own relationship with King Saul’s son. So, even within that tradition, realize that there may be more variability than somebody initially thinks.

But in terms of being afraid that your children are going to adopt a different tradition, I think what we really focus on, again, is what works for them. Would you rather have your child be within a narrow interpretation of Christianity that is making them unhappy and frankly potentially killing them? Let’s be honest and blunt here. Or would you rather have them still have a spirituality, still have the benefits of that in their lives, even if it has a little different shape?

JEN:          I remember when my own son came out and I was contemplating and thinking about all of these sorts of things. And I remember just being really impressed and overwhelmed with the idea that anything divine was perfectly capable of developing a relationship in some fashion with my kid. And if I could just get out of the way, they could do that between themselves. I don’t know how to use pronouns there, but between The Divine and my kid, they would figure it out. They didn’t really need me. And that was really helpful for me to let go of the idea that I needed to control my kid’s spiritual journey. I’m not powerful enough to do it anyway.

NICK:        And I think, in some ways, what that does – and of course this can vary on the age of the kids that are involved – but anybody who has adult children, has had the experience of having to step back and say, “Oh, wow . . .

JEN:          Theoretically. Theoretically we did that.

NICK:        . . . They’re an independent being with their own life. And they’re going to live their own life.” I have five daughters and they have quite the range of relationships with the spiritual tradition that I raised them in. And, personally, I sort of sit back in awe. One of them maintains that tradition and yet very much on her own terms. And it amazes me that within a tradition that can be very difficult for outliers, she manages this. She pulls it off and is happy doing it. That really makes me happy.

I have other children that are not any longer involved in that tradition and have gone on to their own again, more personal relationships. I don’t get to control what those look like. I wouldn’t want to control what those look like. But, especially now that they’re all adults, yeah, guess what, I have to step back and I may be Daddy, but I’m not in charge.

And so if your child is 15, 16 and comes out of the closet and is in this position, in some ways, that’s going to make you as a parent to grow a little faster and be able to say that, “You know what, at least in this piece, my job is to sit back and let them grow, and be, and flourish as they are.”

JEN:          I like that comparison too, because . . .

NICK:        If I also have to give them a curfew.

JEN:          Yeah. That comparison is good, right, because we don’t get to pick who our kids fall in love with or who they’re capable of falling in love with in the same ways that we can’t really dictate how they practice their own spirituality. Talk to me for a minute, what importance do you think religion and spiritual practice have in the world at large. Like, why do we even care about spirituality, we have science now? But particularly, how are these elements important for queer people even in addition to the world?

NICK:        So science, number one, tells us that there are benefits of spirituality, that there are actually psychological pluses of having some sort of spiritual practice. It really does give us comfort. It does preserve our lives in some ways, helps us make healthy choices. And that’s regardless of the tradition by the way. That’s not just tied to one particular tradition. So there are psychological benefits. There are relational benefits. Spirituality often ties us in one way or another to community and helps us build community which is healthy for us. So that’s what science says.

But, for myself as a depth psychologist, part of the focus of my work is looking at the human religious instinct. We are born, we are wired that way. We have amazing scientists who are finding certain areas of the brain that seem directly suited to spiritual experience. You know, when somebody prays, a certain part of the brain actually lights up. Things like this that are way beyond my understanding. But my own work, for example, I’ve worked with 36,000-year-old cave art that was in a ritual setting and is clearly, deeply spiritual in nature. I was watching a documentary last night, it’s on Netflix. Netflix just put out a documentary called, “Cave of Bones.” And among other things that they’re talking about is 250,000-year-old archeological dig, deep in a cave, they are humanoid individuals, but they are not homo sapiens. They are an earlier variety of human. And 250,000 years ago, they are ritually burying their dead. You don’t crawl through this long deep cave through narrow passages to get to a particular part of the cave and bury people in certain positions and sometimes with other goods with them if you don’t have some kind of spiritual existence, some kind of spiritual framework. Otherwise, let the vultures at them. That’s a lot of effort to go to.

There is something in us that longs for that connection with what Rudolph Otto, back in the 1920’s coined the term, Numinous. And he did that just to avoid the word holy and kind of the churchy connotations that had. But the Numinous he talked about was that which was bigger than us, more powerful than us, and beyond our understanding. And the fact is, even if we identify as atheist, we still have what is bigger than us, more powerful than us, and beyond our understanding. And that can take a lot of forms. But we have a natural desire to connect with whatever that is. I like the word “The Divine”. And like I said, The Divine wears a thousand masks. But it is, again, a natural part of who we are. This doesn’t negate science. In fact, we need to work with both together. But science doesn’t negate spirituality. Science, in fact, shows us that spirituality is a value. What we need to do is decide what our spirituality is going to look like in a way that is actually functioning for us and supporting and sustaining us.

JEN:          So a lot of people have religious trauma for a lot of reasons because of the focus of this podcast, I’m going to speak directly to the religious trauma of LGBTQ people. We know that they experience a lot of that in the hands of maybe the traditions of their fathers, we’ll call it. And so we see an exodus from religious practice. Do you have tips or tricks or some sort of understanding of how maybe dipping your toe back into some sort of spiritual practice can actually help heal some of that religious trauma where maybe avoiding it is leaving us with these gaping wounds?

NICK:        The first of those really is, I mentioned early, is allowing yourself to grieve. Because sometimes, if we don’t allow ourselves to have that grief, it’s like any other relationship. The wounding that occurred, the hurt that occurred, will continue to fester. So we allow ourselves to grieve for what was lost, for what we experienced. But then we need to begin to shift our focus from external authority to internal authority. Often in spiritual traditions we’re taught to look outside for answers, whether that’s a sacred text, whether that’s a charismatic leader, it’s always looking outside for the answers. And we can go through decades in a particular religious tradition and be very trained in that.

So part of healing from religious trauma is making the shift to where the authority is inside us, to where we say, “How does this make me feel inside? Do I really agree with this or am I just accepting it because someone else said it?” Instead of what is true, external. What is true for me, internal. So these kind of questions really help us along in moving past that trauma. The negative experiences that we’ve had will always be there. And they are lessons. They are part of our path. But we have a way of being able to acknowledge them, acknowledge our feelings around them, and move forward in a way that is more internally centered.

 We also can begin to frame new ways of interacting with The Divine. So instead of focusing just on the way that our earlier tradition engaged The Divine, we build new ways. We get to create our own rituals and practices. And it’s through all this that we begin to make that transition away to a healthy place. Then, as we’ve done that, we start to rediscover our purpose. You know, I know people who came from particular churches, for example, where they were heavily involved in music, whether playing the piano, whether in a choir. I worked with a client who is deeply, deeply traumatized by the loss of being able to be in the choir because he was excommunicated from his congregation. And I just felt for him so much because that was something deeply personal and important to him.

As we begin to rebuild our own spirituality, we start to rediscover our purpose. I work with a physician who came out as gay, was shoved out of his religious tradition, and had kind of that wandering stage. And eventually ended up volunteering with organizations that work with HIV infected patients. And for him, he rediscovered his spiritual purpose in serving that community. And he’s been doing that now for a couple of decades. In doing that, we start to bring our own gifts back to our community whether that be music, whether that be something like medicine. When we reach the place where we’re able to bring our gifts back to our community, that is really a place of complete healing.

JEN:          I love the tie in to the hero’s journey. We do some healing and then we come on back and offer our gifts.

NICK:        It definitely reflects the hero’s journey in a lot of ways.

JEN:          I like that. I know, for me, learning about so many other faiths also helped empower me a little bit. I felt like I had lost so much and then in the end, I felt like I gained so much more. It’s religion, all of these things I had grown up to believe as fairy tales or whatever, are so expansive. It made me, at least, feel connected to pretty much all of humanity. Like, “Oh, this is what we’re all doing? Okay.”

NICK:        You and I met, if I can tell this story?

JEN:          Sure.

NICK:        You and I met at a conference when I was giving a presentation

Similar to this. And I created a little altar in the middle of the room.

JEN:          It was awesome.

NICK:        And I placed little statues of different faces of The Divine around this altar. And I don’t remember who it was, but there were people pointing at these saying, “What is that?”

JEN:          It was probably me.

NICK:        Somebody pointed to the statue of the Budda, and was like, “What is that?” Sometimes, when we have been in one tradition for a long time, we don’t have a lot of information of what else is out there. And so, just like what you described, as we begin to look outside our circle and see what the rest of humanity has done to engage The Divine, yes, it enriches us.

JEN:          I wasn’t so much removed from religion as I was -- the door opened and I got to meet all the religions.

NICK:        Nice. Nice.

JEN:          I have no advice for anyone. I just, I found it really helpful for me. Talk to all of us about the difference and importance – you touched on it a little bit but I want to go back – between a very literal belief and a non-literal belief. Do some comparing and contrasting of those in the realms of fostering our own spirituality.

NICK:        Sure. So a literal belief, again, sort of gets us back to that outside authority. A literal belief is going to be very defined. This is The Divine. This is what The Divine looks like. This is The Divine’s sexuality. This is The Divine’s gender. This is what color skin The Divine has. Etcetera, okay? For many of us in the United States, that picture looks like an old white male with a beard and white robes. It’s super common, in fact, to have that kind of image. So that kind of literal belief tends to be externally created for us and imposed on us.

A less literal belief is really using these images as vehicles, as tools. Again, there’s this sense that there is something beyond us that is bigger, more powerful, beyond our comprehension. And we use these different images, these different masks, these different tools as ways to approach that. So we don’t have to believe that any particular mask is definitive. It can be one way that we approach. And those can change and morph. At one point in time, we may be very focused on developing love. And we may use the image of Venus as part of that. At another time, we may really need to develop a more assertive aspect of The Divine. We may be looking to Mars. I’m sorry. I draw a lot of examples from the Greek Pantheon because there’s so many in the Greek Pantheon that are easy to work with.

JEN:          And if they needed another one, they just added, it seems like, right?

NICK:        Exactly. But that was a very healthy thing. And I’ll be honest, from my discipline, mono-theism is not the most psychologically healthy model. A more poly-theistic model is actually more enriching and psychologically healthy because we are complex beings. And, yes, these polo-theistic cultures created images of The Divine that represented  these different emotions or realities or even geographic conditions or weather conditions. They created these images of The Divine and they gave them a place to be honored.

In the case of the Roman and Greek Pantheons, they all had altars devoted to them. Paul is like look, “Look, you’ve got all these and you’ve got one without a label. I’m going to tell you about the one without the label.” Good for Paul, okay. But the thing is, they realized that we need to be able to honor all of these aspects of experience, that we need to be able to engage The Divine through them. And that gave a spaciousness that is very healthy.

JEN:          What about someone who says, “You’re not even interested in getting to know God. You’re just making up God however you want.” What do you say to that kind of idea?

NICK:        Okay. Okay.

JEN:          Yes. I say, “Yes, I am.”

NICK:        You know, in my own, speaking for myself in my own experience, this kind of gets back to that certainty thing. I spent so many years as the golden scholar of doctrine and history in my tradition. And so much certainty and I could tell you what a particular church leader said in 1853, okay. I was a nerd in that sense because, by golly, I was going to have all these answers in my head. And, in my journey, what I found out was that’s interesting, but having absolute truth is actually not that useful because here I had a model of what truth was, but that truth was kind of putting me in a position where I either left that tradition or likely would have ended my life. It was down to those two choices.

So I learned to be more concerned with what works than what is true with a Capital T. I don’t care if your image of The Divine is a tub of cottage cheese. I tell this to my spiritual guidance clients. I don’t care. What I care about is how is it functioning for you? How does that image of The Divine support you, sustain you, give you joy and growth. And so, yes, I’m okay with the person who really wants that certainty and doesn’t understand why I don’t want to know their certainty. Good for them. If that works for them, great. For me personally, my focus is what is feeding me, what is working for me, instead. And that’s really how I often help support my clients is to help them discover what works for them.

JEN:          There’s almost a sounding of when there’s a lot of certainty, for me, I didn’t have to do a lot of spiritual interacting with what I would also refer to as The Divine because there was somebody else that had written a book about it. I could just go to the store and look up the answers to my questions. And when that certainty went away, that’s when I feel like I actually started to become more spiritual because there wasn’t anyone to answer those questions for me.

And I wasn’t trying to create divinity, right? I was trying desperately to communicate and connect and commune in some sort of way. But I was 40 and I just didn’t know how other than pulling out those same books that I had been studying my whole life and trying to interpret them in new ways. I like this idea of whatever is coming is what I’m going to adapt and adopt and communicate with. Before I let you go, is there anything that you can share with us about where people can find you, find access to your work, those kind of things. Talk to us about that for a second.

NICK:        Sure. So my website is dancingancestors.com. And you’ll find some of my writings there. In particularly written some things about transgender persons and spirituality. It’s been one of my areas of focus. And through that website, I also offer my services as a spiritual guide. I am professionally trained to give that support. I offer sessions with clients. I do an introductory session, half an hour for free, just to sort of feel the relationship and see whether we want to work together.

But, beyond that, I work with people on an ongoing basis. Many cases I work with clients once a month to help see where things are going for them and where they want to deepen their relationship. And, of course, I teach at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the undergraduate program. We’re always looking for students who want to further their understanding of psychology in a context that allows for spiritual expression. And I’m continuing to do more work as things go on.

JEN :          We will include links to your website. It’s been so fun to watch you over the past, almost, decade. And you were already smart, but as you’ve learned more and more, it’s been really fun to watch. I like, particularly, the way that all the religions and the history of the entire world, when you’re talking, sound like they have more in common, more things that unite humanity. Sometimes when we think about world religions or historical religions, it’s easy to see how there was some contention involved. But when you talk about it, it all seems so uniting and so healing and so for the good of humanity at large and I love all of that.

I appreciate you donating some of your time to help us all understand a different way to see the world. Some of this is going to be very new and maybe even frightening for some of our listeners. I hope that they’ll lean into that because that discomfort is sometimes where we grow. I’m hoping that we can all get excited about exploring our spirituality in deeper ways, even if it’s within our spiritual tradition or if it’s in science. The molecules are a fascinating way to expand our minds just like you said, the luminous world around us. Thank you so much for joining us.

NICK:        Thank you, Jen.

JEN:          Thanks so much for joining us here in the den. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends. We’d also love it if you could take a minute to leave us a positive rating and review on whatever platform you’re listening to us on. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. But, review or not, we’re glad you’re here. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can visit our website at mamdragons.org or follow us on Instagram or Facebook. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes.