What Happens When You Leave Religion but Still Long for Meaning?

For years after leaving Christianity, I felt spiritually homeless.

When I was in church, I was deeply in touch with the part of me that looked for meaning and mystery. So when I left, I felt such a loss.

Not necessarily of the beliefs themselves. I was more than okay releasing the idea that I was born sinful or destined for hell. But I did grieve the part of me that felt connected to the experience of being part of something larger than my ordinary day-to-day life.

Religion gave me a container to place those longings into: music that moved me, symbolism, shared language, practices charged with emotional depth. And when I left, I think I accidentally assumed I had to abandon that part of myself too.

But that longing didn’t disappear.

...so of course I eventually went looking for it elsewhere and I tried filling that space with all kinds of things. If there was a spiritual aisle for it, I probably wandered down it for at least a little while. But looking back now, I think I was still approaching spirituality the same way I approached religion:

🤔 What are the rules here?
🤔 Who has the answers?
🤔 What is the “right” way to do this?

I was still looking outside myself for someone to tell me how to be in relationship with my own life.

When you’ve spent years being taught to override yourself, it can feel terrifying to simply ask subjective, open-ended questions like "What feels meaningful to me now?" or "What makes me feel alive?"

I think a lot of us leave religion expecting freedom to feel exhilarating, only to realize how deeply we were trained to look outside ourselves for orientation. Even spiritually. Especially spiritually.

So for a long time, I kept trying to “get it right.” I wanted someone to hand me a new map, a new way to understand myself and the world so I could follow it and get the proverbial pat on the head for being the good little girl I was trained to be.

But eventually I started realizing that the moments that made me feel most connected to myself were usually not the moments someone else prescribed for me. They were the ordinary moments I stumbled into on my own:

• 🫙How my collection of jars became tiny homes for shells, lake rocks, meaningful little objects and wishes scribbled onto scraps of paper that I placed around the house like little prayers to myself
• 🛌 How unexpectedly delighted I was to notice what images were visiting me in my dreams
• 🌸 Taking pictures of shadows and flowers and clouds because something in me wanted to remember them
• 📖 Immersing myself in folklore stories and feeling like some ancient part of me was reconnecting to stories I’d known for lifetimes

And slowly, I started realizing that spirituality, at least for me, had very little to do with performing the “right” practices and much more to do with staying close to my own life.

I started paying attention to what stirred me, what moved me, what softened me, what made me feel connected, awake, curious, alive. And as I did that, my life started opening up and speaking to me again. Actually…no. I think I was finally learning how to listen and trust what I heard.

Come to virtual Summer Camp! 

That’s become the heartbeat underneath Camp Enchantment: a summer experience for women who want to rebuild and reconnect with the parts of themselves that still long to feel deeply alive on their terms. 

It's not a space that says: “Come learn how to be spiritual.” or: “Come join a new belief system,” but: "Come spend a summer staying close to your own wild and precious life again."

Come sit around a virtual campfire with women who have felt spiritually homeless too and are beginning to realize that maybe home was never another system to fit inside of, but a deeper relationship with themselves all along.

I picture Camp Enchantment as this tiny summer village filled with campfire chats, stories under metaphorical stars, conversations around symbolism and dreams, friendship bracelets, and women slowly remembering how to trust their own inner lives again.

And apparently this kind of space was needed because campers are already gathering. We’re more than over halfway full now, and every time another woman signs up and chooses their camper name and I send out another welcome package, I picture all of us meeting around this cozy little virtual campfire together by midsummer, bringing our stories, weirdness, and secret longings out of the shadows and into conversations that actually know how to hold them.

I can already feel something meaningful gathering here. Come be a part of something incredibly special. Read the online "camp brochure" here.