What You Actually Need Saving From

Did you grow up in the church and eventually leave it because the experience just didn’t feel like love, forgiveness, and "God loves you"? Did your childhood experiences teach you unworthiness? Hellfire and damnation for your sins? A wrathful God? Shame and guilt for being bad?

I did.

I'm not saying my church experience was all bad. It wasn't. Parts of it were wonderful. But it was such a mixed bag of messages, programming, and conditioning that I walked away from the hypocrisy and politics of what I was witnessing many years ago. 

I let my relationship with Jesus go silent. Not because of anything he did or didn't do. Not because of anything he did or didn't do. But because of the way his death and name were hijacked and used to create a narrative that my heart and soul could not support. 

I’ve worked with many who’ve experienced the same rupture — people who once loved Jesus with the wide open heart of a child, only to be alienated from him by the shame, fear, and spiritual distortion they were taught in his name.

You may have left too. You may have let your relationship go silent too. But you were never the problem.

Not your questions. Not your emotions. Not your body. Not your desire for truth. Not the ache you carried when the story didn’t add up. You were never the problem.

The problem is that God was turned into a business. That the church — a system shaped by fear, shame, and control — told you that you were born wrong, sinful by nature, and in need of saving by the very system that first made you feel unsafe.

From an early age, we were handed a heavy story: that we were born wrong, born sinful, and in need of saving. That without obedience, repentance, and unwavering belief in someone else’s version of God, you were doomed.

Does this story sound familiar? Did your heart and soul always struggle to accept it? Mine did. But it shaped me, nonetheless.

I turned away from Jesus for a long time. Not because I stopped loving him — but because the version of him I was taught was wrapped in fear and laced with threats. I couldn’t breathe in that version. I couldn’t heal. I couldn’t belong to myself.

So I left. I walked away in search of something that felt kind. Inclusive. Compassionate. Real. And I found it in yoga, the vedas, Sanatan Dharma. In the breath. In the body. In the earth. In presence. I’ve said it for years: yoga saved my life. And it did.

But here’s the part I am now ready to say:

Jesus never left me. He was always walking beside me, quietly waiting for me to realize His presence again and see through what the church had done in His name, how they had distorted his teaching and death to extort money from the people and disconnect them from their inherent divinity and holiness. 

He was always there. Not the Jesus of shame and damnation, but the one I knew in my bones as a little girl. The one who loved without condition. Who wept. Who walked with the outcasts. Who turned over tables and defied empire. The mystic. The healer. The fire.

He waited for me to return not to the church, but to myself. To Him. As He really is.

So let’s talk about salvation. Let’s talk about what you actually need saving from.

Not from hell. Not from your nature. Not from divine punishment.

What you need saving from is the unworthiness the church sold you. The shame of being a sinner. The fear of getting it wrong. The spiritual trauma that lodged itself in your body when you were too young to question the story.

That’s what needs healing. That’s what so many of us are still carrying and don’t have language for.

I have clients who are healing not because they found something new, but because it finally felt safe to reclaim something old — their love for Jesus, their longing for God, their desire to belong to something sacred without giving up their self-worth. Their divinity. 

This work isn’t about deconstruction. It’s about reclamation.

It’s about remembering that you are not — and never were — separate from God.
That you are holy.
That your soul and your longing were never the problem — they were the compass guiding you back to truth.

The problem was the system that tried to turn your holiness into a product.
That turned God into a transaction.
That reframed the death of Jesus around sin and shame, instead of the truth:

That he was killed for his defiance.
For his rebellion.
For his refusal to bow to empire.

You were never the problem.
You are the path.
And you are not alone.