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Dear Soul Arcanum:
I was raised Catholic and regularly attended church as well as confession while growing up. I am now what you might call a recovering Catholic, as some years ago I began to question the teachings of the Church and to explore my own spiritual path. I’m at peace with this for the most part, but I’ve found that I deeply miss the practice of confession. I feel like my soul has become heavy and polluted without this regular cleansing, and this feeling has me wondering if perhaps the Church was fulfilling a true spiritual need that I won’t be able to meet on my own. Do you have any advice for me?
Bea
Dear Bea:
Confession as a rite of spiritual healing and purification is perhaps universal. Certainly many religious and spiritual traditions incorporate some form of confession as a path to metaphysical renewal.
When we are unable to face ourselves honestly and truly look at the nature of our thoughts, feelings and actions, we distance ourselves from our own higher selves. The more honest we are in our relationship to our true self, the more at peace we feel and the more we can commune with Source. When we face things as they happen, we process them and move on from them. Whatever we can’t face and work through at that time, we carry with us until we find the courage and wisdom to deal with it. This is the power of confession: it guides us in facing and releasing things from the past that we’ve been consciously and unconsciously lugging around with us.
It was once widely believed that if we died with unconfessed sins on our souls, we wouldn’t get into heaven. It’s my understanding that where we go when we leave this life is largely determined by our own beliefs and expectations, so if we feel guilty about things we’ve done that we haven’t made peace with when we die, we could end up in some sort of “purgatory” where we have to work through all the feelings and issues we haven’t consciously faced yet. Most of us are familiar with the idea that when we die, we experience a life review, during which we must relive all the joy and sorrow we caused other people. The more we’ve made peace with the past while still living, the easier this life review should be when we die, so there may be a sound metaphysical basis for religious practices like confession.
Of course, we don’t have to be Catholic or confess to a priest to unburden ourselves of whatever may be weighing on our conscience; there are all sorts of other ways people achieve the same sense of freedom and release. Many people seek emotional peace in conventional psychological counseling. Similarly, my clients often choose me as the person to help them work through feelings of guilt or shame. From pornography addictions to marital infidelity to “evil” thoughts and feelings, I’ve heard it all over the years, and Spirit always has a loving, healing perspective to help people realign with peace and well-being.
So what makes us long for redemption? On some level we are all aware of the karma we are carrying and how it will weigh us down and drag us back into situations where it can be balanced and we can learn whatever we need to learn. We don’t need a priest or counselor to advise us, however; we can meditate upon this ourselves and follow our own hearts in determining how to make things right. In my view, this is truly taking responsibility for our actions and will prove far more powerful than having some appointed official intone words of blessings over our heads. Besides, it’s essential to determine and live by our own moral code. When we try to follow rules set down by some outside authority that don’t resonate with our own inner truth, we just set ourselves up for more angst and neuroses instead of peace and personal growth.
To balance karma, first we must face the truth about our actions. Usually, it is feelings of guilt or shame that lead us to examine our behavior and realize that we’ve acted against our own values. Then we must admit our error to ourselves and whatever higher power we may be calling upon in our quest for personal growth and healing. Sometimes, admitting our error is simply a matter of apologizing to whomever we feel we’ve wronged. Finally, we have to do what we can to make things right. This is how we balance our karma and move toward a higher level of experience.
When we open up and “get things off our chests,” the energy in our auras starts to move and locked up energy starts to dissipate. Basically, when we hold things in, we create tension; when we speak them out loud or open up about them, we get that energy moving again. When the energy is moving, it can be healed, transformed and/or released. Confessing in whatever way feels right and best to us can set us free from karmic backlash because we no longer have the residual energies of that experience acting like a magnet for further related experiences. When we let go of feeling bad for something we did in the past, we rise in vibration and can attract something better in the future.
While all of this can be done internally, there is great power in putting things into words. There is an intense process in yoga called the maha vasana daha tantra or “great purification of the subconscious by fire.” It involves writing down ten pages of memories for each year of one’s life and then burning those pages. It is said that this naturally sets us free from the past and whatever issues may still be active for us on a subconscious level. It’s a bit like hypnotherapy in terms of the instant healing that can happen when we bring things up into our conscious awareness and relive them from a new perspective. Many say that performing this ritual left them feeling profoundly clear, free, joyful, unburdened, and at one with the Universe.
Of course, it’s important to honor your needs as you have been doing and to find whatever works best for you. If writing isn’t appealing, you might find a spiritual counselor you feel comfortable talking to or come up with something else that feels right. For example, if you’re more tactile than verbal, you could create a meditation altar on which you place symbolic tokens of your burdens to be healed and released.
I read somewhere that confession is a surrender of your past to God to be dissolved in divine love. It’s a way to start over from scratch and realign with the divine perfection of your eternal soul. Through it, you can be instantly freed and healed from the past and open to a bright, fresh future. The method you choose isn’t important; what’s important is to open your heart with complete honesty and commit to becoming a better person.
If you can pour all of your soul into it, this simple ritual may suffice:
Sit quietly and allow anything that has been weighing on your conscience to come to mind. Ask yourself what you have learned from this experience and how you could do better in the future. Then simply pray: Universe, please heal me from the past. Cleanse and renew my spirit so that I may walk forward embodying my higher nature and radiating love, wisdom, compassion, courage and integrity in all I think, say and do. Visualize divine love washing over and through you, cleansing your soul clean of any guilt, remorse and negative karma. When you feel clear, let go of worrying about the past, and focus on integrating what you’ve learned by being a better person from that point forward.
– Soul Arcanum