by Bridgett Hart | SELF
If you've been watching anything online lately, you know it's time to connect to Spirit and activate it in your life. But do you actually know how? Before I can show you that, I need to tell you what I actually mean when I say Spirit, because it's bigger than most people assume.
My Definition of Spirit
Spirit isn't a place, a building, or a set of rituals. It's every connection that already exists around you, whether you've noticed it or not. The work isn't creating the connection. It's seeing it, understanding it, and eventually, being intentional about it.
Does that include people? Obviously. Neighbors, the mail carrier, church members, coworkers, people you run with, people you bowl with, anyone you're around for any reason at all, that's Spirit.
What about the people you don't particularly like? They're Spirit too. That connection is real, even when you choose to keep it distant. You don't have to be closely connected to every single person out there, and you never will be, everyone sits at a different distance from you at any given moment. You have real say over how much connection you actually cultivate with the different parts of Spirit around you.
Nature is Spirit, just as fully: the ground, the trees, the plants and flowers, the cannabis I love, the animals we share this world with, the air, the oxygen, the carbon dioxide, every element making up the universe. Everything is Spirit. Nature, ancestors, a conversation with family, a walk, a story, a song, all of it something you interact with energetically.
Even the garbage. We're connected to the literal garbage in the dumpster, whether we want to be or not. That connection raises real questions: how are we treating it? What are we doing with it? Are we paying attention to what it's doing to our earth?
That's the whole definition. Spirit is not a category of special, sacred things set apart from ordinary life. It's everything, including the parts we'd rather not claim.
Connection Is the Starting Point, Not the Finish Line
Once you understand Spirit this way, connection stops being something you have to go find, and becomes something you're already swimming in. The first move isn't building a connection from nothing. It's waking up to what's already there.
But connection alone isn't enough to activate anything. That takes two more things.
Intention
In my Anxiety series, I walk through ten Habits that help minimize negative thoughts, and intention is the word that sums up why all of them actually work. They require putting real, deliberate thought into how you're living your life, your relationships, your decisions.
Intention is how you move Spirit to act on your behalf. So: what is your intention? That's the question, if Spirit doesn't seem to be activating for you, or things aren't going the way you want.
What do you actually want? Is your life currently showing that? If not, why not? You want money, sure, but why do you want money? What will it let you feel, or do? Why do you want that? Keep digging until you find the real why underneath your time, energy, and choices. Once you're honest about your why, Spirit has something clear to work with, because it knows exactly what you want as soon as you do.
Creation
The third piece is creation. You can connect with everyone you know, spend hours in nature, do all the yoga, church, meditation, and breathwork in the world, but without creation, it's an empty vessel. If nothing comes out of you, out of your body, your existence, into something real, Spirit has no medium to work through.
You're not the only creator. Everything you're connected to is creating too. But your own creation is how you activate Spirit specifically on your own behalf.
This is the same idea behind the Hart Habit Show: taking the thoughts, visions, and senses inside you and putting them into some kind of recorded form, audio, visual, painting, sculpture, writing, journaling, whatever fits. If you want a fuller version of this, I wrote about it directly in Vision Board Technique. It doesn't need to be complicated, and it doesn't need to be some divinely inspired masterpiece. You just need to let what's already in you come out, and see what's been created.
A Note on Inclusion
The point of all of this is inclusion. These principles apply to you no matter your religion, your gender, your color, or any label you or anyone else has put on you. You are energy. That's the only qualification. I love you.
Recommended resources:
Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch
Calm
Question of the day: What are your favorite ways to get connected, intentional, or creative?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
Sometimes, our anxiety and negative thoughts are Spirit trying to connect with us, trying to send us a message.
This is something I struggled with for years, so it's a topic I know intimately.
The Last Piece of Self-Love
The past few posts have been about self-love, and how loving ourselves well keeps anxiety and negative thinking from getting the best of us. This is the last piece: bringing our full selves, including our connection to Spirit, into the world we live in.
Note: If you're currently struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You can call or text 988 anytime. You deserve support, right now, exactly as you are.
What Happened to Me at the End of 2019
I suddenly began experiencing a lot of anxiety and negative thinking, overwhelming thoughts of death. It felt out of body, because it wasn't something I was accustomed to.
I was struggling with suicidal thoughts, and a total loss of hope, and I didn't understand where it came from. Fortunately, I tapped into my network, my resources, and the system I use to stay connected, and it worked. I got through.
What I figured out later was that Spirit was trying to send me a message. A few months after that, a pandemic hit the world, and it turned out I'd been feeling something related to that all along.
What I Mean By "Spirit"
I'm not saying you're a blossoming mystic like me, or that you have some message you need to share with the world. What I am saying is that here we are on this earth, and we are energy.
The law of thermodynamics tells us energy can't be created or destroyed, only changed in form. Everything on earth and in the universe we know of is made of atoms, made of subatomic particles moving at different frequencies. We're all made of the same energetic matter. From a scientific standpoint, we are energy, and we emit and interact with measurable frequencies.
I like to compare our existence here to a lava lamp. The lamp is God, or the universe, and we're all part of it. Some of us are the water the blobs float through, some of us are the blobs. Every time a blob floats up, it breaks into different sizes, sinks, comes up again, breaks apart again, over and over. The blobs change form, size, how they look, how they move, but they're all made of the same stuff, inside the same lamp.
We may die and be born, but really, our energy has just changed form. Some believe we become dirt, which feeds plants, which feeds nature, which feeds humanity. Others believe we take on new human or other forms. I'm not trying to settle that debate, but thinking about our time here this way can change how we approach some things.
I know this might challenge some theistic beliefs, and that's not my intention. My intention is to open up the possibility that God is everywhere around us, and in and through us. As part of God in nature, you're an integral piece of the whole, and so is everyone around you, and so is all the nature around you. The Spirit wants to be connected to you, but really, the Spirit already is connected to you. There's no way around that. What we're actually working on is becoming open enough to hear it.
For My Atheist Friends
I get that this might be tough for friends in the atheist community, and I'm sorry if it is. My background is Christianity, that's the language and bias I come from. I honor and respect your own way of engaging with this, and I'll keep working to find language that fits better for you too. Ultimately, the point is: I'm connected to you, you're connected to me, we're part of nature and earth together, and we all matter.
Get Quiet
The first thing to do is get quiet. Just get quiet.
This is genuinely hard in today's world. With all the devastating news and scary things happening, quiet is hard to come by, but it's the first and most important part of connecting with Spirit.
I'm a fan of using tools to help with this, so I recommend the Calm app or Brain.fm, both offer guided meditations and frequencies that can help you get into a relaxed, meditative state. You might also try closing doors, taking alone time, and literally just being quiet. If sitting still with your own mind is hard, lean on a guided tool instead.
Other ways to get quiet: nature walks, a yoga class, working out, a prayer closet, meditation, a silent retreat.
Get Connected
Once you're quiet, you can get connected. This part is intentional and personal. It might mean researching the historical roots of your lineage, your ancestry, your family of origin, or your current community, especially around religion or spiritual connection. Ask yourself: how have your people connected to Spirit in the past?
If you find you're enhanced by Spirit through being with other people, do that. Find your people. Reach out. Spend time with those who lift you up and encourage your best self. That might mean getting involved in a local church or temple, a business group, a gardening group, a gaming group, anything that matters to you and connects you to others of like mind.
One of my mentors in this space is Isha Cogburn, of the Epiphany Institute. She's the person who first pushed me to actually write down and name what would become the Hart Habits, and her own work on spiritual connection has shaped a lot of how I think about this.
Spirit Exists Because You Exist
If you want to connect with Spirit, get quiet, then get connected to what's already around you naturally. Your sphere of influence is there for a reason.
It's simplistic to say connection is just get quiet, get connected. But the real point is that you're already part of the divine of this whole planet. Spirit exists because you exist.
All you need to do is tie into the network Spirit has already built for you, your friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, church, garden group, bowling team, running team, whatever it is. They're there on purpose, as your support and strength for the hard stuff.
And Spirit doesn't only exist in people. It's in every part of the nature you move through too. Spirit is your favorite hiking spot, your garden, the feral kittens born in your backyard, the octopus you met on a scuba trip, the car accident you survived, the devastating loss you carried, the trauma you went through, and every emotion and desire you felt along the way.
I hope you're finding your own way to intentionally get quiet and get connected to the Spirit that's already around you. As you start listening more closely, I'd love to hear what kind of messages you start noticing. It's funny to me when mine come from a commercial I've heard a thousand times, or a billboard I'd never noticed before. I can't wait to hear where you find yours.
Recommended resources:
Isha Cogburn, Epiphany Institute
BetterHelp Online Therapy
Calm
Brain.fm
Question of the day: How do you connect to Spirit, and what do you call it?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
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?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
I spent a lot of my 20s thinking about what I wanted in my future. A husband, kids, a big house. Not the picket fence, but you know what I mean. Everything felt transitional back then, like I was waiting for life to happen.
In my 30s, I spent a lot of time thinking about my past, and how it had shaped who I was, even while I was actively building my future: marriage, a kid, a mortgage.
Now, in my 40s, I'm finally starting to understand the present of the present. Not just the season my life is in, but the actual physical and spiritual experience of inhabiting this exact moment, regardless of the circumstances I happen to be in.
What I'd Tell My 27-Year-Old Self
A lot happened along the way to teach me a few things: I can never be "enough" for "them." The path I plan is lovely, but it can change, die, explode, or shift in one minute, with or without much help from me. I'm always either going to be okay, or I'm going to die. Even then, it will be okay.
If I could give one gift to my 27-year-old self, it would be stillness. Being fully in the present, on a consistent, reliable basis. There's nothing as powerful as what Eckhart Tolle called the power of now, and I wrote this originally with her specifically in mind: I'd just come out of a very unhealthy, abusive relationship, several years of it, and I was in a daze. What did I do? How did I end up there? I was putting my life back together, finally starting on my own path, but everything still felt transitional.
Throughout that week, people kept reaching out to me about similar situations, their own or someone they loved. So this message is for you too, whatever you're going through, but especially if you're in something hard right now. An abusive relationship. A toxic workplace with an abusive boss. Abusive parents or siblings. Anyone can be abusive, whether they're blood family or not.
It's not as easy as it sounds. My mind runs a million miles a minute: lists, shortcomings, family, money. The secret is, you're already perfect for all of it. There's nothing you need to do first. Everything that brought you to this moment, everything still coming from you, everything your ancestors and legacy hoped for, is already in you, exactly as it needs to be. All you have to do is be.
Why Being Present Matters
Being connects you to everything else that is, and everything that isn't. When you pause and actually notice your blood moving through your body, carrying oxygen from the trees to your heart, you remember something. And as you remember, you connect wider and deeper than you'd expect.
It's part of why people become monks and nuns. Once you feel the divinity that's accessible in stillness, in just experiencing being you, nothing else really compares, and definitely not whatever capitalism insists we need to be chasing instead.
Seven Ways to Practice Being Present
Meditation. Prayer and meditation are related, but praying is usually an output, meditation is a state of internal silence, openness, and receptiveness. We should've learned this in kindergarten. We didn't. It's simple and genuinely hard, because we're conditioned to constantly be doing something. Apps like Calm and Brain.fm offer guided meditations that help get my mind and body into that state. It usually starts with focusing intensely on my breath, my body, and my surroundings. Deepak Chopra also has a lot of good guided meditations if you want a specific practitioner to start with.
Nature. Being in nature is its own form of meditation, you don't need to lie down or go still to engage with it. Connecting to this part of ourselves makes it easier to be present everywhere else too. The natural world is full of examples of divinity, if you're paying attention.
Art. Letting art flow through you while you're in a meditative state gives you a tangible representation of the experience of being present. It looks different for everyone. That's the beauty of it.
Movement. Yoga and dance teach you to focus on your breath and the flow of your body. Feeling how your breath and thoughts affect your physical body is one of the genuinely fun side effects of yoga.
Sound. Sound has measurable frequencies, and so do our bodies, which means sound can help shift us toward a state we're aiming for. There's early research suggesting that 528 Hz music, sometimes called the "love frequency," can lower cortisol and reduce measured anxiety in small studies. I want to be honest about what that does and doesn't mean: it's not proof of DNA repair or of some ancient, handed-down healing tradition, those specific claims aren't supported by what's actually been studied. What I do believe is that just because Western science hasn't fully mapped something yet doesn't mean it isn't real or working. I hold both of those at once: stay honest about what's actually been measured, and stay open to what hasn't been studied closely, or at all, yet.
Smell. Essential oils can help you focus and block out distraction while you're learning to be present. Different oils carry different effects too, lavender for calm, lemon or orange for energy.
Ritual. Different cultures carry rituals built around connecting to this moment, to breath, to the physical form our spirit inhabits. These can function as meditation when you focus on the intent and meaning behind the symbolic act. They also connect you to what was, what is, and what will always be true about the experience of being present.
A Guided Exercise
If you want to try this with me, find a safe, comfortable spot. Seated or lying down is fine, just not driving, and not somewhere you could fall if you get too relaxed.
Close your eyes. I like to have my palms touching, that's just me feeling my own energy, you don't have to do that. Get safe, get comfortable, close your eyes.
Clear your mind. Take a few deep breaths, and blow out all the stale air. Then take a few intentional breaths: in deeply through your nose, out through your mouth. Sigh if you want to, or keep it silent.
On your next breath, follow the air. Notice it entering your body, passing through your nose, down into your passages, into your diaphragm, all the way to the lowest part of your belly. Follow it back out through your mouth. If your mind wanders, don't worry, just bring it back. Let the thought pass. Hello, thank you, thought. Let it fly away. Back to the breath.
That alone is enough to give you a real moment of presence. If you want to go deeper, keep breathing slow and easy, and start scanning your body. Begin at the top of your head. Scan your face, notice any tension, relax it. Your ears, your neck. Deep breath in, release whatever you're holding. Keep moving down your body the same way.
As you go, you might start to notice a tingling, blood moving through your fingers and arms, the quiet, ongoing magic of your body simply working. Take one more deep breath.
I'm not a meditation guru, so I'll let you find what works best for you from here. But the point is, with five or ten minutes, you can access the present of being, no matter what your outside circumstances look like right now. And as you do, you'll start to hear the voice inside you that gives clear guidance. I've been there. I know what that guidance sounds like. The more present you get, the more you'll be able to distinguish it: what your next step should be, how to move, what to do, where to go, who to seek out, what kind of help to get.
Recommended resources:
Calm
Brain.fm
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Question of the day: How do you get still and engage with the present moment? What gets in the way?
