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In this episode of "A Changed Mind" our host David Bayer explores the importance of developing a personal relationship with God for continued personal growth. He shares insights from his journey, transitioning from addiction to spirituality, and emphasizes the value of surrendering control to a higher power.

David discusses his communion journaling practice and how it deepened his connection with God. He also examines the role of Christ in facilitating a personal relationship with God, drawing comparisons between Christianity and other spiritual traditions.

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What We Explored This Episode

05:08 Personal Growth and Spirituality

10:13 Journaling and Personal Relationship with God

15:18 Christianity and Loving Devotion

20:24 Placebo Effect of Belief

Memorable Quotes

"A personal relationship with God, or the God of your own understanding, is essential if you really want to move on to the next level of your personal growth, because you have to be able to turn things over to something greater than you."

"Christ gives access to the personal relationship. Christianity in its purest form, from my perspective, is a religion of loving devotion."

"Whether or not Christ was the Son of God, or whether there even is a God, there's an argument that believing there is is very empowering. We understand from psychology and neurobiology that the brain is a goal-achieving machine.

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I believe that what Christ was saying on one hand was what I am here to teach is the way to build a relationship with God. This is the way. I am going to teach you the way. But I also believe that Christ was intimating that a personal relationship is important. And in order to have a personal relationship, God has to be represented in person. And Christ was there for that representation. So that is an important role that I believe Christ plays in accessing the personal relationship with God. And I believe a personal relationship with God, God, or the God of your own understanding is essential if you really want to move on to the next level of your personal growth, because you have to be able to turn things over to something greater than you. And in personal growth, we generally don't have that. That's what we find when we get to spirituality or when we get to religion. Welcome to A Changed Mind, a journey into the topics that matter to you most. From the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth, to groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth and relationships, to open and honest conversations about pressing global such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture and democracy. Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools and timeless wisdom inspiring you to create real, lasting change in your life and in the world. If you've been desiring a sanctuary for your spirit, a place to go to tune out the distraction, negativity and doom and gloom so that you can tap into the deep power, the vibrancy, and the potential you have inside, you're in the right place. Welcome to a Changed Mind. Hey, it's David. Welcome to a Changed Mind. A sanctuary for your spirit. A place where each and every episode I remind you of the certainty of the goodness of the future. I'm your friend, your host, your guide, David Bayer. In this episode, I'm going to explain why a personal relationship with God is essential if you want to continue to move forward in your personal growth and the role that Christ plays in establishing a personal relationship with God, no matter what your belief systems are. I think you're going to find this episode pretty profound. And admittedly I did not grow up in a religious family. I don't consider myself aligned or associated with any particular religion or spiritual belief. But I'm going to share with you this because it has been an absolute game changer for me in terms of having faith in my life, having more peace, having more calm, and ultimately creating prosperity and abundance and living my purpose and creating a life that I love. So let's start with the Idea that a personal relationship with God is essential if you want to achieve the most out of your personal growth. So I was having a conversation with one of my private clients. We were in Antigua, Guatemala, and I've shared this story on other episodes. He was talking to me about how he was transforming the limiting belief of not being good enough into being good enough. And he was sharing with me all the evidence that he was finding in his life that he was good enough. And he was really, truly seeing that this idea that he wasn't enough didn't make any sense. And the work he was doing was fantastic. And as he was explaining this to me, I said, listen, Scott, you're ready for the next level, which is getting out of the not enough or enough conversation completely. And he said, well, how do I get out of that conversation completely? And I explained to him that you get into personal growth, and it's like you're standing in a garden and you start pulling the weeds of your limiting beliefs. And when you've pulled enough of the weeds, you can kind of see a clearing above you, and all of a sudden you can see the sky. And you move into a completely different conversation. He said, what's that conversation? And I said, what is God's will for me? It doesn't matter if you're good enough or not good enough, if you have enough time or you don't have enough time. If money is hard to make or money is easy to make. Transforming a limiting belief into an empowered belief or decision, you start moving into a higher vibrational question, what is God's will for me? And what we find with people who eliminate enough of their limiting beliefs is that they find spirituality and a relationship with a God of their own understanding. And this is a phenomenon that we've been able to experience. We've had over 10,000 coaching conversations in our organization. And the people who have really stayed in the work long enough, who really start to progress in their life, all start building a personal relationship with God. And this was an essential part of my addiction recovery. A relationship with a higher power that allowed me to surrender, allowed me to let go of the things that I couldn't control in my life, and not just let go of them to some sort of chaotic universe, but to let go of them to an infinite intelligence. A source that I believed was a loving source that was working for my greatest growth, my greatest prosperity, and my greatest evolution. All of the things in my day to day life that I couldn't control, I could let go of and trust that a Power greater than myself was working a solution. And we have a prayer in 12 step recovery. It's called the Serenity Prayer. It says, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Now it's a really simple statement, but that third piece is the tricky part. The wisdom to know the difference. But it was only through building a relationship with a higher power of my own understanding. And that was my entry point into a relationship with a higher power. And that's what makes 12 step so acceptable to so many people like me who didn't grow up with a religious background, who didn't grow up believing in God. You can define what your higher power is to you, but having a relationship with this higher power allows you to surrender in your life, to surrender my addiction and to surrender all the things that were happening on a day to day basis that were creating this backlog of accumulated stress and anxiety and overwhelming anger. That was really the emotional constipation that was leading me to drinking and drugging and sexing. So it was through relationship with my higher power that I was able to let go of control and trust that that life was always working for me. And without that, without a relationship with a higher power, what I've seen is that most people become a personal growth junkie. They go to the events, they go to the seminars, they jump up and down, they get into state, they get really excited for a while, but ultimately they go back to their same life without the spiritual connection. Now that's not to say that people who have a spiritual connection don't experience the same merry go round and personal growth. But if you don't have a relationship with a higher power. And again, there's no judgment here. I'm not saying you have to have a relationship with a higher power. I'm just sharing my experience going from drug and alcohol addiction into personal growth and where I feel like I am now, which is going beyond personal growth. My observation is that when I didn't have a relationship with my higher power and so many of the other people that I see in personal growth who come into our community that have not established a relationship with a higher power, it's very easy to still hold attachment to so many things that you're trying to control that you can't control because there isn't a source or a phenomenon outside of you that you trust is working to create a solution. And so whether that's trying to create financial prosperity and abundance for yourself, or whether that's trying to solve a chronic health condition, or whether that's trying to manage your business. What we end up doing is trying to control things that are not meant to us to control. Those things are meant for life to resolve. And as a result of that, we create insanity in our lives. We end up burning out. We end up hustling and grinding. And even if we produce the result, we're too burned out to actually enjoy it. And so there are still limitations in your life as a result of not being able to turn over or surrender those things that you can't control. When you don't have a relationship with a higher power of possibility or a God of possibility, a higher power that can accomplish anything, meaning those things that you cannot accomplish, or a God who can accomplish accomplish anything, meaning those things you cannot accomplish. The second point is that this relationship with a higher power of your own understanding must become personal. So I did not have a personal relationship with God for a long, long, long, long time. In fact, it was really only up until the last, I'd say 18 months that I started being curious about a personal relationship with God. I had a relationship with the universe. Now in my episodes, I talk a lot about God or the universe or Jesus or Allah. And I get a lot of people, in particular Christians, who criticize that, who suggest that, you know, I'm spreading a false dogma or creating false idols. Some people even say I'm going to burn in hell for it. The reason why I create an open funnel in most of my episodes is because here all are welcome, none are judged. Whatever relationship you choose to have, whether it's a relationship with the universe or with intelligence or with the quantum field, or with Jesus or God or Allah or whatever it is, or relationship with nothing, you know, you're practicing an Eastern tradition like Buddhism or Taoism, where there is no God, you're welcome. Here I'm sharing my own experience. And in my own experience, I found that there's a big difference between a relationship with the creator of the universe and the creation, meaning the universe. Now, I'm still going to continue in all of these episodes encouraging people to build a relationship that they choose works best for them. And if you want to have a relationship with the universe as opposed to a God, and again, we're just using language to describe a phenomenon. That's okay. But over the last six months, having been asking for 18, I started developing a personal relationship with God.

I transitioned from the universe to a personal relationship with my higher power, which I I call God. And I discovered this through a journaling process. Now I have this in another episode, if you want to check it out. It's my episode on journaling. Very easy for you to find. You can Google it If you can YouTube it if you're watching on YouTube, or you can check the episodes if you're watching on my podcast. But essentially what happened is I had this inclination that I should be getting up early in the morning and writing, and I didn't know what I should be writing. And I got really clear signs. And finally when I got the third sign, I was like, look, I don't have to get hit over the head to follow the intuition. I will get up in the morning and start writing. And I started journaling. And in my process, I started journaling three very specific things. I call it communion journaling. The first thing is I start out by writing dear Father, and I thank God for all of the wonderful things that are going on in my life, acknowledging that without a higher power and without God, I'm really nothing. You know, if I look at all the things that I cherish in my life, from my wife to my son, to my business to my community, none of it could have happened without God. If I look at it from a probabilistic standpoint, it's infinitely improbable that I would meet my wife, and yet I did. It's infinitely improbable the gift of creation that we have through the birth process, yet there it is. It's infinitely improbable that we would even be existing on a planet with the perfect percentages of noble gases in the way that the global ecosystems work to balance the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Yet here we are. And if I look at something like this podcast, I could take credit for it.

Because God has no needs. God is the only place I can go to for that unconditional relationship and that personal relationship. And so in that I find safety, security, peace and possibility, which is really, really important. If you look at personal growth principles, it's very important to be living in a down regulated state, a parasympathetic expression of your nervous system. That's where you have health, that's where you have ideas, that's where you're resourceful. That's where you can be present for other people. And that's an almost impossible thing to do if you don't feel Safe. And I think so many of us are living with an unsafety that we experience as a result of the conditionality of the relationship with our parents, thinking that relationship was supposed to be unconditional. And for me it's brought me back into a personal relationship with the only place that I believe you can have an unconditional relationship and that is in a personal relationship with the God of your own understanding. Now the third piece here is the role of Christ in the personal relationship. So Christ as man gives us access to something very, very important and that is the personal relationship. Now if you can establish a personal relationship with a thing called God, by all means, fantastic. If you can establish a personal relationship with a thing called the universe, by all means, fantastic. I am not here to judge. I do feel like I have a personal relationship with God. But what I also recognize is that Christ gives access to the personal relationship. Now let me elaborate on this. Christianity in its purest form from my perspective, and you don't have to agree, I'm sure this episode is going to have a lot of people disagreeing with me about a lot of different things that I've said. But from my perspective, Christianity in its purest form is a religion of loving devotion. And I like that's actually something that I got from David Hawkins. He said the tradition of the Holy Grail, pure Christianity is a tradition of loving devotion. And he compares that to the Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Taoism and says those are not traditions of loving devotion. Those are traditions or philosophies of non attachment or acceptance of the dualistic nature of reality or desiring to live a non dualistic type of perception of life. And those are great philosophies that need to be incorporated into a loving devotional relationship with your higher power. Taoism, Buddhism, for example, in particular Buddhism. Remind me of the parable of the wise farmer. And if you've never heard it, there's a wise farmer and an ignorant neighbor and a wise. The wise farmer has a horse that runs off. One day it escapes from the corral. And the ignorant neighbor says, oh, what a terrible thing that's happened. You've lost your only horse. And the wise farmer says, who knows what's good or bad. A few days later the horse comes back with a whole group of wild stallions. And so now the wise farmer has a bunch of horses. And the ignorant neighbor says, oh, what a wonderful thing that's happened. Now you have a whole stable full of stallions. And the wise farmer says, well, who knows what's good or bad. And a few days later his son, his only son is out riding one of the horses and gets thrown from a stallion and breaks his leg. And the ignorant neighbor says, oh, what a terrible thing that's happened that your son has broken his leg. And the wise farmer says, who knows what's good or bad? And a few days later there's a big war that's taking place. And so the military comes and gathers up all the able bodied young men, but they don't take the son. And all of the recruits are going to go off and be killed in this war. And the ignorant neighbor says, oh, what a wonderful thing that's happened. They haven't taken your son off to war. And the wise farmer says, who knows what's good or bad, right? These are principles of acceptance. These are principles about being what is. And these are principles that we learn from Eastern tradition. But Christianity is a tradition of loving devotion. It's this idea that we praise a God, that we have a God who is loving us and we are able to put a face on God as God who walked the earth in the form of Jesus Christ. And so we are in loving devotion of God and the Son and the Holy Spirit, depending upon how you approach Christianity, because people approach Christianity in a whole bunch of different ways. And there's a slight distinction here, and I'm certainly not an expert compared to Islamic traditions for the most part, although there are exceptions, Muhammad is not widely viewed in personal form or depicted, not exclusively, but for the most part. So there's not a personal relationship, nor is there a claim that Muhammad was God on earth, but rather a prophet, just as Jesus was considered a prophet by Islamic tradition. And in the Old Testament, of course, we don't have a Jesus character. And so the New Testament and Christianity give us this access to a personal relationship in a way from my perspective that other faiths do not. And again, this is at least from my own understanding. And again I'm in my own exploration of this. I'm not claiming to be the world's leading expert, but it's an important piece. It is an important piece that we are able to build a relationship with another human being that is God on earth because that is the way that we are accustomed to relating relationally. And so people feel that they can have a personal relationship with Christ because he has a face, he is depicted as opposed to God. And so, you know, Christ was known to have said, I am the way. Now I believe that what Christ was saying on one hand was what I am here to teach is the way to build a relationship with God. This is the way I am going to teach you the way. But I also believe that Christ was intimating that a personal relationship is important. And in order to have a personal relationship, God has to be represented in person. And Christ was there for that representation. So that is an important role that I believe Christ plays in accessing the personal relationship with God. And I believe a personal relationship with God or the God of your own understanding is essential if you really want to move on to the next level of your personal growth. Because you have to be able to turn things over to something greater than you. And in personal growth, we generally don't have that. That's what we find when we get to spirituality or when we get to religion. Now an interesting point here is, is whether or not Christ was the Son of God, or whether there even is a God or there's an argument that having, believing that there is is very, very empowering, that there could be a placebo effect. We understand this from neuro, from psychology and neurophysiology and neurobiology. We understand that the brain is a goal achieving machine. And so if you actually believe that there is a loving God, whether there is a loving God or not, you will be showing up differently in your life and you will prove yourself to be true whether there was a Christ or not. And you believe that believing in Christ and having loving devotion to Christ is the way to a personal relationship with God. And having a relationship with God will afford you benefit. Well, like Henry Ford said, the man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can't are right. So you're right. There certainly could be a placebo effect to even believing. And any of the things that I'm talking about on this episode now, my personal belief is in a creator God. I believe I'm truly developing a personal relationship with that creator God through my practices. But ultimately what I'm seeing right now is a phenomenon of personal growth enthusiasts moving into a personal relationship with God and also accepting Jesus into their life. We saw it recently with Candace Owens, we saw it with Russell Brand. Now that said, there's a big difference between reclaiming a relationship with Christ and actually wanting to live as Christ recommends we live. Those are two very, very different things. So there's a lot of people turning back to God or turning back to Christianity or turning back to Christ. But the integration piece, in other words, doing as Christ told us to do is actually the most important part from my perspective. Again, this is not a part of the conversation of whether Christ died for our sins or even what that means, or whether he is the only way, but just an explanation of what I found to be true for me. So I hope you found this episode beneficial for you. If you've been in an inquiry around whether or not this is important or what role Christ plays, or can you believe in the universe or just believe in God? I hope my perspectives have been beneficial to you. And if you love this episode, do me a favor. You know, if you're listening on the audio platforms, leave me a review. If you're watching on YouTube, subscribe, drop me a comment. I try to read all of them and respond to as many of them as I can. And again, if you want to go a little bit deeper, I have another episode on the Jesus question. Finally answered one of the earlier episodes that I've ever recorded. Also have an episode around my journaling practice that has brought me into a more personal relationship with the God of my own understanding. And I also have some fantastic episodes on how to create from the fourth dimension again, going back to Neville Goddard and the wish fulfilled. So love you. Thank you for being here with me on this episode and I look forward to seeing you on the next one. Hey, it's David. One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.DavidBear.com. you can find the link in the show Notes and subscribe to our newsletter. A couple of times a week. I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released, along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to my free Mind Hack ebook and go even deeper into all the tools, the technologies, the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people establish a changed mind. Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.