This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Debuting The Doubting Self – Rev. Aimee Daniels
DESCRIPTION
What would happen if I debuted my doubting self the way I share my confident self? How might my life and relationships change? This week we consider the power of sharing our personal doubts and creating communities that hold space for these questioning moments.
SUMMARY
The summary is as follows:
Rev. Aimee Daniels explores “divine doubt” as a spiritual messenger rather than a problem to be fixed, contrasting it with the “performed self” that strives to appear certain, composed, and aligned with others’ expectations, a pattern she recognizes from her own corporate experience. Drawing on Richard Rohr, neuroscience, and authors such as Shirzad Chamine, Michael Singer, Adam Grant, Susan David, Tara Brach, and Rollo May, she reframes doubt as an invitation to rethinking, inner inquiry, and transformation, emphasizing that the judging inner voice and the “inner roommate” often mislabel doubt as personal failure rather than a call to growth or change. Using the Odyssey as a central metaphor, she presents Odysseus’ journey—from celebrated king and strategist to stripped-down beggar returning home—as a map of moving beyond the false, performed self, navigating storms, “opening the bag” of fears, and binding oneself to what is true in the face of seductive inner “sirens” of fear and unworthiness. She illustrates how doubt often appears alongside fear in everyday life—such as workplace value violations, unsolicited advice, and personal crises—and argues that sitting with doubt, rather than rushing to fix it, can reveal misaligned circumstances, emerging callings, or the need to change one’s way of engaging.
Rev. Aimee highlights practices for “debuting the doubting self” openly in relationships and community, suggesting that sharing insecurity and questioning with honesty can deepen connection and authenticity, countering the “trance of unworthiness” that insists we must hide unresolved parts of ourselves to be loved or trusted. She offers concrete tools, including Tara Brach’s RAIN—Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture—as a way to stay present with doubt long enough to hear its message, supported by meditation, contemplation, prayer, and community spiritual practice. Through examples like running a marathon and the life of Fred Rogers—who transformed his own persistent self-doubt into a lifelong ministry of affirming others’ worth and used daily rituals such as his “143” weight practice to return to love—she shows that meaningful commitments and lives are often pursued in spite of ongoing doubt, not in its absence. The talk culminates in a metaphysical reading of “Peace, be still” as an inner directive to silence internal chaos and turn from external problems toward spiritual awareness, accompanied by communal affirmation and prayer that affirm oneness with divine presence, the legitimacy of both doubt and confidence, and a deeper inner freedom to express all parts of oneself while trusting that spirit supports and guides the unfolding path.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
That was beautiful, wasn’t it? Yes. That song suits you. Happy Mother’s Day, Cityside today. We’re going to have a little celebration later, but just celebrating all the moms in our lives today, whether they’re our birth mom, someone who’s like a mom to us, someone who’s a nurturing presence and just really appreciating that. My mom passed a long time ago, but I think about her all the time. I was saying to Linda, I go, “If my mom had been dressed for today, she would have had a dress on, but I have on jeans.” So that song was a great lead in to talk about what we’re going to talk about today. Kelly Clarkson wrote that song, trying to spread her wings, trying to fly away, trying to move into a new life that she doesn’t know. I like it because it’s aspirational. It’s like moving towards something.
And we’re looking at doubt this month, which somebody said to me, “I don’t even know what divine doubt is. ” So we’re going to dive into that now, but we’re really breaking away and we’re breaking away not from a place, we’re breaking away from a part of ourself that Richard Rohr calls the performed self. That’s the self that has it all together. That’s the self that’s certain about everything.
I really relate to that in my life. I think I had a really performed self when I was working in the corporate world. I have to look a certain way. I have to show up a certain way. I have to anticipate what everybody wants from me. But when I think about it, I probably still have a performed self in part of my life if I’m honest about it. We all have that part of us that is maybe a little afraid to just kind of show what’s totally going on sometimes. And that’s what we’re going to break through a little bit today. So I’m going to weave the story of Odysseus through today. I debated between that and a couple Bible stories, but Richard Rohr talks about this in his book. So it’s really a good pairing with this idea of doubt. And if you don’t know the story about Odysseus, it’s a story.
It’s an ancient Greek myth and he was the king of Ithaca and he left home to go to war, but he couldn’t get back. He was gone for 20 years. But the king he was when he left is not the king who came back. And we can relate to this in our life sometimes, can’t we? When our life starts to change sometimes we don’t know who we are anymore and we’re like, “Okay, I was this. I’m becoming something else, but I’m not sure quite what that is yet.” Does anyone relate to that? Yeah. So that’s what I want to talk about today. The doubting self that Richard Rohr talks about is that voice that we have in our head and we’re going to dig into this that questions all the time and we all have that voice, right? We all have that voice that sometimes it’s like, “What just happened in my head?
Somebody took me over. Who was that? We’re perfectly happy and something triggers it. ” Does anyone else do that or am I the only one? All the time. Okay. I want to tell you a little bit more about Odysseus. So he was a success by every measure. He was the king of Ithaca. He was the best strategist in the world at the time. He’s the guy who came up with the idea for the Trojan horse, Helen of Troy, because they couldn’t come up with another solution. And he’s a father, he’s a leader and he knows who he is because everybody tells him all the time. He’s the king, right? Everyone tells him who he is. And he’s kind of a good example of the performed self that Richard Rohr talks about at its best. It’s like everything is put together. Everything is already perfect. And then the Warrens tries to go home and he spends 10 years trying to get there.
Everything that goes wrong could go wrong. Like there’s a storm, there’s a monster. His crew makes a bad decision, which I’ll tell you more about later. But the Greeks told this story not as a tragedy. They told it more like a map. It’s the hero’s journey that we see in a lot of different things. I mean, I could have picked Star Wars because there’s a hero’s journey in every great story, isn’t there? And I’ve been in conversations with a lot of people this week in my life and I want to say doubt is so much a part of how we live, right? It really is.
I noticed something. I was talking to a couple people on the same day on Friday. It happened to be on Friday and both of them were kind of having the same experience. They both were feeling a lot of doubt about something that happened in their life and the people around them were telling them what they should do. I notice I’m like, how unhelpful that is, right? Because when we’re really in our doubt, we just kind of got to sit with it for a while. At least I do. Somebody trying to slap a bandaid on me and tell me, like the one person said someone told her, “Just get into your power. You need to own your power.” And she’s really upset about something that happens still. Sometimes you just got to give yourself a hot minute is my point.
I really relate to that personally because I had a situation with one of the things I do outside of Cityside where I was getting a lot of unsolicited advice and I started to really feel bad about myself and what I realized is that’s what I do when I’m doubting myself. That’s why I was feeling bad about myself. I went right to like, “What did I do wrong?” Instead of asking the question like, “Just how am I feeling right now? Maybe I’m just feeling a little down and it’s okay because doubt is not a problem to be fixed. When our doubt shows up, it’s a message, right? It’s a message that says, look here, I’m feeling some doubt. Maybe it means I’ve outgrown a situation. Maybe it means that I need to step into whatever I’m doing a little differently. I need to change how I’m thinking about it.
Doubt is actually a messenger. It’s not a bad thing.
And our question, one of our CSL questions this month is, what would happen if I debuted my doubting self the way I share my confidence self? How might my life and relationships change? And I laughed that you said you debuted your doubting self a long time ago. But the truth is a lot of times we don’t feel free to bring that part of us which feels insecure or questioning, right? We don’t feel free because we think we’ll be judged, right? So that’s why we don’t do it instead of just saying like, “I’m just going to be a little brave and tell the truth about how I’m feeling right now.” It’s not to blame anyone else. It’s just to own it, right? It’s just to own it. This is where I am right now and there’s nothing broken, right? In the story of Odysseus, he’s gifted this gift by Aolis, who’s the keeper of the wins when he starts his trip.
And Aolis puts all the different bad winds and storms and stuff that could happen to him and he puts them in a bag and he says, “If you just keep this bag closed for your whole trip, you’ll have a smooth sailing.” And they’re gone, they’re on their way back, they’re almost there, the crew’s exhausted, Odysseus goes to sleep and while they’re sleeping, the crew decides they’re going to go look in the bag because they are convinced it’s a treasure in that bag. And so they open the bag, they get into this storm, it blows them back to where they were. I think that that’s a great analogy for how we can open the bag of our doubts and fears, right? We can just go down that rabbit hole and we can keep feeding it in our mind and then we feel terrible. And I know that because I do it to myself, right?
We all do it to ourselves.
And the other thing about doubt is we’re so sure that our doubt’s a problem and that we need to fix or resolve it or get advice to move it away from our experience instead of just saying, “What does my doubt have to say to me? What’s the message of my doubt?” A book I really like a lot is by a guy named Shirzad Shamin. It’s called Positive Intelligence and he says that we all have 10 saboteurs, but the biggest one is the judge and the judge is the voice in our head that’s always judging us and it’s the voice that judges everybody else, by the way, as well. And so that voice can say to us that whatever the uncertainty is in your thinking, whatever the doubt is in your thinking, that somehow that makes you bad or wrong and that you have to manage it.
Michael Singer would call it the inner roommate, which is the voice that never stops talking. It never stops giving the doubting self unsolicited advice. The example I gave of one of the people I spoke to the other day, she was so upset because her values were violated by something that happened at work. It was emotionally upsetting to her, which led her to start doubting herself and her choices and whatever. But it’s like, I said to her, I’m like, “Your values got violated. You just got to sit with that for a little bit. It doesn’t mean you need to run away right now, but that means there’s something for you that’s calling to you to be in a different circumstance.” And that’s what the voice of doubt can tell us, right? It’s time for a change. It’s time to step out of where we are. And neuroscience also tells us that our brain is a prediction machine and our brain is always generating its idea of what should happen next.
And when that doesn’t happen, then what happens? Doubt happens. It’s the moment of failure, but it’s actually tells us that it’s not a malfunction. It tells us that we should take a look and look at it as an update. So it’s a new intelligence that came to you. We could say it’s divine intelligence trying to get through. And Adam Grant tells us rethinking is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of an open mind. So doubt is really our opportunity just to rethink, to take a step back, to get quiet, to sit with where you’re at, to listen to the voice of your own spirit. Jason read to us and said, “You’ll be led to the edge of your own private resources.” That’s what happens. And if you think about your life, there’s probably been a lot of times it’s happened, but as you sat with it and you moved through it, did something good come later?
It usually does. Sometimes these hard things are the things that lead to the great things. So let’s talk about fear and doubt, because I think fear and doubt travel together. At least they do for me whenever I’m like, I don’t know which comes first if it’s fear or a doubt or doubt then fear, but I know for me they’re paired. I don’t know if anyone else feels that. So on his journey, Odysseus knows and has been warned about the sirens. I don’t know if anyone knows this story, but the sirens are like these creatures that are on an island and they sing and every sailor who’s ever gone past them has been called to them. Their boat goes into the rocks, they crash, they’re gone. And it’s an irresistible song that they’re singing. That’s what they do. And for Odysseus, they called him by name and they know who he is and they tell him, “Come to us and we’ll tell you everything.” But see, going into it, he knew about that and he knows he’s not going to be able to resist it.
So he says to his crew, “Tie me to what is true.” So he has his crew tie him to the mast because he says, “I know that I can’t resist this when it happens. I know it’s going to happen. I’m going to hear the song. I’m going to beg you to take me over toward the sirens, but don’t listen to me. ” And I love that part of the story because it’s also what we do for each other, right? It’s also why we need other people like, “Hey, if you notice me doing this, say, hey, there you go again.” But they tie him to what’s true and spiritually that’s the same thing as saying, “Bring me back to my spirit.” That’s how we bind to something true. We bind to that part of ourselves, which is divine wisdom.
And doubt, as I said, doesn’t travel alone. It’s companion is fear. And I know for myself, my fear is if people see my questioning self that they’re going to question me, right? That if I lead with uncertainty that people will question my authenticity, my credibility, whatever matters in whatever context you’re in. And the story of the sirens is just that fear made audible, right? So how do we quiet those voices in our head that metaphorically make us smash into the rocks to take us down that unhealthy rabbit hole in our mind. Tara Brock, who’s a psychologist and meditation teacher, calls this the trance of unworthiness. That’s a hard word to get out sometimes. And it’s this deeply conditioned belief that we’re not enough the way we are and that this doubting uncertain part of ourself, this part of ourself that’s not yet resolved is the part that we have to hide or fix or perform around before someone’s going to love us, before they’re going to trust us, before they’re going to take us seriously.
And Tara Brock teaches that the trance is not the truth about us, which we would say spiritually in our teaching, like your human form is not the truth about you. Your spirit is the truth about you, but this truth that we believe according to Tara Brock is a story we learned so early and so completely that we forgot it was a story and the way out isn’t to argue or fix it. The way out is to recognize it, to say, “Oh, there it is again. There’s that song. I know that song.” But to choose not to turn towards that, to consciously choose to turn your inner dialogue in a different direction.
Rollo May says, “Commitment is healthiest when it’s not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.” And if you think about something you did in your life that maybe you didn’t believe you could do or other people didn’t believe you could do, did you get it done but doubt was still present? I think about running a marathon. I don’t know, that’s my best example. I decided to run a marathon a long time ago now. It’s probably more than 25 years, but when I started, I wasn’t even a runner and to run 26.2 miles, I mean, that’s a lot. It’s a lot. At the end, you’re kind of like, “Ugh.” But I just kept going. That’s what I did and I let myself be taught by the people around me and I learned what I needed and that’s I think a good analogy for life when we have doubt.
Just take the next step. Just take whatever the next step is. That’s how we move through it. Susan David says discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life, but we don’t want to be uncomfortable, do we? It stinks to be uncomfortable, right? But if we really think about our lives, we know moving through discomfort is the key to our freedom, really. It truly is. And we can lean on our spiritual practice when you do that. I want to talk about someone that probably you all know and that is Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers. And he’s the guy in a walk in the house, put on your cardigan. He told millions of children for 30 plus years, “You are special just the way you are. ” And what most people don’t know is that he was kind of a bullied kid. He was chubby, he was shy, he was lonely, he’d go home and watch TV by himself and he’s like the least likely person you would think would ever be on the television, right?
But he doubted his own worth so consistently and quietly and persistently that he eventually built this theology, which looked like his show to support other people in getting rid of the doubt that he had about himself. It’s really quite beautiful. He was a Presbyterian minister. A lot of people don’t know that and he had a spiritual director that he would write to throughout his life and he would talk about the gap between who he perceived himself to be on the inside and the person who showed up to be on the TV. And it’s interesting to know that he never resolved that sense of like, “I don’t know if I’m the same person.” So even though he was preaching this beautiful thing teaching it, he doubted it and he had a ritual he did every morning. He would step on the scale and he weighed 143 pounds and that was a goal because one four, three, Jim’s nodding his head, he already knew this, three words, a one letter word, a four letter word and a three letter word.
What is it? I love you. I love you. 143, I love you. And he turned an ordinary daily act into a practice of return, not because he had arrived at certainty, but because he hadn’t arrived at certainty. He knew he had to bring himself back every morning and let go of that doubting part of himself to continue to move forward. So it wasn’t that dark was absent, it was that he moved through the dark that was there.
So let’s go back to Odysseus at the end of the story. So he comes back after 20 years, 10 years he’s at war, 10 years he’s trying to get home and he doesn’t arrive a king when he comes home. He gets off the boat the goddess Athena, that cracks me up. The goddess Athena appears at the shore and she turns him into a beggar. She makes him look ragged, weathered, unrecognizable, stripped of anything that would identify who he was and his armor’s gone, his cruise gone, his title means nothing. And he goes up, he walks up the path to his own house, he knocks on the door and he has to kind of work his way into the house. They’re not going to let him in, right? And he goes inside and he sits down and he sees all the people who have sort of taken over and he’s being mocked and he just sits there and he said, “The king who’s come home has come home as a beggar because he was stripped of everything that wasn’t his real self.
He was stripped of his false self.” And eventually his family and his dog recognized me, especially like the dog part of that story since I have one, but the debut of the doubting self is that walk up the path, right? I come in, I come in humbly and I just trust that if I continue to do my work then that I’m going to be okay however I am, right? So it’s accepting ourselves and knowing that like who we really are is that self with a capital S. I was walking, I walked the dog this morning and I just felt like I needed to get out because there’s something I’ve been grappling with and I noticed my mind wasn’t clear this morning and I said to Rich, I’m like, “I’m going to go for a walk.” And I heard these words, “Peace be still in my head,” which is from the Bible.
I grew up as a Methodist, so I get these little Bible pop-ins and Jesus also said, “My peace I give to you, not the peace of the world.” And so I’m like, “Well, I want to know what that means metaphysically. What’s the interpretation of these words?” And what I read is that peace be still as a state to silence our internal chaos, our doubts and our anxieties by accessing the state of unwavering calm within. So it causes us to stop focusing on our external problems and to turn within to our spiritual awareness. And that is really what we’re talking about here is how do we calm the mind and allow the spirit to intervene? And we do that through prayer. We do that through our spiritual practice and we do that through study and we do have a class starting Tuesday. I wanted to mention that it’s five weeks.
It looks at five different areas of spiritual principles and how they tie between science of mind that we teach here and also ancient teachings. I just want to encourage you to check it out, but let me give you one tool before we complete, which this is from Tara Brock and she calls it RAIN and RAIN is not a cure for doubt. It’s a way to stay with your doubting self long enough to feel what’s happening. The R, recognize is pause and name what’s happening. I notice I’m doubting myself right now. Don’t fix it, don’t run away from it, just name it. This is what I’m feeling. And meditation is a great place or contemplation is a great place to do that. Just to simply check in with yourself and say, “Where am I right now? How am I feeling?” The second letter A is allow, which just let the experience be there without pushing it away.
It’s so normal to push it away, isn’t it? Don’t we just push away our discomfort? I know I do, but just to say there’s doubt here, I don’t have to fix it right now.
And then we investigate. We get curious. What does the doubt need me to know? What’s the doubt here to tell me? What’s it protecting? What’s it reaching toward? And then we nurture, which we just were kind to ourself. We offer the doubting self what it needs, not advice, not certainty, just I see you, you’re allowed to be here. And I know for me, a good follow on for that is to get some prayer, right? Just because sometimes when we can’t know the truth for ourselves, somebody else can know it for us. Someone says a prayer, they say one word and you’re like, “Oh, that’s the word. That’s it. ” It’s an invitation to the spiritual energy. So we’re going to pray in just a minute. I ask the music team to come back up. Richard Rohr says, “You cannot discover who you truly are while staying safely inside of what everyone expects of you.
” I love that quote.
We have to live inside the problem till it transforms us. Not solve the doubt, not perform our way past it, not wait until it resolves before you let anyone see it. Just live inside it. Let someone see you living inside it. Let other people help, right? Let other people be there for you. Sometimes the greatest gift someone can give you is just to sit with you, right? And that’s really, this is the debut of the doubting self. I don’t have to push it away. It’s okay. It is okay that it is here. So as we go into prayer, I just want to have us say an affirmation together. I’m going to say it, then I want you to say it with me. Hopefully it’s on the screen. Oh, look at that. Isn’t that interesting? Okay. I share all parts of myself including my doubt with grace.
Let’s say it together. I share all parts of myself including my doubt with grace. And so I invite you to turn within now and if you want, you can put your hand on your heart, whatever feels comfortable to you and just let’s take a few breaths into ourselves into our spirit, just knowing this presence and power which always and everywhere is with us, this divine love, this divine grace, this divine peace, this deep inner knowing of spirit that always and everywhere is with us. I know that I am one with this divine presence. I am one with this divine wisdom. I am one with this love, this grace, this goodness, this divine wellbeing. And as I know this for myself, I know this for each of the beautiful people hearing my words, just knowing that we are all one with this loving divine presence, that it is the truth of our being, that it is the love, the grace, the goodnes, the peace, the light, the love.
And so from this place of oneness, I just speak a word of transformation for each and every one of us. I just know and declare that we all feel free to be exactly who we are in our doubts and our confidence. I know that in this and every moment we are fully supported by spirit, that whatever is happening in our life is simply our lesson and that we can embrace it and we can embrace it knowing we are held by the divine, knowing that we are always supported knowing that the way is being made forward. And so I know and declare for each of us today a deeper sense of inner freedom to simply express who we are, just knowing that the divine God, spirit, whatever your word is, that we are being held. This is what I know and affirm for us and I’m grateful for this.
I’m just grateful to know that we are surrounded and supported in love in every moment. I’m grateful for the inner transformation that is happening in each of us and I’m grateful to know that spirit leads us forward and together we say, “And so it is amen.”