Realigning My Spiritual Path

Spirituality doesn't fit into a check-marked box

In 2009 I walked out of my church one Sunday morning and never went back. I hadn’t intended for this to be the last time. I just could no longer find a reason to go. Maybe you have wandered from a straightforward path, too. This blog is the tale of my wanderings, and what I've created out of them, but I need to begin long before I walked out that church door in 2009.

The Roots of My Story

The story starts seven years earlier on another Sunday, a day that began the disconnect between my public expression of faith and my internal spirituality. That Sunday in 2002 started like many others, with me going to worship and then coming home. Just an ordinary day. Then my sister-in-law called, telling me that my brother had died. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. As I raced to their house I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. The sun was still shining, the sky was a brilliant blue, and yet I was supposed to accept that my brother was forever gone from my life?

My sister-in-law hadn’t been able to reach the rest of my family, so the task of telling my parents and sisters fell to me. My father’s soft, incredulous voice as he tried to make sense of what I was saying has been seared into my memory. After these calls I plopped down on their living room floor exhausted, not thinking and barely feeling.

Then the second life-changing event of the day happened. I heard my deceased grandmother calling my brother’s name in the unique way she had. But it wasn’t just her voice that led me to know something incredible was happening.  I was engulfed in feelings of joy and deep, unconditional love. These feelings were unlike anything I had experienced before.

In the span of a few hours my life inexorably changed. My brother was gone. Yet I witnessed the reunion of grandmother and beloved grandson. So he was … not gone? Merely out of visible awareness? I didn’t quite know how to process this. Then two days later my now deceased brother was somehow in my bedroom at 5:00 in the morning asking me to take care of his family. And he kept visiting me. Then I heard other voices, too, as if my dead relatives all said, “She can hear us!” and started to speak to me.

Explorations into New Worlds

I approached these new experiences the way I did most things in my life – through curiosity and research. But as I was doing so, my private understanding and expression of spirituality diverged more and more from my public persona. My public expression of spirituality was the same. I was still going to worship every week. Was still involved in the leadership at the church and in the music program. My private beliefs were more jumbled up. I replaced my Bible study and daily devotional books with books written by mediums and books about developing spiritual gifts.

Mostly I kept what I was doing secret.  I quickly learned who was safe for me to talk to and who wasn’t. A friend who had experienced vivid dreams about loved ones, SAFE. Another friend who thought I was cavorting with demons, NOT SAFE.

My life continued to change in unexpected and surprising ways. I went to a medium for the first time in 2003. Experienced another sudden death in the family in 2005. I left my business career in 2006 and returned to school to get a masters and Ph.D. in Pastoral Counseling (which means I was trained as a counselor but received additional training and education in religion and spirituality).

THEN that Sunday in the spring of 2009 came when I walked out of my church for the last time.

Once I accepted I wasn’t going back to church, I felt free from expectations and constraints, free from the things I thought I “should” be doing. I started going to yoga on Sunday mornings. I was redefining who I was, and how I expressed my spirituality. I was deepening my connection to the Divine because I was finding that divinity everywhere: in people I met, religions I studied, and practices I explored.

More to Come

There’s more to my story. More about my dissertation research with conservative Christian counseling students who struggled with the ethics of working with LGBTQ clients. More about my adventures in mediumship and energy psychology. More about how my company, Spiritual Geography, and the exercise of the same name, came into being. For now the most important thing to know is that I’ve spent the past 20 years coming into alignment with a type of spirituality that fits me uniquely. I could call it a synthesis, a blending, or a mishmash of traditions. By any name, though, I’m comfortable with the variety of practices and beliefs that form my spiritual life (which still includes Christianity).

This blog, Spiritual Geography, is a way to help navigate the vast territory of spirituality, to find a unique path that resonates with your soul. Every week (or two) I’ll write about spirituality in ways that may seem familiar or may seem alien to you. I hope you will gain new insights, new understanding, deeper connections to others, and deeper connections to the Divine. Let’s explore together.