Becoming a Christian Buddhist
Melanie
“Although I left Christianity, there are things in it I love. So I think of my faith now as a Christian Buddhist faith.”
Edited by Cliff Williams from an interview with Melanie on September 2, 2026. "Melanie" is a pseudonym.
Childhood and College
I grew up in a Christian home and was taught the Christian faith from a young age. When I was a kid, I worried that I wasn’t going to be saved. I lay in bed at night asking Jesus into my heart over and over again, hoping that if I died, I would go to heaven.
When I became a teenager, I read a book called Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster, which was about disciplines Christians could do to become better Christians. It had a chapter on simplicity and one on fasting. I wanted to feel better about myself, so I gave away a lot of my things so as to have a simple life. And I did a juice fast for a week and then fasted once a week for a time.
I was pretty lonely and disconnected, mostly from my parents, but also from my peers and from myself in some ways. I didn’t know how to understand myself. I took the Myers-Brigg test, which told me I was INTP—Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.
After high school, I went to an evangelical Christian college. That felt pretty safe, because it had the Christianity I knew. My focus there was on becoming a better Christian. I decided to major in philosophy, and I took a lot of philosophy courses. At some point when I was a freshman or sophomore, I had a conversation with my mom about that. She was afraid that taking philosophy courses would affect my Christian beliefs.
I had doubts about my faith in college. I read Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis to try to convince myself to stay a Christian. I also bought a book on Christian apologetics. Interestingly, my dad encouraged me whenever I had doubts. He didn’t squash them. He said, “No, it’s good to doubt and question so as to test your faith.” He encouraged me to think outside the box and to be adventurous in my thought life.
Leaving Christianity
After I graduated from college, I went to a foreign country for two years to teach English with a Catholic organization. I thought maybe if I picked a faith that was similar to evangelical, but far enough away from evangelical, it would be more my own beliefs.
In that country, I lived in community with four other Americans my own age who had grown up in wildly different backgrounds from my own. That showed me different ways of thinking and also different ways of behaving and feeling. I started to have a sense that my Christianity limited me. It wasn’t that I wanted to do drugs and sex and similar stuff. It was more that I wanted to be able to think the way I wanted to instead of being told how I had to think. I remember a Bible verse that helped me take a step away from Christianity: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32).
To me the truth was definitely not the Christianity I had been taught. I stepped away from it and started to tell my close Christian friends, also missionary kids like me, that I wasn’t a Christian anymore. That was a big thing for me, because many of my friends were strong Christians. Their hearing I wasn’t a Christian anymore was like my falling away from the faith. I was going to go to hell. Some of them thought I couldn’t be their friends anymore, at least close friends. So they kept their distance from me. That’s still true years later.
A clinical supervisor I had when I was studying to get a master’s degree in community counseling emphasized what a loss it was to lose my faith. At the time, I didn’t understood that, but later I did. Having faith was like having a road map of how to behave, who to be, what to expect from life, and what type of person I should be. And that was no longer there. So I was walking in the dark in many ways. But it was also exhilarating not to have faith. I had made a decision that I was going to be happy, and that was what mattered to me. I was tired of all the rules and all the things I was supposed to do.
Feeling Free
When I got back to the US, I became more free with my life. I didn’t feel so guilty about not reading my Bible or not being a good Christian or not praying. I felt freed from the guilt that I used to feel all the time as a kid—the guilt of feeling that I should be a better person: I should pray more. I should read the Bible more. I became less rule-oriented. I still went to church, though, because most of my friends did. Afterwards, we went out to eat together.
I started interacting with guys more and being more flirty. I had never dated, except for a week when I was in college. As a teenager, I was part of Christian chastity culture. The idea was that you didn’t date. You just meet someone and get married. Those of us in the chastity culture wore a chastity ring until we found someone we were going to marry. I wanted to be part of that, so I got my dad to get me a chastity ring.
My first romantic relationship occurred in my mid to late twenties, and, unfortunately, it was emotionally and sexually abusive. Though I didn’t have the guidance of my prior Christian beliefs at that point, I still had cultural roots of who I should be as a person. So with the sexual assault, I had an intense feeling of shame and guilt, though I don’t think I was aware of that at the time. I also had a need to make the relationship work, which kept me in it on and off for about two years. It ended when I moved to another state to get my doctorate in clinical counseling. With that move, I was going to figure out how to be happy.
Searching for Happiness
I read a book about happiness. It said that one way to be happy was to meditate. So I joined a Buddhist group to learn how to meditate. On Wednesday evenings, I listened to Dharma talks on how to meditate by the teacher Baika and then sat meditating for twenty to thirty minutes. I also did a lot of yoga, because that was supposed to help with sexual trauma. Otherwise, I was very isolated and mostly stayed to myself.
Because of the isolation, I had a rich inner world. I did a lot of thinking and had lots of feelings, though I didn’t have any checks and balances on them. That sent me on a cascade of anxieties and fears when I connected with a male friend who showed some interest in me: What would happen if he and I got together? That thought triggered the sexual trauma I had been through.
At the same time, I started to go into what I thought was a spiritual awakening. On the airplane on the way back from visiting a friend, I suddenly had a deep sensation of being loved all the way to my bones. I felt deeply cared for and protected. And when I got back home, I had numerous spiritual experiences as though my mind had been flung open. I became fascinated with flowers. I stared at the moon. Music felt beautiful. I became interested in esoteric spiritual ideas, such as Kundalini, which is about energy centers in the human personality and awakening.
I lived near a forested area, so I went on hikes in the forest. They felt like shamanic journeys, that is, ways of altering my consciousness so as to get guidance, healing, and spiritual insight. On one hike I hugged a tree for a time. Maybe it was twenty minutes, or maybe it was two hours. I don’t know. I just stood there with my arms around the tree, feeling its solidity. I felt guided.
On another hike I found what looked like the pelvic bones of a cow in a ravine. In the state of mind I was in, they represented the sexual trauma I had been through. I needed to take the bones to a certain point on a hike, then leave them behind. That meant I would leave the sexual trauma behind. I did that.
Unraveling
In spite of the positive things that happened, I experienced a lot of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) from the sexual and emotional trauma in the abusive relationship.
My mind unraveled in a lot of ways. I couldn’t focus in my classes for the doctorate. I couldn’t pay attention to what my counselees were saying because I was too distracted by internal stimuli. I ended up moving back to my home state, where my mental health deteriorated so much that it developed into a full-blown psychosis. I became deeply depressed because I couldn’t trust my mind anymore. I had loved my mind, thinking it could do anything, and suddenly it betrayed me to such an extent that I didn’t know what I could trust.
I spent a good two to three years in my early to mid thirties trying to figure out medications for the psychosis. I attempted to ascertain the meaning of my life during those years and what I could trust. I became delusional about a lot of things. I thought the FBI was after me but believed the Secret Service was helping me counteract the FBI.
Becoming a Buddhist
This is when Thich Nhat Hanh comes in. I had heard of him when I was going to the Buddha Sangha, a Buddhist community in the other state I was in while getting my doctorate. For some reason I had an instinct that I needed to listen to him. So as I drove to another state for a year-long internship for my doctoral program, I listened to his The Art of Living. I listened to it over and over, plus Fear, another of his books. And when I became deeply depressed again and felt the same despair I had felt before, I listened to hours and hours of Thich Nhat Hanh’s talks all over again.
The message that got through to me from listening to him was the importance of having compassion and understanding. He said, “You can have energy if you have a great aspiration.” And he said that one great aspiration was to have compassion for yourself and others. The way to have compassion, he said, was to understand yourself and others.
That changed my thinking. I had previously felt so limited by my psychosis that I felt diminished. Suddenly I thought, “Wait a second. I can have compassion, and I can understand.” I didn’t have energy for much of anything in my depression, but at least I could do these.
That gave me hope. If I could focus on having compassion, then maybe I could have more energy. I would be able to do something about my depression. I might be able to get out of bed in the morning more easily. I could think about things that I wanted to think about.
I remembered what earlier I had heard Christian Wiman, a Christian poet, say in a podcast: “We have doubt, or we fall away from our faith so that faith can take new forms.” That, too, gave me hope, because it meant that I could have a different type of faith.
Alongside that, I read in one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books that faith is something we have by testing it out. Instead of the leap of faith in Christianity, where, in my mind, you just believe because you’re told to, faith can be something that proves itself over time. It’s like, I eat asparagus, I feel healthy. I can have faith in something because it actually works.
That was the big gift of Buddhism for me. I suddenly felt that I was given something that works. Thich Nhat Hanh’s thoughts helped me get out of my depression. And they actually helped me stay alive, because at one point I had thought of suicide.
A New Life
What I love about Buddhism is that it says my desire for happiness is good. What I felt from Christianity was that you’re supposed to forfeit happiness until a later time, in heaven. You’re not supposed to care about your own desire for happiness because that is too selfish. So acquiring a Buddhist faith was freeing in the sense that I could let myself want to be happy. I acquired an acceptance of myself that I had not had before. I became who I am.
Another piece of my journey has to do with the Buddhist principle of mindfulness—the importance of being present in the moment and being aware of what you are doing. I became aware of everyday things I was doing, such as taking out the trash, making my bed, making lunch. That helped me feel connected to myself in a moment-to-moment way. It also helped me connect with other people in a deeper and more meaningful way—my clients, friends, and anyone I care about. I no longer feel the disconnection I felt earlier.
In addition, the therapist job I now do, working with those who have had to deal with sexual trauma, goes along with my Buddhist faith. It fits the principle of right livelihood in The Eightfold Path. I get to use compassion. And I listen deeply, which Thich Nhat Hanh also values.
He also said that you can’t be happy unless you go back to your roots, which for me is Christianity. Although I left Christianity, there are things in it I love. So I think of my faith now as a Christian Buddhist faith.
I recently started doing meditation again four or five times a week. I have been going to a Sangha to try to focus on developing my beliefs. I began doing yoga anew after having stopped it for a while. I can do everyday things without anxiety. Before, I had been a pretty competitive person. I wanted to be better than others or outsmart them. But I have set that aside. Having compassion for myself and others has become a focus of my life. I am now a different person.
Turning Points: Faith Journeys of Twenty-Five People