In the last few episodes of The Missing Conversation, Robert has explored the nuances of having our religious leaders share their personal challenges with us and be more vulnerable with their congregation. It is difficulties, fears, and our grief that make us human, after all. When students and followers are able to view their teachers as human and relate better to them, it gives students more insight on how to tackle their own challenges.

Indeed, sometimes religious leaders allow their students to be human and help them work towards healing with advice, spiritual healing, and teaching. But when it comes to sharing their own personal challenges and how they're working on them, they often fall short. They give others a chance to show their humanness but very rarely share their own.

If religious leaders were to share their challenges and how they use religious and spiritual teachings to work towards healing and well-being, then students can also learn similar values and principles. This also allows them to gain a deeper understanding of how to work towards a solution or toward healing. It is you as students who might have to encourage your teachers and ask questions about their personal challenges.

Most religious and spiritual people identify with each other because of their shared faith or understanding. However, in this episode, Robert talks about the benefits of having a sense of healthy doubt, of questioning, so we don't take our faith and beliefs as the absolute, certain truth. Indeed, there are some things we truly Know, while others, we believe in due to our faith. Without any space for doubts or questions, a black and white belief is likely a way to disidentify and isolate yourself from others and even from yourself. But if we look inward and accept our feelings and doubts along with our essential spiritual values, truths, and attitudes, we can move toward a more complete healing. We can also learn how to face these feelings and how to care for them.

If we don't take care of ourselves and these feelings, it will turn into a kind of complex with feelings that root themselves in our subconscious. We will then begin to experience these feelings as undesirable enemies. Whereas, if we place it in our awareness, faith, or belief, we can use our wisdom to develop a relationship to care for ourselves in difficult situations. That is what makes us innately human — our doubts and difficulties surrounded by our faith and beliefs.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode on The Global Bridge Foundation website.