Have you ever wondered how connecting with your inner spirit might help you manifest more in your life?
The connection you build with your inner spirit is the freeway to the life you actually want. Does that mean you can pray about it and get whatever you ask for? Of course not. But it does mean that as you learn to listen and learn from your inner spirit, you get in alignment with your most authentic self, and with the actual steps that turn your dreams into something real.
What Even Is "Spirit"?
We have a lot of names for the same idea across different societies: Jesus, God, Buddha, the Universe, Krishna, Jehovah. What you call it matters less than whether you take the time to connect.
My own background is Christianity. In that tradition, we believe we can get saved by praying and asking Jesus to live in our hearts. To me, that means Jesus lives inside me, which makes me capable of everything Jesus, living in me, is capable of. So what I'm describing here isn't new-agey, and it isn't anti-Christian. It's right in line with what the Bible has always said.
Get Intentional
Spirit is always there, but it won't push its way into your life. It won't force a particular path or force good choices on you. It's there, constantly sharing love and wisdom, but you have to pay attention to actually receive any of it.
Get intentional about wanting to connect. Think about how you've connected with Spirit in the past, how your ancestors connected. How do the people around you deepen their own relationship to it now? Just because you learned one way as a kid doesn't mean it's the only way, or the right way for you now. If it still fits, great. If it doesn't, that's okay too. Maybe it's ten minutes of meditation each morning, or a weekly trip to the mountains or the ocean to pray and write. There are countless ways to connect. Figure out which ones actually fit you, then make the adjustments, the plans, the space, to do it on purpose.
Meditation and rest, learning more about yourself, your ancestry, where you come from, all of this is crucial to building the kind of world where everyone is cared for and able to live fully. Getting our own internal work done is what makes it possible to have genuinely healthy, productive relationships with each other and with the planet, and right now, we're not doing a great job of either. The more intentional you get about what you want from Spirit, what you want to give it, and what communion with it actually looks like for you, the better this goes.
Get Quiet
I sometimes describe Spirit as the quietest voice in my head. It's the persistent whisper underneath all the other, louder voices trying to drown it out. Often it's telling me to do the hard thing. Sometimes it's shouting: stop and rest, the way it did before I ended up hospitalized for a week with diabetic ketoacidosis.
Meditation is one of my favorite ways to get quiet. I recommend the Calm app. But there are plenty of paths there: yoga, hiking, driving, gardening, working out, anything that quiets the mind enough for Spirit to actually be heard.
If you don't have any specific practices, rituals, or spiritual background at all, start here. Go into a quiet space and just be quiet. This isn't about praying or telling God what you want. It's not about throwing out requests. It's about shutting down, focusing on your breath, on the movement of blood through your body. If you know nothing else, you can learn this. Spirit comes to a quiet mind. And if your mind genuinely won't quiet down, therapy is a real and valid option too, not a failure of this practice.
Get Community
One of my favorite things about the divine is its duality. Truth can be false, false can be true, there's very little absolute truth beyond the fact that we are love, and we are loved. Your spiritual walk is deeply personal, and your relationship with God is yours alone. However. Your existence on this planet is not yours alone. It exists in relation to everything else here too. You're solely responsible for your own journey, and inextricably connected to everyone and everything around you.
One of the best ways to connect with your inner spirit is to spend time with people who share your values, people trying to produce the same kind of good energy. That might be a church, as long as it honors your authentic self, a monastery, a temple, a friend group, family. We're connected, and Spirit is stronger when we're together.
I've wondered before whether you have to go to church or formally meditate to hear Spirit. The answer is no. Spirit communicates with you at all times, in every way. The real skill is learning to see and hear the messages.
Whatever kind of spirituality or community works for you is fine, as long as it isn't a cult, nobody should be asking you to drink the Kool-Aid, or asking you to leave your family and friends behind. If it's genuinely helping you connect, and it isn't isolating you, it's good. A lot of people assume I dislike church because I left mine years ago. I love the church. I love people in churches, plenty of them, and I have real friends across a lot of different kinds of congregations. I just don't personally attend that type of church anymore, because it's a disconnect for me on my own spiritual path. That's okay. I have a different kind of community now, built around connecting to Spirit in the way that actually works for me.
I heard a good analogy recently, from Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God, an older book I still recommend. We tend to say Spirit inhabits our body. I've said it that way myself. But really, Spirit envelops the body. The spirit that is me surrounds my body; my body is part of how that spirit moves through the world, but the spirit itself is bigger than just this physical being. Once you think of it that way, you realize that if Spirit envelops you, then your spirit is also what connects with, bumps into, the spirits and energy of the people around you. Get in community with people trying to move in the same direction, because other energies are going to affect yours whether you like it or not, unless yours is strong enough to affect theirs instead. The more connected you get, the more depth you have access to, and the more your own energy is able to shift what's around it.
Being Intentional and Quiet Are the Training Ground
Being intentional and getting quiet are what train you to walk around talking with Spirit all day long, not just in dedicated moments.
I used to wonder why anyone would choose to become a monk or a nun. It seemed extreme. But once I understood what intentionality and quiet actually do for your ability to communicate with Spirit, and how good it feels to live at that level of connection regularly, I got it. Being present with the divine is its own kind of ecstasy. Choosing it as a full lifestyle makes sense.
That said, I'm still pretty connected to some of my more human desires too. Wild sex with my husband. Decadent vacations to tropical islands. Sue me, I'm human. I love you.
Recommended resources:
Calm
Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch
Question of the day: How do you connect to Spirit, and what do you call it?