A while back, a client shared a spiritual experience they’d had that was very meaningful to them. But, they asked, “What if it was all in my head?”
I can relate. Especially if you grew up in a secular home, as I did, it is so easy to dismiss even the most powerful spiritual experiences as meaningless, unreliable, a mere trick of the mind.
And yet, what if those experiences are not meaningless?
What if they’re the very opposite of unreliable?
Many years ago, I was on vacation in a quiet country place, with gentle rolling hills and views that seemed to stretch for miles. Everything was so lovely, but my heart was hurting because of a recent disappointment in my life.
One evening, I took a walk just as the sun was setting. The beauty of the hills and the sunset was breathtaking. It opened my heart, and I felt a immense wave of sorrow move through me, some strange mixture of personal grief and sadness for all the grief in this difficult world we find ourselves in.
Then, all of a sudden, I heard a voice in my head saying quite clearly, “All will be well.”
It wasn’t my voice.
Nor did it feel like a thought in my mind like other thoughts, even though I’d long known those famous words of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich: All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.
The voice was in my head, but came from somewhere else, not-me.
And it sounded both authoritative and deeply comforting. All will be well. No matter how you feel right now or how hard this world seems, all will be well.
I clung to that experience, even as I wondered—did it really happen? Was it real? Or was it all in my head?
And yet, I hoped it was real. I wanted to be able to trust it. Just as my client hoped they could trust their experience too.
For me, that long-ago encounter with the strange voice started me on a path of spiritual practice that I am still walking, decades later. And today, I can say to you:
If you have an experience that feels spiritual to you, why not trust it?
Why not try an experiment and act as if your experience is reliable? As if it can be trusted?
Why not try on the possibility that we are connected to spiritual energies whose nature is love, who care about us and want us to be well? And who, sometimes, speak to us—in words and whispers, in moments of beauty and movements of our heart, in seeming coincidences, and in a million other ways.
And if it helps to try on the possibility that Spirit speaks to you and wants you to be well—if it brings you joy and hope, or just makes life feel even a tiny bit easier—why not live as if it’s true?
Because if it is, it will change everything.
Blessings always and in all ways,
Laura