I have searched for beauty, belonging and identity through religious promiscuity—living as a yogini, Catholic, Orthodox Jew and Buddhist.

I am a semi-professional convert undergoing four ceremonies all of which came with a new name. Some people might call me a spiritual seeker, while others might say that I’m lacking a sense of self or an ability to commit—all this would have a grain of truth.

My first spiritual experience happened in the Ramsey Junior High School library during my sixth period study hall.

Perusing books on religion, which was completely unlike me, I opened a book about world religions and my attention was drawn to a black and white photo, circa 1950, of an ornate sanctuary in a Catholic church. Catholicism was a religion I had little experience with—other than the knowledge passed down to me from my grandfather who was a Primitive Baptist minister that Catholics were misguided and worshipped idols.

I don’t know if it was the architecture, so strikingly different from the bare walls of my grandfather’s Baptist church, or that I was ripe for a miracle—it didn’t matter and it doesn’t matter—all I know is that the photos of that Catholic sanctuary, with its idols, incense and pageantry, rocked my world.

In a matter of seconds my dark and friendless little life was bathed in white light and a newfound, deliciously painful longing for a god who’d meant absolutely nothing to me earlier that morning.

In 10^th grade I traded in Catholicism for Judaism.

It’s not that I began to question the veracity of Jesus as God’s son—because Jesus was never really part of the equation for me. My love of Catholicism began because of it otherness, not its dogma.

Twenty years later, when I officially converted to Catholicism, Jesus didn’t mean much to me then either (although I tried to convince myself that he did). That’s probably why Jesus wasn’t an issue when I converted to Judaism, five years after my stint as a Catholic. I loved Catholicism because of the rituals, statues and sense of the foreign (which I hadn’t been exposed to growing up in the primitive Baptist church).

When I was 19 years old my college piano teacher introduced me to Siddha Yoga.

As foreign as Catholicism and Judaism were from my Baptist upbringing, yoga was off the map, but I was a depressed college freshman, willing to try anything.

Siddha Yoga is rich with the practices of meditation and chanting. As a piano major, and a girl who felt passionately about music, I responded at a soul level to the ecstatic Indian chants. When I chanted, all my doubts were washed away and I understood that my life was following a perfect and divine order.

I had found everything that I never knew I was looking for.

After six years of immersing myself in the practices and teachings of Siddha Yoga, I left.

I didn’t leave because I was bored or disenchanted, but out of curiosity for what else was out there. I had still never set foot in a Catholic church or a synagogue. So I left yoga and explored, in depth, the religions that had called to me years before.

During my post yoga years I was pretty much lost. Although I had allowed myself to experience and explore the paths that I had at one time been powerfully drawn to, I felt as though I was wearing someone else’s clothes and living someone else’s life. I gave it my all until I began to burst through the seams of my borrowed wardrobe and was left standing naked in the middle of my life.

Since I had shed the old, borrowed identity I needed to make sense of a life lived as myself, so I began seeing a therapist.

During the course of therapy it became clear that I had lived my life with a sense of disconnect from my physical self and that I needed to engage in body work to connect with myself and the world around me.

With all of my spiritual searching, it had never occurred to me that my physical body was important. Although I had engaged in mantra repetition, meditation and chanting, I had never practiced hatha yoga.

Hatha yoga has been a life saver. It has helped me feel more grounded in my body, and my life, and has lead me to places and experiences that I thought I’d never visit again.

This past April, as I was sitting on the floor of a yoga studio in Savannah, Georgia listening to kirtan artist David Newman lead an intimate group of people in ecstatic and achingly beautiful chanting, I realized that I was wearing my own clothes again.

I didn’t need to change myself or search through anyone else’s closet anymore.

Sitting in a yoga center, chanting with love and devotion to an invisible god that I had fallen in love with when I was an adolescent, I had come back home to myself.

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Assistant Ed: Laura Ashworth/Ed: Bryonie Wise

Photo: GROSSO