Today’s post is a topic I’ve thought long and hard about over the years, ever since I began this spiritual path. How can you tell if your spiritual experience is real, or if it’s all in your head? (And does it even matter? Dun dun dun…)
As a former Christian, I’ve had a lot of time to think about spiritual experiences I had once perceived as being the Christian God communicating to me versus experiences I’ve had since then that do not carry such an attachment. If I no longer follow a Christian path, does that render those previous experiences meaningless? Was I just making things up when I thought Jesus was communicating with me? And how can I trust the experiences I have now, if I no longer believe in those older ones?
To start, my definition of a spiritual experience here is any sign, dream, vision, or other experience that we percieve as being of the Universe or the Divine. That could include asking your spirit guides for advice and receiving a sign, communicating with your deities through a tarot reading, receiving an answer to a prayer, sensing a message from a loved one on the other side, seeing a repeated number or pattern multiple times in your life, or experiencing a type of spiritual presence. Basically, anything you might perceive as an encounter or an experience that feels like more than just a coincidence and might provide you with an answer of some kind. The heart of the issue is, how can you know when to TRUST those answers?
I think at the end of the day, you’re going to be the best judge of whether an experience is genuine or not. Many times the experience is obvious and our intuition tells us without a doubt what we’re meant to take away from it. But sometimes we just don’t know!
To be honest, none of the following questions are going to apply to every situation. It’s perfectly possible to have a genuine spiritual experience despite having one or more of these criteria be true. However, I do think these are good questions to ask yourself in order to get at the heart of the issue. If you’re doubting an experience you may have had or need some help interpreting it, here are a few things to think about.
1. Is experience this playing on any deep-seated fears I might have?
As a person with anxiety, this is something I contend with a lot. If I ask the tarot for guidance about an upcoming trip and draw the Death card, I might be so blinded by my fear of dying in a plane crash that I completely miss the true message of this card – transformation and the shedding of old beliefs. The message could very easily be that my upcoming trip will challenge long-held viewpoints and ignite the spark of a new beginning, which would be a very cool experience to have. But because one of my deeply-held fears is at play, I can only see the card as a bad omen.
If you have a spiritual experience that leaves you terrified or seems to confirm your worst fears, take a few deep breaths and step away from the situation. Try to think about the experience objectively. What else could it have meant? Sometimes an experience really is meant as a warning, but panic is hardly ever a helpful reaction and it can blind us to many things. If you have a knee-jerk freakout to a particular experience, ask yourself why. It could also be the case that your mind is seeking to confirm your fears, so it latches on to patterns or signs that might not be a spiritual communication at all.
2. Is this something that’s been constantly on my mind?
If you’ve been thinking about your deceased grandmother nonstop, it’s easy to see why you might have a dream about her. It’s certainly possible that this dream is her way of communicating with you from beyond, but if she tells you to sell all your stuff and move to Alaska, maybe pause and think about whether this dream could be just a dream brought on by your consistent thoughts.
3. Am I reading too much into things?
If we are focused on a particular outcome or desire, we tend to look for any excuse to confirm that desire. If you desperately want to quit your job, for example, you might notice every song on the radio seems to be about people being unhappy at work, or people wanting to quit their jobs. Is that a sign that you should leave and never come back? Maybe, but let’s slow down for a second.
If you ask for a sign, try to keep an open mind about what the outcome might be. Don’t just jump on the first hint of confirmation that you see. Give yourself time to receive any and all messages and process them before you make a decision.
4. What associations am I assigning to this experience?
Growing up Catholic, I assumed every spiritual experience that I had as a child was God or Jesus because that was all I knew. I didn’t understand that there were other spiritual paths aside from the one I was walking, so I automatically forced my known associations of Jesus on any spiritual experience I might have had. Does this mean that the experiences weren’t real? Of course not, but it’s certainly possible that I was misunderstanding what was happening because I had my own preconceived notions about what a spiritual experience was supposed to be.
I’m not really sure where I was going with this one, but I guess it’s important to just not assume that every sign you receive is from just one entity, deity, spirit, or whatever. Something else might be trying to contact you if you keep an open mind.
5. Have I been programmed to think this way?
One experience I had that scarred me for life: when I first began exploring witchcraft, I had a dream that I was, for lack of a better word, gettin’ it on with the Devil. In this dream, the voice of Jesus came to me and said that the only way I could make things right and stop the Devil’s influence was to find a ring I’d been given by my aunt for my First Communion. Now, this ring really exists and obviously had a very strong spiritual meaning to me at one time. I woke up in a cold sweat, because as far as dreams go, the meaning of this one couldn’t have been more clear – stop what you’re doing and return to the religion of your childhood, or else.
But the more I thought about it, the less sure I was. After all, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong – what, learning about herbs is going to bring about demonic destruction? Jokes aside, I was feeling more fulfilled in my spirituality than ever. I could actually feel myself becoming a better person, with more respect for life, deeper insight into my own issues, and a desire to help others heal. That didn’t match what I had been told the Devil was like, and what’s more, I wasn’t sure I believed in the Devil at all. My dream had given me a message, but my intuition – which I was just beginning to learn to trust – told me that I was on the right path after all.
What this dream did bring up, though, was how I had been programmed from childhood that witchcraft was bad. Looking back at it now, I can completely see how my initial uncertainty and feeling that this path was forbidden would have triggered a subconscious response from my mind, parroting back at me everything that had been hammered into me at a tender and vulnerable age.
(I mean, maybe this one was real and I’m super going to hell. But I’ll be in good company, because the witches I’ve met in this community are some of the best people I know.)
If you’re healing from spiritual trauma, be gentle with yourself. Consider the ways in which your previous programming might influence the way you perceive a sign or spiritual experience.
6. When in doubt, ask for confirmation.
Sometimes we just don’t have enough information to go on. Maybe the experience was too abstract or we’re caught up in conflicting feelings over the matter. In that case, if it’s something important to you, ask for another sign to confirm what you saw! This could mean asking your deity or spirit guides for help or consulting a tarot reader/psychic/etc that you trust to help you commune with the other side. There’s no shame in needing confirmation if a particular experience’s meaning is unclear.
Now, these have been a few ways to help you verify the legitimacy of your spiritual experience. At the end of the day, though, does it really matter if an experience is “all in our head” if it’s something that helps us along our journey? Isn’t the human brain conjuring images to guide our waking mind a kind of magic in and of itself?
If you’re seriously thinking about quitting your job, and you notice that all of the songs on the radio seem to be about quitting your job… maybe you’ve always known deep down what the right answer would be. Whether you interpret that as a legitimate spiritual experience or not doesn’t really matter. At least, that’s my two cents.
Now, I am certainly not an expert on this. If you have any other suggestions or disagree with my points, please let me know in the comments! It would be great to hear some peoples’ personal experiences or added tips to make this a really comprehensive guide. Let me know your thoughts, I’d love to hear them!
