The Architecture Of Faith: Why Church Feels Real & Mediumship Doesn't

This episode of The Unity Code was not planned — and those are always the ones that hit the hardest.

After walking into a Catholic church for a funeral for the first time in over a decade, I had a full-body realization: the church makes the invisible feel undeniably real — not just through belief, but through the nervous system. The silence. The architecture. The rituals. The sitting, standing, kneeling. The repetition. The collective rhythm. Before a single prayer lands, your body already knows what to do.

In this episode, we unpack the psychology of faith and religion through the lens of somatic conditioning — how meaning is learned through posture, repetition, environment, rhythm, and emotion before logic. We explore how churches create safety to surrender, how authority is reinforced through structure and ritual, and why these experiences become socially sanctioned “truth.”

Then we go one step further: why is religion publicly accepted while mediumship is treated like a guilty secret? If both connect people to the unseen, what’s the real difference? (Spoiler: institutions mastered the body-based experience of the invisible.)

If you’re curious about nervous system regulation, ritual, spiritual authority, mediumship stigma, and why humans trust experience more than concepts — this one will blow your mind the way it blew mine.

Note: This is an exploration of psychology, somatics, and spiritual culture — not an attempt to change your faith. Take what resonates, leave the rest.

Keywords: psychology of religion, somatic conditioning, nervous system and faith, church ritual repetition, sitting standing kneeling, spiritual authority, mediumship stigma, making the invisible real, embodied belief, unity code podcast

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Nicole Pope is an internationally-trained Evidential Medium and Soul Integration Guide dedicated to helping others reconnect with their higher self, awaken their gifts, and remember who they truly are.

To connect with Nicole, book a reading, or access her social media accounts: http://mediumnicole.com/links

Chapters

• 0:00 Unplanned Entry And A Funeral
• 4:20 Old Rituals Return In The Body
• 7:30 Why Churches Make The Invisible Feel Real
• 14:08 Space, Silence, And Nervous System Calm
• 18:33 Repetition, Obedience, And Safety
• 22:35 Authority, Elevation, And Amplified Voices
• 25:13 Emotion As An Anchor For Belief
• 28:20 Somatic Conditioning Explained
• 31:06 Mediumship Without Institutions
• 34:30 Ritual Tools That Make Spirit Tangible
• 37:25 Healing, Nervous System, And Lasting Change

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 2:21

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Unity Code. I have to be honest with all of you that this episode today is completely not planned. Which means it's going to be an amazing fucking episode because that's how it always works when I have no idea spirit is making space for something big to come. And boy, did they. Because this morning I walked into a Catholic church for a funeral. It has been a very long time since I walked into a Catholic church. There's been a lot of personal processing, a lot of sovereignty that I've been going through, a lot of shifting perspectives about my beliefs in the spirit world and the role that religions play in that. And also, I have to tell you, as soon as I stepped inside that church today, it's like I never left the faith. I walked in, and I knew exactly how to take the holy water, and I knew how to bow politely at the end of my pew. And I sat down and I was able to even know the phrases and sayings that are so popular in the Catholic faith, when to sit, when to stand. All of it came back to me, even though it has been years since I had participated in any sort of a Catholic activity, Catholic ceremony, faith. What do we call these? I don't even know what they're called anymore. That's how far how long I've been out of the religion. That's point taken, spirit, point taken. But when you think about that, the fact that I've been out of this practice for probably more than a decade now. I dabbled a little bit when my ch children were young, mainly because I wanted them to have some sort of form of religion and structure and faith. And so it's been probably about 10 years since I've stepped foot in a Catholic church. And yet all of the body responses came back. So I want you to think about it. I want you to think about it. And again, nope, I'm just gonna say it. I want you to imagine yourself walking inside a church. For those of you that are familiar with what that feels like and looks like, what happens to you? If you walked into a Catholic funeral today, or funeral of your faith today, would you know exactly how to act? Would you know exactly the tone of voice to use, the way you should walk through the location, how your body would respond to being there? Because I'll tell you what, as I walked in the door of this beautiful church today, I naturally got quiet. I naturally started walking slower and more intentionally. My head went down as I walked, I almost kind of moused in, skulked in like I was little, right? No one told me to do that. I didn't I didn't just decide to do that. My body automatically reacted. And as I sat there in the pew watching my dear friend bury her family member, I caught myself thinking this place makes the invisible feel undeniably real. People that walk in these doors know faith, no God, no religion, effortlessly. No one questions it. It's part of our society. And so as I sat there looking at the two priests, the two fathers, not literal, of course, because this is the Catholic faith on the altar, it really got me thinking about their role versus mine, about how these two men chose to live their life dedicated to faith and helping others and facilitating critical, pivotal moments in people's lives, and being that safe space for them to transition, especially in this instance, into death, into births, to marriages, into weekly routines and ceremonies of celebrating their faith. These two men's have made it their career to serve God and serve the spiritual needs of their community. Why are they socially accepted while mediumship myself, who I am also connecting to the unseen, I am also wanting to serve my community in their spiritual faith. Why am I whispered about and treated like a guilty secret? Well, they get a palace. That's what I want to unpack today. And and before I go there, before I go there, I want to highlight my intention is not necessarily to change anyone's perspective on religion. Um, you are welcome to send me hate mail. Just know that I love you. I want everybody to continue their beliefs, and I want you to listen to this podcast and take what resonates and throw what doesn't out the door, out the window. My intention is not to change anyone's mind about their faith, but I do want to talk about the psychology behind faith and religion and the church because I find that so fucking interesting. And before I start about why and how churches make this invisible thing feel so real for people, I want to talk about how belief doesn't start in the mind, it starts in the body. And we're gonna talk about that as I go through this. I'm gonna give you lots of examples because before a prayer is spoken, before theology enters the room, before belief even has a chance, the nervous system has already decided that this is real, this matters, this is safe to surrender to. And so I'm gonna challenge the perspective that churches don't convince you of God, because we all know there's a ton of people that go to church that don't believe in it. But they give you the experience of something bigger than yourself. And we are wired in our brain to trust experience. Boom. Um there here comes the hate mail. Are you typing yet? So let's talk, let's talk about how the churches train our nervous system. Okay. Because the reality is that churches caused me an automatic nervous system change, an automatic behavior change just by walking in the doors. How did they do that? Let's break down the science behind that. First things first, you walk in. What's the first thing you notice when you go into a church? Is it the high ceilings? Because that's what I look at. The beautiful room that you're in, even before you even walk in the door, you can see typically a beautiful stained glass on the front and maybe on the sides. You have these very high ceilings. You have very long aisles. There's symmetry in most churches, there's stillness in most churches. Your eyes just start looking around, going up, and you know what happens in a really big space, you start to feel smaller. But also because of the symmetry, because of the patterns that exist in these churches, you also feel held. So your nervous system is looking at the physical space before you even sit down and realizing that you are literally standing in something bigger than yourself. And yet your feet are on the ground and you feel held in that space. Let's talk about the lack of sound in a church, the whispering that happens as soon as you walk in the door. The baby I heard crying today at the ceremony, right? Everything is quiet in a church. Footsteps echo. You have the quiet whispers of people. What's meditation, everybody? It's silence, it's quietness, it's reverence. What happens in meditation? What happens in the quiet? You start to slow your breath. You start to soften your muscles, you start to lower your defenses. That silence isn't empty. It's literally regulating your nervous system. It's literally calming and quieting your brain and removing external noises and reactions from your body. Things that cause you to react, it's literally removing those from your environment so that you have a moment to breathe and think and hear for yourself. Come to think of it, why did I stop going to church once I had kids? Damn. Oh, I know why. I know exactly why. Because they put me in that little room, the kids' room, where it was soundproof. So it was the exact opposite of what a church experience should be like because instead I was sitting in a quiet room with the loud sounds of my children echoing off of it. Never mind, I remember why I quit. Okay. So as we're going through this beautiful ceremony today, this beautiful services for my friend, there came the sayings, the movements, right? The patterns, the repetition in the service. And as somebody who's been long out of the Catholic faith, I think it's been over 10 years since I stood in a church, if I remember correctly. I think it's been over 10 years. Everything still came back to me. I knew what to say when. I knew when to sit, when to stand, I knew how to find the hymns in the book. Right? There's a predictability that comes with religions and faith. That predictability makes our nervous system feel amazing, feel safe, feel like you can finally put your guard down, your shoulders drop, you know what to expect. And that was absolutely true today when you clearly had the people who go to church every week and knew when to sit and stand before the priest indicated to the crowd that we need to sit and stand. Predictability creates nervous system regulation, calmness in your energy. And can we talk for a moment about the movements? About the fact that, yeah, there is sitting, standing, and kneeling, but you don't decide when you're doing that. You follow the cues again. So standing comes with this idea of I'm going to show respect to the authority of what is being read right now. And they typically happen with the hymns and sermons, right? Sitting is when, just like a child in school, you're supposed to be sitting and re listening and receiving. And kneeling is when you are praying and devoting and surrendering to God. And so through these motions, the sitting, the standing, the kneeling, your body is literally being told how to feel, how to react, how to respond. And through the repetition of not knowing when and you following the cues of that, you become, I'm gonna say it, obedient. You become listening. There's no one in there that didn't do what the priest said to do. Even people that were witches sitting right next to me. We still did what the priest told us to do in terms of sitting and standing and kneeling because we wanted to be respectful. But we are listening to the person in charge. We're being obedient to their requests. And so what's interesting is that that obedience doesn't feel like obedience once it becomes a repetition. It feels like a pattern, it feels safe, it feels right, it feels sacred. This is how I celebrate my God. This is how I show respect and love and devotion to my God through this repetition by being a good student, by being an obedient student, by doing what we have been asked to do. There's a whole lot to unpack right there.

SPEAKER_00: 19:41

I'm gonna keep on moving though. And so a few other things I noticed was that again, nobody disobeyed what the priest asked us to do.

SPEAKER_01: 20:03

There was this collective agreement that made the experience cohesive and real in being part of a community. When you add other people and everyone moves together and speaks together and listens together, there's cohesiveness, there's synchronicity. Not synchronicity. Oh God, everybody. Um, that's not the right word, synchrony. Um and that does something profound, it makes your nervous system socially safe. I belong, I'm not going to be rejected. And so that collective agreement turns your experience into a shared reality. So not only in your nervous system do you feel safe through repetition, through um humble and small, through the physical, beautiful, tall structures, the marble altarpieces. You feel reverent, right? You're sitting and standing and you're following and you're listening. And you have people all around you doing it too. And all of this together, all of this together makes your nervous system. Feel safe, feel whole, feel protected. And how does that feel in your body, everybody? How does it feel in your body? Maybe some of you are feeling a little perturbed and upset and having probably a negative response to what I said because of the realizations you might have just had. But typically when you live in it, when you go in a church and you go through these patterns, your body relaxes. And so, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. You're gonna get mad at me. We're gonna go there anyway, because I want you to think about where the authority sits in a church. Where is the priest? He's in he's behind the altar. Where is that? A few steps above you.

SPEAKER_00: 22:31

How do you hear him? Through a microphone. His voice is amplified.

SPEAKER_01: 22:47

Is he asking you your opinion of God? Your opinion of the Bible, or is he telling you? Right? So you're learning that your truth in religion comes from the man near the altar. Or or woman, if you're in one of the faiths that have women priests, right, right on, right on. And so you're learning that your truth comes from the man on the altar in the book, probably sitting next to you or hanging, hanging in front of you on the pew in front of you. Right? So, this is not an intellectual exercise. You have handed over your authority before your mind even has an opportunity to ask any questions. Damn, right? Damn. And so what seals the deal, I think. If all of that wasn't enough to keep people going to religion, what seals the deal is when you go to church, right? There's a lot of emotion at most of the experiences where you're at church. And I know that there's a lot of people that go weekly, I get that. But for me, when do I go to church? I go for baptisms, I go for funerals, I go for weddings, I go at very emotional points in people's lives. They are anchored as the safe space in the most emotionally volatile times of our lives andor the most emotionally high moments of our lives. Right. And so when the emotional Happens and is facilitated through, let's be honest, because you don't get married unless you go through the ceremony. I didn't, but I'm just stating that as a to further my point. Um, you don't get into heaven until you get baptized, right? You don't get buried until there's a final closure through the church. When when these very big emotional moments happen inside this sacred container in the church, your nervous system anchors the reality of the institution. The nervous system anchors the reality of the institution. Did I break you yet? I'm so sorry if I did. Because if we think about the big picture, the big picture of the church, it is set up in a way to make your nervous system feel regulated, to feel unified with other people, to feel receptive, to feel surrendered. And here's the thing: you don't surrender you because you believe, you believe because your body has already surrendered. And this is a thing. It's called somatic conditioning, everybody. This is a psychology term, somatic conditioning. It's when meaning is learned through posture and repetition and rhythm and environment and emotion before logic, before belief, before choice, because your body feels if it's true, safe and familiar. And so in that moment of feeling safe and familiar, you decide to believe that this is true. Boom, everybody, boom. I know I'm gonna have to like pro this is this is the processing that's going through my mind, and I can't like my brain is still wrapping around this. And so shifting gears, why the fuck is medium treated any differently? Because we don't have the institutions, because we don't have the physical place for people to know and feel the presence of God, right? Because we don't have these beautiful windows, we don't have these big, amazing architecture with imported marble, right? Because we don't have these quiet, reverent spaces where we bring everybody at once to experience and to amplify and to anchor the energy of this shared experience with people. Because we don't have these rhythms and routines of sitting and kneeling and and and standing, right? And this goes back to a podcast episode I listened to a few weeks ago by the lovely Sandra Ingerman, who, if you if you know her, you know. If you don't, she's an amazing shamanic teacher. Um, amazing, amazing, amazing. And she's, I don't believe, offering any more classes, but she has an amazing podcast where she really breaks down these ideas. And and I completely agree with her, and I completely agree with what she said in this podcast episode of spiritual healing and the fact that we don't heal people. I I said it, I said it. Metaphysical practitioners do not heal people. We create the space and belief of people to heal themselves. And so in that podcast episode, she talked about how she doesn't need anything to heal you, right? To go through and create that open space for you to heal yourself. Let me rephrase that based on what I just said. She doesn't need anything because spirit can heal anything at any time and anywhere. And I think my podcast episodes have proved that. Spirit, when it decides it wants to heal something, it's gone, it's it's done. The churches would call that a miracle, right? But she said in this podcast episode that people need the physical routines and ceremonies to make it feel real for them. They need to anchor this invisible experience into a physical experience. And that's why she, in her shamanic practices, her shamanic um sessions with people will bring rattles and drums and music, right? And incense. And making this very invisible thing feel very real in the body. And spirit is making me jump to why do we need that? Why do we need that? And I'm the number one proponent of I don't need anything to connect with your departed loved ones. I don't need anything to do these shamanic healings on you. I don't like we literally need nothing. And and I this has been my freaking stand for several years now about all the tools that we think we need in a metaphysical standpoint. We don't need any of them. But that podcast and this church experience and this class I'm taking. I've taken a somatics class, everybody, somatic healing class. I think it's helping me come to the realization that we need the physical to make these feel real. We need the physical to convince our mind that we have changed. Because I can go and we can do a healing session, and you can be fine and perfect in an instant, we can heal that back of yours in one instant. But if we don't heal the nervous system and heal the routines and embedded patterns within your brain as part of that as well, you're just gonna go back to thinking. You still have that problem, and we all know your thoughts create your reality, so it's just gonna come back. Oh, and so oh, I don't know. Let me see if I can bring this together into like some sort of a closing. Let's be real that society does not accept the invisible. It doesn't. It accepts shared experiences, it accepts external authority and structure and routines. And the church made that visible. It made the invisible public repeatable, socially sanctioned, socially acceptable to the point where there are nonprofits that are supported by government. Okay. Meanwhile, mediumship has stayed personal. It stayed internal, right? It stayed unsanctioned, it stayed quiet through not wanting to share the social experiences. And that difference matters psychologically. And so this isn't necessarily talking about how churches are wrong or mediumship is right. It's understanding that the body is how humans experience the unseen. And institutions master that. Step two is bringing that information and energy back into your body and recognizing your own authority, your own power, your own truth within your own body. And everything else falls away. Okay. And that is something I'm going to be working on. Moving into my body, moving into my truth and understanding and playing with this idea of how can I make the invisible feel more real for my clients, for all of you. Because that is the way we're going to move forward. That is the way we are going to change our faith, change our religions, change our cultures, change our way of being is by bringing that displaced energy back into our own bodies and reclaiming our sovereignty. Um, okay, my mind is officially blown. I'm gonna go sit in the corner, rocking chair, and just like mull this over a million times. But I hope this was an intriguing episode for all of you. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be mulling this over for weeks. If you have responses, questions, I would love to hear it. Did this hit? Did it not hit? Are you angry at me? I'm fine with all of these reactions because you know what? You feel it in your body, and that's your truth. So I'm gonna leave that with all of you. From my amazing day, amazing revelations to yours. I send you all the love and I will see you soon here on the Unity Code. Take care.