the path
God does not belong to anyone
The spiritual meaning of “open your heart to Jesus” is that our connection to God is through the heart, not the mind, and that connecting to God has to be a free will choice we make to be open and willing for that connection to occur. I’m not a Christian, but I can recognize spiritual teachings exist in all traditions.
And I can separate those teachings from the bullying I received at the hands of Christian kids growing up, and the authoritarian politics of some Christians in my country that is frankly terrifying. These are all different things.
God doesn’t belong to anyone’s tradition–the Light shines for us all, and whatever words and methods help you find it are perfectly fine. I sincerely hope humanity can eventually stop fighting about what are only symbolic interpretations anyway. Our mind cannot comprehend the truth of God, which is why we have to connect with our heart and why “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao”. So use whatever works for you, and let other people use what works for them.
Choosing painful incarnations
I often hear people feel the idea that we choose our incarnations, and therefore choose our traumas, to be victim blaming. I understand why it would feel that way from a human perspective. But the choice isn’t made from within the human experience. This idea presupposes that who we really are is so much more vast and expansive than we can ever hope to imagine while we are in these human vessels, so the choice to experience helplessness and victimization makes sense. It makes sense to a soul the way that lifting very heavy weights to tear our muscles so they regrow stronger makes sense to us as humans–the soul has absolute knowledge that it will survive the experience and learn things from it that it can’t learn any other way.
If you can’t understand why a vast immortal being might choose to have a very challenging but temporary dark emotional experience, then you don’t understand the idea itself, and it’s not meant for you right now. This is a problem with esoteric spiritual ideas being readily available all over the internet, and people encountering them far before they are ready to understand them, at a point when they can actually be harmful or painful to hear.