Last night, I was sitting in a (fancy) bar in San Francisco with one of my soul sisters, who happens to be a badass boss lady in her own right.

As always when we meet, the whole conversation was fueled by and centered around soul and Spirit.

We reveled with each other in how consistently and beautifully Divine Order is always working things out for us.

She told me of her delight in attending Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. (Look it up — this place is an historic epicenter of revolutionary, radical love… and it’s also run by the Glide Foundation… where I’m on the Board of Trustees.)

We traded silly stories and baby pictures and business updates and deep blessings.

We talked about this journey of fully integrating business and real estate and spirit.

We traded our visions and shared the Divine Downloads we’ve both been receiving, rapid-fire.

We saw that our visions overlapped significantly.

And we reveled in that, too.

At some point, the guy next to us said:

“Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear you.

Can I ask you something?

My son is dating a woman who comes from a family of so-called spiritual leaders.

And they talk about some really out there things.

And hey… I believe in love and energy, too.

But they get really extreme.

And also: Can we talk about organized religion?”

(Homeboy was all up in our business.)

“If organized religion would focused on the things you guys were just talking about, everybody would be into it.

But they try to control and….”

I had to interject.

“Hi, there! Ok: hang on one second.

Here’s the advice I’ll give you about your son and about the religion thing.

But it also applies to every subject ever.

Here’s what you do:

You’ve just gotta eat the meat and leave the bones.”

“Ahhhh.” he said, instantly understanding my meaning.

And that’s the advice I’ll share with you today.

Whenever you’re faced with new concepts, thoughts, systems or ideas, paradigms or new ways of being, and you’re drawn to some parts of them but disagree with other parts, you don’t have to prove how smart you are by critiquing or “sciencing” them until all the energy, juice, joy and delight is gone.

A science guy I once knew used to talk about how science sparks more questions than it settles, anyway.

Let that sink in.

Science is about questions, explorations, wonder, awe. Not settling everything. It’s not even the right lens for understanding most human things.

And misapplying the scientific method will jack you up.

It’ll make you miss your blessings.

One of my beloved clients is fearful of flying, and working through that as we speak. She recently shared an article with what she felt was a disturbing headline:

No One Knows Why Planes Stay in the Sky.

This might be true, though many can describe the forces that keep planes aloft.

But know what else is true? No one knows why the Earth stays suspended in space, either.

Or why you stay on the ground.

Science labels these phenomena, and creates predictive rules for understanding and leveraging them, but you don’t have to understand gravity to be secure on the ground where you stand.

It just is.

Gravity was a reality that humans lived and benefitted from way before anyone called it a scientific law.

You can experience something as real without science having validated it.

I’m certain that 1,000 years from now, humans will look back at what we call scientific fact and call it “cute”.

We don’t even KNOW what all we don’t know.

So when I say this Universe is abundant, that it is conspiring for you to thrive and that you can trust life to be good to you, you can choose to find and argue evidence to the contrary.

And you’ll find it.

Or you can choose to look at the fact that your lungs and the atmosphere of our Earth have been conspiring to keep you alive for all these decades — without your effort, knowledge or participation — as deeply resonant evidence that this Universe is conspiring for your good.

And when you appreciate your body in this way, your body will reward you with vitality, energy, and even more life.

I meet so many brilliant, thinking people who live in a chronic state of depression, disconnection and disdain because their brilliant, thinking minds are squeezing the beauty out of the unprovable concepts and imperfectly stated but beautiful wisdom that would give them life if they could let it in.

Your life is giving you abundant proofs that all is well with you.

But your culture is giving you abundant messages that say all is scarce.

Don’t let culture win.

Don’t let culture convince you.

See, culture has convinced many “thinking” people that intelligence and spirit can’t coexist.

Culture has convinced many “thinking” people that they are consumers, even of ideas, so that they must receive perfectly packaged “products” of even wisdom and spiritual insight and reject anything that doesn’t meet airbrushed, polished standard of consumer packaged goods.

Yo.

That ain’t even hown spiritual wisdom works.

You are the master and sovereign of your own thoughts, beliefs and connection with the Divine.

You don’t have to accept anything that doesn’t sit well in your spirit. Ever.

No matter WHO says it.

But you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You don’t have to choose sides between intellect and Spirit.

You DO get to take what works for you.

And you DO get to leave the rest right where it is.

And when you do, you’ll find yourself being your own inner nurturant parent, giving yourself the spiritual nutrition you, personally, want and need to experience inner wellbeing, actualize your potentials and answer the callings of your soul.

When you start eating the meat and leaving the bones, you become spiritually independent.

When you start eating the meat and leaving the bones, you opt out of the people-who-believe-that-vs-people-who-believe-this industrial complex.

You opt out of the perpetual hunger of your soul. Always hungry. Always seeking.

You opt out of waiting to be spoon-fed the “just right” spiritual porridge that is palatable to the other “smart ones” and unoffensive and limp and devoid of the energy and charge and radically loving, counter-cultural truth it takes to give yourself a shot at true awakening and actualization in this life.

Listen: It is a waste of precious life force to constantly critique, litigate and try to prove or disprove matters of soul and spirit anyway.

They aren’t provable.

So why not adopt a default rule of taking things in, trusting your own Inner Guidance, feeling for inner resonance, eating the meat and leaving the bones?

Or, as my student Jeanne says: “Eat the candy and leave the wrapper.”

Try this out. See if you can’t let a little more spiritual nutrition in.

Let me know how it goes.

Head up + heart out,

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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