When you think of spirituality or someone who is spiritual, what comes to mind? A monk, nun, or a priest, or some other person of the cloth? Or perhaps a yogi wearing a robe and a turban, who sports long hair and sits in meditation for hours a day? This is certainly one image of spirituality.
But something’s going on in the world. Something undeniable – at least from my perspective and many others. People around the planet are waking up spiritually. Their perception of life is changing. Many are are jumping onto the path of various forms of yoga and meditation, while others are on a healing path. And still others are learning that what’s always been natural and normal for them is their connection to spirit and a sense of inner knowing. They’ve always been “spiritual” and didn’t necessarily recognize it. I’ve always been able to tell when a person is lying or isn’t being authentic just by hearing them speak. Something about the tone of their voice. And I’ve always heard spirit guidance whisper to me quietly in my mind, but I didn’t know this was what it was. And honestly, I blew it off for decades.
With television shows like Montel Williams featuring people like psychic Sylvia Browne back around 2007 and 2008, people en mass were exposed to spiritual abilities like being psychic or being a medium. Today, a dozen years later, the cold reception Sylvia faced by many people is much warmer for the likes of psychics/mediums Allison DuBois, James Van Praagh, Theresa Caputo, Chip Coffey, Lisa Williams, and Tyler Henry. And with the internet and so very many platforms to share live and recorded interviews, many more spiritually talented people are able to put themselves out there to share their abilities with the world.
Not only are people who were born with abilities like clairvoyance and other spiritual abilities putting themselves out there publicly, but many are teaching people to recognize their own natural abilities and to grow them.
Today, anyone with an interest in the unseen world can read books, watch videos online, take classes, buy online courses, and develop their areas of interest. I’m lucky to have a spiritual center within commuting distance where I took several short classes in things like energy, energy healing, clairvoyance, and communicating with spirit.
In my own life, spirituality came to me not because I decided to seek it specifically, but because I was looking for things to help either myself or my son. Spirituality stealthily crept up on me, giving me teasers of experiences that I didn’t necessarily label as spiritual at the time. In fact, I remember coming home from a few hypnosis sessions talking about them like they were what an acid trip must be like. I can think of at least six experiences I had during hypnosis sessions that only years later could I label as spiritual or metaphysical.
Becoming spiritually awake was something that truly caught me by surprise, as can happen. I recently connected briefly with a woman who broke her tailbone, and it acted as the initiation for her Kundalini energy to open wide – which is an exceedingly difficult thing to experience when you have an awareness of what’s going on, never mind when you have no clue what’s happening to you (as was the case for this woman).
For me, my initial “spiritual awakening” was triggered by having a psychic reading almost a decade ago. The psychic became my first spiritual teacher/mentor, and she later told me I was ripe for the awakening. Waking up to the knowledge that there’s more to this world than we can know through our basic five senses happens differently for everyone. In my case, once I had proof positive (through this psychic reading) that there is something beyond this world, something deep within me woke up. It showed up as a burning desire to know everything about energy healing. Before I woke up, I’d been exposed to energy healing, but it wasn’t a huge interest in my life. After the awakening I was completely obsessed. Like a switch had been flipped.
For many, after going through an awakening, spending a lot of time in meditation and finding practices like yoga, qigong, and tai chi, become their path of continued awakening.
Although I’ve done a little yoga from time to time in my life and have done different forms of meditation over the years, my path has gone a bit differently. It’s been one of exploring several types of energy healing modalities until I found the one or two that work best for me: hypnotherapy and guided meditation.
Today, you might pass by a nondescript person walking through the grocery store and decide she’s a middle aged, overweight housewife who’s let herself go because she doesn’t color her hair or wear makeup, and she’s unfashionable and out of shape. You have no clue what’s going on inside her. You might see a man stocking shelves in a Target store and judge him all sorts of ways. And you might see a woman working in a school as an aide, a helper, and because she sometimes fumbles to get just the right word out, you probably judge her. You may actually have just seen a spiritual master or a master in training.
Today, spirituality wears many hats and looks like many things. From the more traditional eastern yogi and contemporary yoga teachers and their students, to the former church minister, near-death experiencer who now holds his weekly “Not Church” sessions online for those who seek spirituality and meaning through his evolved interpretation of religious texts, to the “ordinary” housewife and mother whose healing path led her to spiritual awareness and expansion she not only didn’t specifically seek, but levels of awareness that are lately blowing her mind.
After becoming obsessed with energy healing, studying, learning, and working with healers of all sorts, another major level of awakening completely broke me open in early 2017. It’s hard to explain, but my sense of self and self awareness completely changed during a healing session. It kicked off a process that’s been fueled by Kundalini energy burning and churning in my body every since. And recently, the energy I’ve known as Kundalini is even evolving into its next evolution.
Now I understand the earlier obsession with energy healing, as Kundalini energy’s purpose is to strip away things within us that don’t resonate with Oneness and self-authenticity. To date, my process has been a deep and very intense inner journey that has gradually changed how I see and experience the world. It’s been doing deep inner healing work, sometimes in meditation on my own, and more recently working with healers. It’s been a physical, mental and emotional process of healing lifetimes of fear, anger, grief, and other not so fun emotions. It’s been a process of reclaiming a sense of self that is connected to spirit and intuition. Reclaiming my inner authority, power, grace, and the connection to my higher self with its pipeline to endless creativity, knowledge, and love. Changing me from the inside out.
Today, even though I’m still very much “in process” I walk the world with a very different mindset. Although yes, I do feel the range of emotions we all feel, when I get angry, it usually passes through fairly quickly. A few emotions I really don’t experience these days are things like shame and judgment. Instead of being stuck seeing things one way, I see them through several perspectives. Instead of black and white, there are all sorts of shades of gray. And I acknowledge and honor information and messages I receive through my intuitive connection.
What that looks like in real world terms is having let go of the rest of the pain I carried courtesy of my complicated relationship with my now deceased mentally ill mother. And more recently letting go of not only pain and anger I felt toward another family member whose treatment toward me for much of the first seventeen years of my life was abusive, but having an epiphany that dissolved the desire to continue our relationship any further. Freedom.
For many people who seek spirituality, because the focus is on the unseen world, there can be a disconnect from the physical, here and now world. Some spend hours a day meditating because it feels great to be free and out of the body, using it as an escape. Or they read books upon books of spiritual wisdom without accessing their own inner wisdom.
One of the biggest gifts my latest state of awareness is giving me is the desire to feel human again. To appreciate what it is to be human. Normal (whatever that is). Regular. To reach my new normal full-time. To fully embody myself in the here and now physical world and to have the mental and physical energy to engage fully in life. I just want to feel connected to the feeling of “me” full-time again, because I’ll be honest: this process has been hella difficult and still isn’t a cakewalk.
From where I now sit, whether a person is knowingly spiritual or not really doesn’t matter because all of life is spiritual. Simply perceiving ourselves as physical human beings IS the current experience we’re having. Once we slip out of our bodies and leave them to break down into their elements, our self-awareness will still exist. And it will shift and change again. Big-time.
A universal desire everyone has is to feel good. To have a sense of inner contentedness and to feel safe and secure, valued, and loved. I think when people become spiritual seekers it’s these qualities they’re really looking for. And there are as many paths to get there as there are people in the world.
