One day, a brilliant, beautiful friend of mine dropped a wisdom-bomb that I think applies to all matters of spiritual growth, religious belief and even self help when she said, “sometimes, you’ve gotta eat the meat and leave the bones.”

This saying comes to mind a lot when I’m talking to people about God and church. I think very often, people who believe there’s something more out there than what science and culture can offer them get hung up and miss out on a relationship with God, because they want to fact check a church’s set of beliefs the way you might fact check a political debate.

But faith doesn’t work like that. The literal definition of faith is the belief in things you can’t detect with your physical senses. My relationship with God is the single most valuable, most precious thing in my life, by far. But it’s not something I can or even want to try to prove, factually, the way you’d prove the law of gravity or that global warming is a thing.

Matters of the spirit are, by definition, supernatural. They are outside the laws of nature. They operate on principles and laws, but spiritual ones. Churches, religions and spiritual communities are places where humanity and spirit connect, but they are ultimately made of people. And people, well, it is a rare thing that a group of people will come together and put together a list of beliefs or philosophies they stand for, by consensus, and have every single member of that community agree wholeheartedly with every single line item of that philosophy.

To deprive yourself of the soul-filling, life-giving, spirit-recharging experience that belonging to a spiritual community can be because you don’t agree with 100% of what they believe can, in some cases, be the spiritual equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m not suggesting a Buddhist should join up with a Southern Baptist congregation for the music, by any means. But I am suggesting that, if you’re curious about God and spirit, you seek out a spiritual community which fits you in spirit and in broad stroke beliefs, and that you not deprive yourself of that or of a relationship with God because you think religion is bad or religious people or crazy, or because the church you love takes communion and you don’t understand that.

Eat the meat and leave the bones.

I have a similar line of thinking when it comes to self-help books and teaching, which these days I like to call WizLit (Wisdom Literature). There’s one very well-known teacher/speaker/author who I won’t name here, because, well, you’ll see why in just a sec. For years, I heard about him, including a truly spooky, borderline nonsensical story about how he came to receive the wisdom he shares. And every time I heard his name, my eyes nearly rolled back to the whites.

And then someone I know, trust and respect mentioned a lesson she’d read by this guy. And it was really profound, really a fresh reframe of a tired, old thought habit of my own. And so I decided to listen to this teaching my friend shared with me. And it blew my mind. It actually blew my mind wide open. Changed my perspective, entirely. And I thought, you know what? I don’t care what his weird-ass story of channeling this stuff or conjuring it up is. I just know this material is very valuable for me, and is helping me release old limits, so I’m gonna roll with it. Period.

Eat meat. Leave bones.

I suppose you have to have some sort of rubric for determining which spiritual and wisdom teachings are meat and which are bones. And on this matter, I think the rules must be very personal, simple and general. For me, I seek things out that expand my capacity, that bring me into integrity, and that make my life feel expanded, enlarged and empowered, not contracted or disconnected from power. I seek things out that make me feel more and more tuned in to who I am. I seek out wisdom with a core message of love and inclusion, not hate and division.

I had an experience recently that showcases this point pretty perfectly. I’ve long been a reader of Louise Hay. Her 1984 book You Can Heal Your Life (YCHYL) contains some of the practices that have been the most transformational in my life’s path. Some of them also struck me as intensely ridiculous—and by that, I mean worthy of ridicule—when I first encountered them. She’s a proponent of mirror work, literally, standing in the mirror and saying lovely, sweet things—”affirmations”— to yourself in the morning.

Kind of like this.

Silly, right? This is how I felt about mirror work the first time I read YCHYL.

Except for one thing. Except for the fact that many of us do actually have a critical inner voice. Some of us have said negative things to ourselves, about ourselves, for years. For decades. And in the book, she makes a wonderful case for just trying it. And so I did.

And it turns out that this whole mirror work thing works. It gradually replaces your critical inner voice with a voice that sounds more like this:

Louise Hay for the win.

The other thing YCHYL is well-known for is the mind-body symptom chart at the back of the book. It is based on Hay’s philosophy that all illness is an indicator of our emotional beliefs, thoughts and focus. Her “Causes of Symptoms” table is just a long list of physical symptoms, illnesses and body parts, each with a corresponding spiritual or emotional cause, and a prescription. Plot twist is, the prescriptions are all affirmations.

So, for example, if you have diabetes, the chart suggests the following emotional causes:
*Longing for what might have been.
*A great need to control.
*Deep sorrow.
*No sweetness left.

And the prescribed affirmation is: This moment is filled with joy. I now choose to experience the sweetness of today.

Seems farfetched, right? But I’ve also had times in my life where I looked up a physical symptom and actually got something out of the explanation or the affirmation prescribed. So I got in the habit of looking up any physical symptoms I was having, and then eating the meat and leaving the bones of her recommended affirmations.

A few months ago, I had a couple of freak accidents at home, one of which resulted in deep stitches and glue and wound care, the other just crutches and wound care. Very bizarre, very intense, but very healable and ultimately minor things. As is now my habit, I consulted Hay’s Causes of Symptoms chart. And it had a lot to say. According to the chart, I was having problems with my feminine side or family line, I was struggling to receive nurturing, and having a hard time moving forward with life.

I considered these things. And I could find a smidge of truth in some of them. But others just didn’t feel true for me, to be totally honest. I had no twinge of “oh, that’s so me!” I felt more like this:

That said, I did think these injuries could symbolize something or be manifestations of something that was going on in my head or my heart. I just didn’t think it was what she’d said in the chart. Not this time. This time, all of the explanation was bones. I did eventually find the meat, but it was something I found only down deep, within myself.

Both of these injuries happened when I was just going about my daily at-home puttering, but inadvertently exerted an extraordinary amount of physical force with my body—much more than I even realized until I looked down and saw the blood dripping (in one case) and spurting (in the other) from my freshly, self-inflicted wounds.

I wanted and needed to understand a narrative around these events. But the Hay storyline felt lame and just frankly, not true for me. What did feel true was this: that these injuries indicated I have superpowers. That I literally and figuratively have worked and trained and cultivated an inner power so intense I don’t even quite realize just how strong I am. So, in the same way a teenager learns how to drive, my job is to gradually, in my own time, learn to appreciate just how powerful I am, and to learn to wield that power with wisdom and grace, so as not to hurt myself.

That’s what felt right to me. I recreated the story. I ate the meat. I left the bones. But I also left the bones with gratitude for the way they had shown me, the way of finding my own meat anytime I need to.