What Happens When We Leave God Out of a Spiritual Journey?

The great challenge of AA, tantra, and yoga traditions

Years ago a good friend of mine took me to one of her AA meetings. She was 10 years sober and wanted me to experience the community and support that she got there.

She also knew that I was deeply spiritual and had heard me complain for years that we had stripped God from spiritual journeys and then wondered why we hadn’t found the happiness promised. I had no idea that the same thing had happened to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Removing God from Tantra

The foundation for my story is that I teach tantra. I have been studying, teaching and practicing for over 15 years. It is a wonderful journey of fully blending the infinite spiritual aspect of ourselves into our day-to-day lives — which includes our sexuality which is why many in the west are drawn to promises of hours and hours of lovemaking and energy orgasms that take you to another place.

When I began studying, I lived on a farm in the middle of rural Ontario, Canada — definitely no opportunities to explore any kind of tantric community or teachings. So, I was on my own… well, except for my first spiritual teacher, Jim, who helped me through a healing crisis in 1999 (the story of my book What If You Could Skip the Cancer?). He was a very eccentric man who would say things like, “I don’t understand why humans don’t walk around in a constant state of orgasm. Why do they choose to be stressed out? I don’t get it.” Then, he would say, “If you’re not going to make love for three hours, why would you bother?”

My husband and I would just sit and stare at him having no idea what he was talking about. It would be many years later after many tantric experiences (in life and in the bedroom) that I would realize that what he was saying was perfectly reasonable and now I find myself asking the same questions.

After studying on my own for a few years, I went out into the world and began attending “tantra retreats”. I was having so many realizations that were changing my life, I wanted to share this with a community that understood. I wanted to see how bringing God and the infinite universe had changed their lives and lovemaking as well!

But this wasn’t what I found. There were many sexual healing techniques, consent exercises and really valuable tools for a world where sex had become so taboo, we had more issues than we had joy. I take nothing away from these retreats (except for some that were really crazy). They served a purpose. But I kept hearing this voice in my head saying “This isn’t tantra”.

Something was missing… And everyone there knew it because when I shared the experiences I was having, they would just stare at me and want to know more. These were the experiences that they had read about. They were what had drawn them to tantra in the first place. But they weren’t having them in their own lives at all.

De-Spiritualizing Yoga

Around the same time I discovered tantra, I also discovered kundalini yoga. Again, because I lived in the middle of nowhere, I had to go away to study it. I then became a teacher and returned to share it with my community.

I found this yoga incredibly transforming. It moved us from the inside out. It changed our inner wiring. It made us feel whole, happy, and expansive. I loved it so much.

So, I tried going to other yoga classes. But all we did was stretch and do balancing postures. Sometimes we did breathing exercises. Then, you see all the Instagram pictures of people doing acrobatics with people calling them great yogis. It was so confusing to me. Again, I heard that little voice inside saying “But this isn’t yoga”.

For years, people would want to come to my classes but they would say, “I can’t do yoga. I am not flexible.” I would try to convince them that yoga has nothing to do with flexibility. Yoga is about connecting your spiritual self with your physical reality. Yes, sometimes we use postures and breathing techniques to get there. But whether you are flexible or not should have nothing to do with it.

I was so disillusioned as to what had happened to yoga and tantra. Two beautiful, spiritual paths had the spiritual part taken away and what was left was simply some physical exercises… and people wondered why there was no magic anymore.

Enter Alcoholics Anonymous

What intrigued me about AA is that the founder, Bill Wilson, ran into the same problem as soon as “The Big Book” was widely published and groups were popping up all over North America.

One of the foundations of the 12-step program is having a spiritual experience that re-wires you and lets you give yourself over to your Higher Power. Without this, the program doesn’t work.

This actually came from Carl Jung. A man named Rowland H. had flown to Switzerland in the early 1930s to work with Jung to see if he could help him overcome his alcoholism. After a year, Jung told him that there was no hope and that he should return to America. There was nothing he could do.

Rowland pleaded with him asking if he had ever had any successes with alcoholics. Jung said that on occasion, there were those who had a spiritual experience that caused a kind of re-wiring and after that, they never picked up another drink. He recommended that perhaps he “place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best”.

The “religious experience” that Jung spoke of could have come from any faith, conversation, or experience. He wasn’t specific. But it was absolutely foundational to the whole program that this happens. Otherwise, all the other steps would be painful and difficult to walk through.

While Rowland and Bill were still active in the groups, this spiritual requirement was focused on. Their passion and example helped many people recover permanently. But as groups began to exponentially appear in every city, it is easy to imagine how this requirement would get watered down and eventually the recovery rate also dropped drastically.

Why do we delete God from AA, tantra & yoga?

There are two big reasons. First, because of what the church has taught for centuries, the idea of God, surrendering to God, or anything to do with “some dude in the sky throwing down thunderbolts” simply didn’t wash with most people. God was about judgment, jealousy, a father figure (which isn’t a positive for many people), and someone who was supposed to take care of you “if you’re good”.

Based on this picture placed in our minds as vulnerable children, if our lives were difficult, painful, or even cruel, how could we not ask what kind of God would do that? There are so many aspects of this story that simply paints this whole concept in such a terrible light, any discussion of bringing God into our lives stops before it can even get started.

Secondly, how do you instigate a “spiritual awakening”? This isn’t something you can plan. You can’t just do these five things and “experience God”. It just doesn’t happen like that. Spiritual awakenings often come in very low times — when we’ve hit rock bottom. Or it happens spontaneously or through illness or the fear of dying. Some have said that psychedelics are the way… but even that will not guarantee a true spiritual experience.

So, in some ways, it is natural that all of these groups chose to just leave this part out. How can our foundation be something that most people simply haven’t experienced?

It makes sense to still offer part of the work and do as much good as we can.

Our spiritual experience is for us to find

And so, we are left doing the best job we can. We have well-intentioned yogis teaching classes of stretching, acrobatics, and gymnastics. And within that, you will find wonderful classes where people really find great peace. They breathe deeply, connect with their bodies, and find a wonderful community of people who all want to slow down, heal their bodies and minds, and grow in a new way in our fast paced world.

We have people teaching what they call “red tantra” where the focus is on our sex lives. We heal from past sexual traumas, learn to truly connect with each other, and learn how to live in our truth in relationships. And again, we find a wonderful community of people seeking the same things as we are.

And in the halls of AA, you find all the same wonderful folks. The program has a structure that offers many opportunities for healing. You have people supporting each other and seeking similar goals.

Outside of these, we are just living our lives. We are each on our own spiritual journey. At some point, we may have one of these “spiritual experiences” that rewires us and helps us to truly blend that infinite God experience with our life.

At that point, our experience of yoga will change, our tantric experiences will change, and our addictions will also look very different.

We will just continue on our journey… listening within, trying new things, and finding great new friends along the way.

Thank you to my friend Marcus who wrote the following article which brought all of these thoughts to the foreground inspiring this article.