Spiritual quest

When I think of a spiritual quest I think of my time around the age of 20 when I discovered the Pentecostal church.  I felt the Holy Spirit deeply.  I began a serious search for God through a very disciplined and suffering lifestyle. I cried a lot and I questioned a lot. I began to not be able to think for myself. I began to feel as though I was living a life of sin even though oddly I was really far from it then.  I even got baptized again since I felt I wanted to re dedicate my life to God.  I really fell into a sort of trap of understanding.  I felt like I was surrendered to something that made me hurt. Everything I did felt like a sin, like a terrible tragedy.  It really felt dramatic all of a sudden.  My whole search was my insecurity with myself, with where I belonged.  I began to lose my self in religion. I began to think I needed to live my life out of a book and from the pulpit of a preacher who also thought living out of that book was the only way there was.  I still felt the Holy Spirit from time to time but I agonized over the addiction I felt to needling to feel it. Soon I found myself choosing to go to a bible college after I went on a journey to try to make it in Los Angelas to find a way to go to Cal Arts that I had just got a nice scholarship to but couldn't afford.  My journey there only lasted a few weeks and with so much pressure from my home town to make it work I cracked under pressure and came back home.  Now I really felt like a sinner.  Everyone seemed to hate me and was so dissapointed in me.  It was very hard to come back to ballet class with so much fear in me.  But to no avail with my mentors encouragement I came back and pushed through. I hung out for a year then decided to go to the bible college to serve Christ.  It was there that I felt my spiritual quest was really tested. I found myself dragging through so incredibly much more suffering.  I found that I was trapped in a sort of box and couldn't breathe.  It only lasted a year and I had to move along and spread my wings. I needed to get back to my dancing. I was bound and determined to stay a solid Christian though.  Soon I began to fight an emotional journey.  Every success I had I fought with then eventually broke a solid rope around myself and ran. I learned that I was human. I learned that there was so much inside of me that I was running from.  Soon I began to search inside and fighting all the way I began to find an inner spirituality that was feeling more solid...though the outside and in my head I struggled badly.  Right when I began to feel somewhat grounded my body began to fail me, then after all that my mother passed away...  All of a sudden life became surreal.  Who was I without my grounding?  Who was I without church and now who was I without mom?  A new spiritual quest began. I now have explored to this point all kinds of studies in multi cultural religions in college I had even gone to a few different churches.  What I had barely tapped into was sitting with myself and my own being.  I was a goddess I was a beautiful person inside and out...I was a dancer with many artistic things going for me...when it all came down to it my fears made me conform, my fears made me scared, my fears made me run...I felt like I was drowning so many times because I was constantly on this quest to find something else but yet whenever I stood still and let everything fall away a sort of humbleness arrived..a quiet solitude of groundedness prevailed. I began to realize my quest was beginning to arrive.  My religion wasn't in anything specific.  I was more into a variety of things that grounded me, that made me who I am, that all began to thread together my spirituality. I call this co exist. I still believe in God but I also believe in so many things that make up this journey.  Sure I am still on a sort of spiritual quest but I never want to torment myself the way I did in my twenties. In so many ways I missed a lot of opportunities to be successful in my art, in life in general.  Sometimes I remember that I have been dealt a certain hand but in that I have also taken the lesser road and succumbed to it.  Now I face new challenges but those challenges are way more beautiful and include way less suffering, way less struggle.  Living in the moment with gratitude has become my new quest.  I'm learning to love more, to laugh more and to greet as many people with a kind heart as possible.  If that is the way of a sinner then boy oh boy do I have a lot to learn...somehow I think it is a God given gift to be able to even tap into in the slightest...gods prophecy over my life has come true in many ways.  Therefore my twenties were not a complete waste of energy. I was listening, but then it was from a bleeding heart, now it's from a grateful heart...