19. Leaving the LDS Church: How I Became Empowered To Find My True Path

Hi, I’m Natalie Ottosen and you are listening to The Mindset School for Soulful Entrepreneurs, episode number 19.

Welcome to The Mindset School podcast, a show for spiritual entrepreneurs who are ready to stop feeling stuck, reconnect to their soul’s purpose, and create a deeply fulfilling life and business. I’m Natalie Ottosen, transformational life coach, and reconnection healing foundational practitioner, and I can help you scale and grow a six-figure business from a place of inner authority, wisdom, knowledge, and truth.

If you are a spiritual entrepreneur and you are looking to take that first step towards your dream of running your own business, this is the show for you. Ready to step into your power and move forward with clarity and purpose? Let’s go.

Okay, so last week I recorded this episode on how I ended up leaving this organized religion. And because of a computer update, all of my settings got mixed up and it didn't record with my mic. So we tried to remaster it, see if we could get it to work. It absolutely sounded terrible. I sounded like a weird robot. And it was interesting because it actually was a beautiful opportunity for me to come back and talk about perfectionism.

And even though I didn't end up submitting the episode, I decided to focus on something instead and then come back, re-record this and then present it to you. Because this is such a sensitive subject, a sensitive and loaded subject and topic, I didn't want it to sound weird coming from me and it really did sound weird. So side note there. And yesterday I ended up having the opportunity, I was interviewed on a podcast that's going to be coming out here soon and I'm so excited to share that on this podcast. So more on that later.

But I was asked how I ended up becoming a coach, basically, how I ended up getting into this field of coaching and energy healing and astrology and all of that. And it so fascinated me because it does go back to this origin story of me leaving this organized religion. And basically to jump on here and welcome you as a soul family, I just, I can't even tell you how difficult that has been for me and what the process has been for me to be able to say that and to be able to speak those words out into existence.

Because when I left my organized religion, there was so much shame and fear surrounding leaving this church. So basically, if you've been with me from the beginning, I started talking about this in the first couple episodes of my podcast. I really talked about it in episode two. And so, if you haven't listened to that yet, maybe go back and listen to that episode. It's the one where I talk about mindfulness and the five easy steps to create a mindfulness practice for yourself.

And basically in that episode I talked a little bit about being raised in this predominant religion and really how all of my identity and worth and belief was all wrapped up in this religion. And in that episode I also talk about how lack of mindfulness, how it was showing up for me, and how it may be showing up for you. And one of the ways was feeling disconnected from yourself spiritually and not feeling a clear sense of spiritual beliefs. And that basically was me because after 25 years of being in this religion I left and I decided it no longer resonated with me, with my values and really ultimately what I believed anymore.

And this mindfulness practice, specifically meditation is what reconnected me back not only to my spirituality but ultimately God. And I'll kind of share with you how that happened. So before we get started on that, if you are not a spiritual person and you have no interest in spirituality, number one, you're probably listening to the wrong podcast. But also if you don't want to hear about religion, maybe you're an atheist or agnostic or whatever it is, and you're not interested in this at all, this also might not be the episode for you.

And this is also based on my perception and my experience of what happened to me in my religion. So I know it can be a big, heavy topic and it was something that I did want to share, that I wanted to share. So I want to be able to do that today and kind of share my journey and how it unfolded for me. So if you're interested go ahead and keep listening.

I kind of wanted to talk about where I was, what happened and what brought me to the here and now because being a spiritual entrepreneur. It might be very easy for some, but it was not easy for me. Stepping away from everything I knew spirituality wise, believing that my religion meant spirituality, I didn't realize the two were separate. Stepping away from that religion and all of the beliefs and the programming and the authority that was tied into that and stepping over to the spiritual side, becoming a coach, learning astrology, learning energy healing and really even being an intuitive.

These are all things, not the coaching piece, but the astrology, the energy healing and even being a psychic intuitive, these are things that really went against the religion that I was raised and born into. I was raised as Mormon. I was part of the LDS Church. My parents were raised in it, so this was a generational thing. I have family who were general authorities, cousins, and things like that. So that is a president of the church, which is kind of a big deal in our church.

Basically quick backstory is my mom went to BYU, which is a church school. She met my dad there. My dad was not part of the religion. He was Christian faith-based, but they ended up meeting. My dad ended up converting to the LDS Church, the LDS religion. And then we were part of what you would call a TBM, a True Believing Mormon family. And this was how I was raised. We would attend church every Sunday. We would do our weekly church activities and services. We paid our tithing, which was 10% of our income, read our scriptures daily.

We didn't do things on Sunday, we didn't shop, we didn't watch TV, none of that stuff. The only thing we would actually end up doing on Sunday was church activities. And then we would go to a convalescent center and see the old people. That's how I remember it. So we followed the religion to the letter of the law. And I am number three of four kids. So when I was eight, my parents actually ended up getting divorced and again, that was kind of a big deal in this religion. It is definitely something that is frowned upon. And at that time, life ended up changing dramatically.

So my dad actually lived in the neighborhood that we were in at that time, and that made it really uncomfortable for my mom to go to church. And my mom started dating somebody else who was not accepted in our ward, who was not accepted in the religion, so to speak. And so my mom stopped going to church. My dad was still going to church. And my dad still continues to go to church to this day. And there was kind of a separation, a divide. Eventually, my dad ended up moving out of the ward and my mom had completely stopped going by then.

And so for me, I very much believed in this religion. I was a very spiritual person and I just, I truly believed this church to be true. So I would go to church by myself every Sunday and I would sit alone. So three hours of church every Sunday I would go, and I would participate. And then when it came to sacrament meeting, which is the last meeting of the day, I would sit there by myself. And I started to notice that parents weren’t letting their kids play with me and that we were kind of being excluded as a family.

There was lots of things that were said by members of the church, by the bishops, and they're the ones that lead our specific ward. There was lots of things said to my mom about how she was making my dad look good and things like that, just really kind of silly, inappropriate things. But noticing that the divorce had kind of created this divide for us with the church, and even though even myself, even though I was showing up and doing what ‘I needed to be doing,’ I still wasn't being accepted and so that was a real struggle for me. It started creating some confusion for me.

It didn't make a whole lot of sense for me that even though I was there, I was doing the things I was supposed to. And even knowing some of my friends that were out doing things ‘they shouldn't be doing,’ so to speak, according to our standard of the church. I was doing the things that I should be doing, and they weren't, but I was the one that they were judging. So that again was very confusing for me. In this religion, I know they talk a lot about being very inclusive and all-encompassing and loving and all of those things.

But I was starting to notice that that might be some people’s experience, but unfortunately it was not becoming mine. And again, because my parents had gotten this divorce, we no longer ‘fit in the mold.’ And it started to become very clear to me that I wasn't fitting in again, even though I was doing things that I was ‘supposed to be doing’ and following the rules.

Fast forward to several years later, we ended up moving multiple times. And we ended up moving out of that ward that we were in, where things like you're making your ex-husband look good type of comments that were being made to my mom. We end up moving out of that ward and we ended up moving further south in the valley. And my mom kind of did, started going back to church again and things like that. So we would go and then not go, and I was participating in the groups in girls camp. And I was making friends and I was connecting. And in fact things were actually getting much better in that ward, in that environment. I was making really good friends. I was making close relationships.

I was participating in the ward. I was going to girls camp, all of those types of things, doing all of the normal church stuff. So that was my 8^th and 9^th grade year because we had moved in between my 7^th and 8th grade year. And so 8^th and 9^th grade for me were junior high and then 10^th grade was high school. And there was some stuff going on again, my parents were divorced, and my mom had gotten remarried, and he had several kids, and they lived much more north. They lived about 30 minutes north in the valley.

So after much conversation and consideration, my parents decided to move closer to my stepdad's kids and his work. So that meant that we moved in between my 9^th and 10^th grade year. And around this time as well I started getting into modeling. My dad was doing some modeling work and I also started doing some modeling work, which I absolutely loved. I thought I was going to become a famous model, be in New York running the runway. I think I mentioned this in one of my episodes. I think it was episode seven.

I thought I was going to become this famous model. With that being said, I had a very high moral standard because of this religion. So, modesty was huge. The word of wisdom was huge, which means you don't smoke or drink, you don't say profanity. You are very modest in your clothing, how you dress, you don't show your shoulders, you don't wear short skirts, you don't show your belly. I mean, one piece bathing suits are the standard, things like that. And so the modeling industry kind of went against that a little bit because people did smoke, and they drink, and some women end up being naked.

So I mean, there's just all sorts of, the standard is very different than the church I was raised in. So there were jobs that I didn't take and there were opportunities I didn't do because of this religion. And I ended up talking about this in episode seven. And this has to do with intuition and tapping into intuition, because all up to this point, everything that was said to me about church and what my parents, the programming, the authority that we end up learning as children, I was basically told, “This is how you think, and this is what's true. And if you don't follow this, then basically you're wrong,” is kind of how I perceived it.

And so the intuition piece where I felt things and I knew things and the spiritual experiences I was having, as long as it fit within the parameters of my religion, it was right. But if it didn't fit in that parameter, basically what I perceived it to be is that I was wrong. And then having people tell me things like, “You're too sensitive.” And dismissing my own intuitive hits, that ended up getting me in trouble when I was 16 years old.

I was building my portfolio for my modeling profession, and I was testing with a photographer. And again, I talk about this in episode seven. And the photographer ended up taking advantage of me. So it ended up being a really bad situation, which led me to basically go crazy. I went a little nuts after that. And it was also very confusing for me because I was raised in a religion that you needed to keep yourself clean and pure for marriage.

You didn't have sex before you were married. You didn't participate in any sort of inappropriate, what they considered inappropriate behavior, sexual behavior before you got married. And if you did, again, the way that I perceived it was basically you were damaged goods. And so having this experience happen to me, it again left me very confused. And not only was I struggling with what had happened to me, but I was also struggling with the beliefs and the principles that I was raised in that I had been violated and what do I now do with this.

And again, because of all of that, I ended up going crazy. I ended up becoming sexually active and which led to me getting pregnant. And I ended up going and talking with my bishop at the time, which again is the leader of our ward. So wherever we live within our boundaries, it's where we went to church. He oversaw us and it's kind of like if you do something wrong according to the church, then you go and you talk with your bishop and you figure out a plan on how to repent for the sins that you've committed.

So in this case it would have been the premarital sex that I was going and talking to my bishop about because I had gone crazy after being sexually assaulted. And they had decided that my disciplinary action would be that I would lose my membership in the church. I could still go. I could still be there, but as far as participating in being able to say a prayer at church or participate in taking the sacrament, which is you drink your water, and you take your bread. It represents when Jesus died. I was no longer allowed to participate in things like that.

I couldn't have a calling. I could be at activities, but I definitely couldn't participate, be an active participant in those activities. So I did that, I went through that process, but I had not done any therapy on the assault that had taken place, and nobody knew about it either. I had not told this bishop about it. My parents didn't know about it. Nobody knew about it except for me, what had happened to me. And I ended up getting pregnant right away.

And again, I kind of talk about this in episode seven. But I ended up getting pregnant and I was still going to church, and I was still participating. And that was a very difficult time for me. So I was there, I was at church, and nobody would even speak to me. They knew I was pregnant, and they wouldn't talk to me, and I ended up talking to my mom about this at a later point in time. And she had said to me they just didn't know what to say.

And I just want to offer to anybody listening to this, if you're ever in a situation where you're looking at somebody that maybe doesn't fit into the mold of what you think they should be doing, or you maybe have a judgment about what's happened or taken place. I just want to offer that you have no idea what is going on in their life and what is going on in their story. And love is always the answer. If you don't know what to say, all you have to do is love somebody, that's it.

Because we truly never know what somebody’s struggling with and what they're going through just as nobody understood what was happening with me or what was going on with me. Not only was I struggling again, with the sexual assault and the losing my membership of the church, and now I was dealing with being pregnant, being a 17 year old girl who was pregnant, who was deciding whether or not she was going to keep the baby or give him up for adoption. So we never know people struggle and I just want to offer that if you ever don't know what to do, just love somebody, that is always the answer.

So nobody would speak to me, nobody would talk to me. I had one person, and we also had ended up moving as I had mentioned in between my 9^th and 10^th grade year. And so I was struggling to make friends. I was struggling to fit in. I wasn't fitting in with the new ward that we had moved into. I was struggling to find friends at the high school I was going to. And so I was just kind of floundering. And then after the sexual assault, I was floundering even more. And then I got pregnant, and my family told me, “You’re not going to graduate high school,” and things like that.

And long story short, on all of that, I ended up graduating early, I ended up superseding everyone's expectations as far as that was concerned. And I kept my son and I continued to move forward in life but started to unravel this religion piece of, again, having a baby and I was not in the religion at this time. But having a baby I would say is one of the experiences in life where you are the closest you've ever been to God, source, creator, whatever you call it. I would say there are very few experiences that are closer to that.

So having that very profound spiritual experience and other profound spiritual experiences that I had had in and out of this religion. I started putting these experiences that were outside of this religion on a shelf of, well, this is happening and they're telling me it's wrong because that's what the experience is, but is it really wrong? And so my shelf started to break.

So, fast forward again, a couple of years where I ended up getting back together with my son's father again. I talk about this in episode eight, so seven and eight. I get very vulnerable, and I talk about some pretty profound experiences with me. I got back together with my son's father. We thought we were going to be a family. I thought we were going to be a family and very quickly realized that was not going to happen. And at about 14 weeks, I knew I was going to be giving my son up for adoption because I knew I wasn't going to be able to take care of myself, my son, that I currently had and take care of another baby.

And so I ended up into preterm labor, had major complications with my pregnancy. And so I started looking into families for adoption. And my son ended up being born early, he was eight weeks early. And I ended up giving him up for adoption to an LDS family, a Mormon LDS family. And I was still just unraveling, I still had not dealt with my sexual assault. I still had not really dealt with the traumatic event of having a teen pregnancy and trying to figure out how to be a mom and go to school and figure out my life because that ultimately wasn't my path.

My path was to go to New York and become a professional and maybe get married when I was in my 30s and maybe have kids in my late 30s and things like that. That was ultimately my path and my trajectory and ultimately life had another plan for me. But the lack of inclusion and the judgment that I received for being a single mom. I got on LDS dating sites and anytime they found out that I was a mom, instantly I was no longer attractive to them. I dated multiple people who didn't want, in the Mormon religion, and I would say it doesn't have to be Mormon in order for this to happen.

But there was a lot more judgment coming from religious Mormon parents and Mormon men that I was trying to date because they wanted the perfect wife so that they could have the perfect life. And my sins were very visible to the world to see. Everyone could see my faults and see what I had done where other people who had made maybe not the best decisions in their life, a lot of those could be secret and their sins weren't as visible as my sins were. And so it became very confusing and complicated and difficult, and I was still struggling with my mental health, and I still had not dealt with the sexual trauma.

And I had continued to make really terrible decisions. I was just making one bad decision after another, constantly, but ultimately, after I had given my son up for adoption and experiencing the most painful experience of my entire life, I knew that my life had to change. I knew that something had to be different. And so I started to do the work in order to change and transition and become a better version of myself because the version that I was headed down a very deep, dark, and very destructive path.

And it didn't seem to matter if I was going to church and doing the church route and following all of the rules and doing all of the things I still seemed to be struggling regardless. And again, that was also very confusing because as long as you were righteous and you were living that path then things were supposed to be great, and they just weren't for me. After I’d given my son up for adoption, that was when the shelf really started to crumble for me. And the cognitive dissonance that I had been doing in order to stay in the religion and to make it make sense for me, it wasn't working anymore.

And here I was following this path and doing these things and just feeling absolutely terrible regardless of what direction I was heading. And so I ended up meeting my current husband right here, right now, who was not part of the Mormon religion. And at that time I had really kind of decided to set it aside. It just wasn't making sense for me anymore and he had asked me a few questions and one of them was basically if I was a good person. And I wasn't sure that I believed that I was at the time.

I mean, I think to some degree I could answer yes, but I knew I had made a lot of ‘mistakes’ in my life. I had made a lot of questionable decisions in my life and things had been really tough up until that point. So much that I haven't even talked about on this podcast or even in this episode. But there had been some very life altering decisions that had happened, and the religion really wasn't bringing me any comfort in any of it. It was just kind of perpetuating the shame and anxiety, this lack of worthiness, amplifying fear, and I just don't ultimately believe that's what it's about.

Again, this inclusivity and this all-encompassing and this loving and this coming together, I just wasn't experiencing any of that. That's not what my experience was. And it didn't mean that I didn't find some of those pieces or some of those people along the way. And also I was experiencing those things outside of the religion and this religion basically taught us that anything outside of the religion was wrong and that if you were experiencing it inside the religion, it was correct. And so that was very again confusing for me because either both experiences are wrong or there's a disconnect there.

And I started to see that it was a disconnect and so when I met my husband, who is currently my husband, we've been married for 17 years. I decided to completely step away from religion and that really did cause me a lot of shame and fear. And I had to really deal with the unworthiness that came with all of that. I didn't realize how much of my worthiness was actually tied into this religion. And so I started to do some pretty heavy duty therapy.

And thank heavens for this therapist, I have said for many years that he saved my life. I saved my life, but he was such a catalyst in helping me dive deeper into what was going on with me and reconnecting me. He was also the one that introduced me to meditation. So through the process of working with him, he introduced meditation to me pretty early on in our therapy sessions and I was very resistant to it. It was not something that I wanted to do, even though I knew that there was some scientific data to back up the benefits of it. I again was very resistant.

I decided to give it a try and around the same timeframe, I had two people very close to me die within a very short period of time and that was devastating for me. I didn't understand part of my thought process at the time was, why did they get to go and why do I have to continue to stay here and go through what I'm going through? That was something I said for a very long time, until I was really able to step into my purpose and connect back to my spirituality. Those were the words that kind of replayed in my head for a really long time and so I struggled very much.

And one of the people who was close to me that died, she was actually a childhood friend of mine who I had said some pretty nasty things to right before she died. So I had on top of the grief of her dying and this other person that was close to me. I also had a lot of shame and guilt over what I had said and how I had left things with her. And she had actually responded to me in an email which I never read, I just deleted it. So I had all this shame surrounding this experience. So I actually ended up hiring a medium to come and work with me.

I had had a friend who had met with a medium and had a really good experience. And so I ended up having her come and meet with me, and it was so fascinating because right off the bat, the very first thing that had ended up happening was my guides, my angels and guides came in. And they said, “We've been trying to get a hold of you. We've been trying to connect with you and all of these things that you see out of the corner of your eye and all these experiences that are happening, those are true and those are real and those are us.”

And so there was a huge sense of relief inside of me, number one, to know that I wasn't crazy. And that even though I had stepped away from this religion, these spiritual aspects of myself were very present and very real and were very much happening. The two people who I wanted to connect with ended up coming through in that medium session. But the big takeaway for me at that time was that my angels and guides were there. They were supporting me, and they had been there all along.

At this time of leaving this religion, I basically had become atheist and I wouldn't say atheist because I do think I believed in something bigger than me, so I was probably more agnostic, but I really did not believe in God anymore. I had a very hard time saying the word ‘God,’ I had a very hard time believing that there was a God. I just didn't believe that God would allow all these terrible things to happen and just sit there and watch all of this take place and that people are punished for their actions and all that. I just didn't believe in that kind of a God. And so at that time I very much didn't believe in God.

So this process of opening back up to the spirituality piece and again it was very hard for me, I wasn't even sure if I believed really in spirituality anymore either. There was so much tied into, I really believed that they were the same thing, and it actually took me quite some time to unravel all of that and recognize that they were really two separate things. There is religion and there is spirituality, and they are very different. So after I met with this medium, I very much resonated with this medium and she had told me, “If you want to be a medium, you have this ability,” which I had already basically known that inside of me.

There's lots of things that I knew inside of me but again, because of my religion, they were wrong, they were not okay. And so it's almost that shame of, I'm wrong because I sense this in me. There's something wrong inside of me because I can see things, I can hear things, I can feel things that other people can't or maybe they can. But I had all of the sensory that I was experiencing, and I had spiritual visions and I had intuition and I had guidance and I had all of these different things that basically my religion was like, if you have this, only men can have this, you really can't have this, only we can.

And so that again was so confusing for me. And it was kind of that moment, though, that started me back on the spiritual path. I kind of just started diving into everything, going down every pathway that I possibly could, to figure out what truly resonated with me. And at this time, I really didn't trust my intuition. And there were things that were said along the way with mediums and psychics and intuitives and things like that were sharing things with me that were resonating with me. And also it would be something that I had felt and something that I have experienced and all of those things.

And so bit by bit and piece by piece, I started building this spirituality. And I had also started meditating as well. So little acts of meditation, and again, if you didn't hear the story, I said it in one of the first episodes that I was basically a closet meditator because I really had so much shame about doing this. Because I really thought that if people knew what I was doing and if I talked about this, they would think that I was crazy. I was still trying to understand who I was and again, picking up the spirituality piece, especially putting the religion piece down. So I was really trying to understand what it all meant and what it all looked like.

And meditating isn't necessarily a spiritual thing, however, it can open you up to spirituality, and it was one of the pivotal pieces in helping me build my intuition, because I started getting information when I meditated. It was an opportunity for angels, for God, angels, the universe, to connect to me at that time. And so I used to have a journal that would sit right by me, and I would start writing down information that would come to me and through me. And again, at this time, I really didn't believe in God, I did believe in angels.

And again there was a lot of fear about the Satan side of things and bad angels and bad energies and so there was a lot of separation I was having to do with those types of energies and am I tapping into that and am I being safe. And really deprogramming all of the fear, and again, that shame and that guilt that was all coming up. And really starting to listen to my own intuition, my own inner wisdom, my own inner knowledge, as I was going through this process.

And there was one day, and I've asked if I can share this story because it's a very personal story for me. One day I was meditating, and I had started this practice of really grounding in my energy. And then bringing that energy, so grounding that energy down into the earth and then bringing that energy up and then going up either a mountain or a staircase. At this time, it was a staircase. I had started going up a staircase in a counterclockwise motion.

And as I would go up the stairs I would get lighter and lighter and lighter until I would reach, what I understand now is the top of my chakra pillar, and it would be a cloud base. And that is where I would connect to my higher self. And I did this regularly. I was meditating every single day and I was connecting. I was journaling. I was writing. I was listening. I was reading books. I was watching YouTube videos. I was doing all of the things.

And one day I grounded down and then I was connecting up and I got to the top of my chakra pillar and instantly I was greeted by God. And He just wrapped me up and enveloped me in His love and in His arms and He told me that, “I have never left you and I've always been here, and I will always be here. And you've never been alone.” Even though I very much have felt that way in my life. So many times I felt like I was abandoned by God. And what I understand about it now, sorry, it makes me emotional.

What I understand about it now is that everything that I have been through, all of these experiences, all of my trials, all of my tribulations, all of it, it has shaped me into the person I am today so that I can help people on their journey through the same things. That's what I understand about it now. But this experience where I was greeted by God, Heavenly Father, and Heavenly Mother, we came together, and they walked with me. I’ll never forget it. This was 16 years ago this experience and I had left the religion. I wasn't anywhere near it. I was on my own path. I was doing my spirituality.

And I would say that was the beginning of my awakening. That was a moment in time where I knew my life was never going to be the same and that my path was a spiritual one. So I have put all of my effort into moving forward on this path to listen to my inner guidance, my inner knowing, to take my authority back. My authority, our authority, it doesn't live outside of us. It doesn't live in a religion. It doesn't live with our parents. It doesn't live in schools. It doesn't live in our societies and what people tell us. It lives inside of us.

We have all of the answers. We have all of our knowledge. We have all of our wisdom inside of us. We just have to tap into it. We just have to start listening to that. And then when we are able to listen and start acting and moving in accordance with that, we are able to discern on a whole new level. We are able to make decisions that are in alignment with who we are. And so that is what I have done and that is what I have created.

I knew my path, so yesterday when she asked me, “How did you get into this?” I know my path has always been to help other people, I know that has always been part of my path. I had no idea to what degree I would help other people. I thought I was going to go down the psychology route, become a licensed clinical social worker. I thought I was going to get my PhD in neuropsychology. But again, life had other plans for me in that process.

And I even was going to go back to school to get my neuropsychology degree back in 2020. And as I started going down that path, I realized that the courses in the classes I was having to take were the life experiences that I was having in my life. And I just said, “I'm not going to go pay to get a college degree when I've literally had the life experience that is equivalent to this. I have a PhD in life.” And so I dropped that and stepped back into the coaching and went full force into my coaching, energy healing, astrology, human design, all of it, because all of it lights me up.

And so again, my purpose and my path and what I want to help my clients uncover and discover for themselves is that same thing, what lights you up, what brings you joy, what's in alignment. The reason why I talk about authority and alignment and boundaries and finding your inner wisdom and knowledge and truth is because that is your guidance system, that is your path.

If I can leave you with anything today, it's that, that's your information. That's your guidance. It's not what a religion tells you. It's not what your parents tell you. It's not what your friends say. It's not what you see on television. Your knowledge, your truth, it truly lives inside of you and the more that you honor that and the more that you step into that and move in that direction the more that comes out.

So, many years later, I had some very close friends start to leave this religion as well. And through that process I learned a lot about the Mormon church and the false doctrines of it. So I left based on a feeling, and now I have the doctrine for me that backs up what I felt, the incongruencies I felt inside of me. I probably could have saved myself 10 years of therapy had I had some of this doctrine. And at that time we called it anti-Mormon literature and it was against our religion to read it, which is so fascinating because it was all true.

But the founder of our religion, the founder of our church, there were some real incongruencies there and there were some real disturbing information for me learning about that, that really has eventually helped solidify the decision of me walking away and leaving this religion. And it's also been a lot of unpacking. It's been a lot of therapy. It's been a lot of healing. It's been, I mean, the last six months of my master coach training, it was a lot of belief systems, unpacking this religion of it didn't matter if I was doing things right or wrong, I was still wrong.

There was so much shame, there was so much guilt. And so this is going to be an ever evolving and unfolding, I believe, of the programming that I received in this religion, and again the incongruencies for me. But being able to unpack that over the last six months, specifically in my coaching program has been one of the most liberating and freeing experiences of my life.

In fact, it's been so liberating and freeing that I really believe that my purpose and my path is to probably help women, LDS women who have left this religion and who are transitioning out of this religion. To really help them find their way back to themselves and really find their way back to their own spirituality, especially if it's like I know there's something out there, I'm just not sure what it is anymore. To really bring them back to this place of this does live inside of me.

And then even taking it a step further and helping you find your purpose, because I know for me that I've always felt like I've had a purpose and it was just a matter of figuring out what that truly was. And I know it's this right here, right now, it's speaking to you. It's sharing my story, showing up with courage and vulnerability to share with you what I have been through to help you know, number one, you're not alone.

Number two, I'm sorry if any of this has been part of your experience in your own life and I'm here to just love. I'm here to help you through the process for yourself to help you get to the other side, to know that you are whole, you are complete. There is nothing you have to do. There is nobody you have to become. You are worthy. You are brilliant. You are amazing.

So if I can leave you with that message today and let you know that I've been through a lot of pain, I've been through a lot of experiences. And I have come out the other side where I am today, doesn't mean I don't struggle with these things. Like I said, the last six months were unpacking this for me, unpacking more of the religion for me, unpacking more of connecting to myself on a deeper level. It is possible and there is light at the end of that tunnel.

So again, if this resonates with you at all, please reach out to me. I would love to chat with you. I'd love to have a conversation with you. You can always reach me @soulsister coaching on Instagram. You can reach me on my website, you can reach me there soulsistercoaching.com. But I just want you to know that you are loved, you are seen, you are held. I am with you. I am sending you love. I am sending you healing. I am sending you all of the things.

I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I would love to know if this has been any part of your experience. Again, come reach out to me Soul Sister Coaching on Instagram and thank you for letting me share my story. And I will see you guys next week. All my love.

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Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Mindset School. Ready to dive deeper into finding your purpose and create a deeply fulfilling life? Visit soulsistercoaching.com for more guidance and resources. See you next week.