Inside you right now, there’s something deeper than your thoughts, deeper than your feelings, deeper than anything you can see in a mirror. Think of it like this: you’re like a lamp that contains a light bulb. Most people spend their whole lives looking at the lamp—the outside shell—and never notice the light glowing inside.

That inner light is what we’re talking about when we say “spiritual essence.” It’s already there. You don’t have to create it or earn it. You just have to notice it.

Two Ways of Seeing

Every day, you have a choice about how you look at the world:

1. You can see only surfaces—just the physical stuff. The car, the body, the job, the house. Like looking at the lamp and never noticing it’s plugged in.
2. Or you can look deeper and sense the living energy inside everything—including yourself. Like remembering that every lamp has a light inside, even when it’s turned off.

Here’s the challenge: the physical world is loud and bright and demands your attention. Your bills are real. Your body gets tired. Your car needs gas. It’s easy to think that’s all there is.

But here’s what changes everything: when you learn to feel the deeper current of life flowing through you, you start to notice it flowing through everything else too.

PRACTICE 1: Feel Your Inner Spark (2 minutes)

Try this right now:

1. Place one hand on your heart area—right in the center of your chest.
2. Close your eyes for a moment and take three slow, deep breaths.
3. As you breathe, imagine you’re breathing into the space beneath your hand. Not your lungs—deeper. Into the center of your chest.
4. Ask yourself quietly: “What does it feel like to be alive right here, right now?”
5. Don’t think about the answer. Just feel. You might notice warmth, or tingling, or a sense of presence. Maybe nothing obvious at first—and that’s okay.

That feeling—however subtle—is your first hello to your spiritual essence. It’s not somewhere else. It’s right here, right now, inside you.

Why It’s Hard to Remember the Deeper Part

Think about your phone. When you look at it, you see glass and metal. But inside, there’s an invisible network connecting you to the whole world. You can’t see the signal, but it’s there.

The same is true for people and situations around you. A coworker might seem grumpy, rude, or difficult. That’s the surface—the “glass and metal.” But underneath, there’s a deeper current of life flowing through them too. They’ve just forgotten how to feel it.

Here’s what’s important: when someone acts badly or a situation seems negative, it doesn’t mean their inner light is gone. It means they’ve lost touch with it. They’re disconnected from their own signal.

Being on a spiritual path doesn’t mean pretending everything is perfect. It means learning to sense the deeper pattern underneath the surface chaos.

PRACTICE 2: Look Past the Surface (Throughout Your Day)

Next time you’re frustrated with someone:

1. Take one deep breath.
2. Touch your own heart with your hand for just a second—this reconnects you to your own inner feeling.
3. While looking at the person, silently think: “There’s something deeper in them too, even if I can’t see it right now.”
4. Notice how this shift in your thinking changes how you feel. You don’t have to like their behavior. You’re just acknowledging the hidden light beneath their surface.

Important: This doesn’t mean letting people treat you badly. If a situation is harmful, protect yourself. Sensing someone’s deeper essence doesn’t mean ignoring real problems.

The Mirror Effect

Here’s something fascinating that happens: the way you see yourself affects how you see everything else.

If you only see yourself as a body that needs food, sleep, and money—just a physical thing moving through a physical world—then that’s all you’ll see everywhere you look. Other people become just bodies too. Your job becomes just a paycheck. Your home becomes just walls and a roof.

But when you start to feel the living awareness inside yourself—when you sense that quiet presence in your chest—suddenly you have new eyes. You begin to notice that same aliveness everywhere.

It’s like this: imagine you’ve been listening to a song through one earbud your whole life. Then suddenly you put in both earbuds and realize there was a whole other layer of music you’d never heard. That’s what happens when you start sensing the deeper dimension of life.

PRACTICE 3: The Morning Connection (3 minutes)

Before you get out of bed tomorrow morning:

1. Don’t reach for your phone yet. Just lie still.
2. Take three slow breaths, feeling your belly rise and fall.
3. Place both hands on your heart and ask yourself: “What’s alive inside me right now?”
4. Feel whatever is there. Maybe it’s calm. Maybe it’s anxious. Maybe it’s excited. Don’t judge it—just notice the living feeling of being you.
5. Silently say to yourself: “This awareness inside me is connected to everything.”
6. Now you can start your day.

This small morning practice trains you to remember your inner essence before the busy world pulls your attention outward.

Understanding Distortion vs. Disconnection

When something is broken or bent out of shape, that means it was once whole and straight, right?

The same is true for negative behavior or difficult situations. When you see someone acting in hurtful ways, you’re seeing a distortion—they’ve bent away from their natural alignment with their inner light. But the light itself never goes away. It’s just covered up, forgotten, or ignored.

Think of it like a radio: the signal is always broadcasting. But if your radio is tuned to the wrong station, or if there’s static, you can’t hear the music clearly. The music hasn’t stopped—you’re just not connected to it.

This is why sensing the deeper essence in difficult people or situations is so powerful. You’re remembering the truth: they’re not separate from the universal source of life. They’re just temporarily tuned to the wrong frequency.

The One Energy: Not Spiritual OR Material, But Both

Here’s where many people get confused: they think there’s spiritual stuff over here, and material stuff over there, and never the two shall meet.

But that’s not how it works.

Think of ice, water, and steam. They look completely different, right? Ice is solid. Water flows. Steam disappears into air. But they’re all the exact same thing—H₂O—just expressing itself in different forms depending on temperature.

The same is true for everything in existence. There’s one fundamental energy running through the entire universe. Your body is this energy in a dense, solid form. Your thoughts are this energy in a lighter, faster form. The consciousness you feel in your heart is this energy in its purest, most aware form.

It’s all the same energy. There’s no separation between “spiritual” and “material.” There’s just this one universal life force expressing itself as everything—rocks, trees, bodies, thoughts, feelings, souls, stars.

When you understand this, something radical happens: you stop thinking you have to leave the material world to find the spiritual world. You realize the spiritual world is right here, woven into every molecule of the material world.

The energy that makes your heart beat is the same energy that makes stars shine. The awareness reading these words right now is the same consciousness that flows through everything in existence. You’re not separate from the universe—you’re the universe experiencing itself through a human body.

PRACTICE 4A: Sensing the One Energy (3 minutes)

This practice helps you feel the single energy expressing itself in different forms:

1. Sit comfortably and place one hand on your chest, one hand on your belly.
2. Take three slow breaths. Feel your chest and belly rise and fall.
3. Notice the solidity of your body—your bones, your weight on the chair. Say silently: “This is energy in solid form.”
4. Now notice your breath moving in and out. Feel the air, the movement, the rhythm. Say silently: “This is energy in flowing form.”
5. Now feel the awareness behind your thoughts—that quiet presence that notices everything. Say silently: “This is energy in conscious form.”
6. Hold all three at once: the solidity of your body, the flow of your breath, the awareness in your heart. Feel them as different expressions of the same energy.
7. Silently say: “The energy of the universe is everywhere. It is in my body. It is in my breath. It is in my awareness. It is me.”
8. Sit with this feeling for one full minute. You’re not imagining anything—you’re recognizing what’s always been true.

When you practice this regularly, the false division between spiritual and material begins to dissolve. You start to sense the one living energy flowing through everything, including you.

PRACTICE 4B: The Silent Blessing (30 seconds, anytime)

When you encounter someone difficult today:

1. Take one quiet breath.
2. In your mind, silently wish for them: “May you remember who you really are.”
3. Notice how this changes your own heart. You’re not fixing them. You’re just acknowledging the hidden light in them—and that acknowledgment shifts the energy.

This isn’t magical thinking. It’s energy awareness. When you see someone’s deeper essence, you’re actually helping create space for them to reconnect with it themselves.

Spiritual Practice in Daily Life

Being spiritual doesn’t mean leaving the world behind or pretending problems don’t exist. It means bringing your deeper awareness into your everyday life.

You still pay your bills. You still deal with traffic. You still have difficult conversations. But underneath all of it, you’re practicing a different way of experiencing reality.

Here’s the key shift: instead of thinking the physical world is all there is, you start to experience it as the outer layer of something infinitely deeper. Like the surface of an ocean—you can see the waves, but underneath is a vast depth of water that goes down and down.

The world you thought was “just material” is actually alive with consciousness. It’s vibrating with awareness. You just need to tune in to feel it.

PRACTICE 5: The Gratitude Pause (1-minute, multiple times daily)

Several times today, stop whatever you’re doing:

1. Take one deep breath.
2. Look around at your immediate surroundings.
3. Pick one thing you can see—a plant, a cup, a person, a building, even your own hand.
4. Instead of just seeing it as a physical object, feel into it. Sense the aliveness that brought it into existence. (For objects: someone designed it, made it, brought it to you. For living things: sense the life force animating it.)
5. Silently say: “I see the life in this.”

This practice trains your awareness to sense the deeper current flowing through ordinary things. Do it often enough, and the world starts to feel less flat and more alive.

The Web That Connects Everything

Imagine an invisible web, like a spider’s web, connecting everything in existence. You can’t see it with your eyes, but you can feel it when you pay attention.

When you touch your own heart and feel your inner essence, you’re touching one thread of that web. When you sense the deeper presence in another person, you’re feeling how your thread connects to theirs. When you look at a tree or a mountain or the night sky and feel moved by it, you’re sensing the vast web that holds all things together.

This isn’t poetry or imagination. This is a real awareness you can develop. The more you practice feeling your own inner essence, the more you’ll sense this interconnected web of life all around you.

And here’s what’s beautiful: you don’t have to believe in anything special to experience this. You just have to pay attention differently.

PRACTICE 6: The Connecting Thread (2 minutes)

Find a quiet moment and try this:

1. Sit comfortably and place one hand on your heart.
2. Take three slow breaths and feel your aliveness—that quiet presence inside your chest.
3. Now think of someone you love. Picture their face.
4. Imagine a thread of light connecting your heart to theirs. Not literally—just feel the connection that’s already there.
5. Now expand it: imagine threads of light connecting you to your neighbors, your city, the earth, the stars.
6. Sit with this feeling of being connected to everything for just one minute.

You’re not making this up. You’re simply becoming aware of what’s already true: you are part of an infinite web of consciousness.

Living Between Two Worlds

You live in two worlds at once.

One is the world of surfaces: bills, bodies, traffic, schedules, problems, solutions. This is the world most people see.

The other is the world of depths: the quiet presence inside you, the living consciousness flowing through everything, the invisible web connecting all things. This is the world you’re learning to sense.

The spiritual path isn’t about choosing one over the other. It’s about learning to live in both at the same time.

You can wash the dishes and feel the presence of life in your hands.

You can have a difficult conversation and still sense the light in the other person.

You can drive through traffic and feel connected to the vast universe.

This is what it means to be on a spiritual path in this material world. Not to escape into some other reality, but to discover the deeper dimension that’s been here all along, hidden in plain sight.

PRACTICE 7: The Integration Practice (Evening reflection, 5 minutes)

Before bed, sit quietly and review your day:

1. Close your eyes and take three slow breaths.
2. Remember one moment today when you were completely caught up in surface stuff—stress, worry, busyness.
3. Now imagine replaying that moment while also feeling your hand on your heart, aware of your inner presence.
4. Notice how the situation looks different when viewed from your deeper awareness.
5. Remember one moment today when you did sense the deeper dimension—even for just a second.
6. Feel gratitude for that moment of awakeness.
7. Set an intention: “Tomorrow, I’ll remember to feel my inner presence a little more often.”

This evening practice strengthens your ability to live in both worlds at once.

A Final Word: Your Freedom

Right now, in this very moment, you have a choice.

You can continue seeing the world as purely physical—just stuff and surfaces, bodies and objects, problems and solutions. There’s nothing wrong with this view. It’s how most people live their entire lives.

Or you can begin to practice sensing the deeper current flowing through everything, including yourself. You can learn to feel the quiet presence in your chest. You can start noticing the hidden light in other people, even difficult ones. You can sense the invisible web connecting all things.

This choice is freedom. Not freedom from the world, but freedom in the world.

When you touch this deeper dimension of reality, even for a few seconds a day, something shifts. The world doesn’t become perfect. You still have challenges. But you’re no longer trapped by the illusion that surface appearances are all there is.

You’ve touched something infinite. You’ve felt the grace that flows through everything.

And in that moment, you’re free.

Welcome to your spiritual path—right here, right now, in this beautiful, messy, material world.

—

Summary of Daily Practices:

Morning (3 min): Connect with your heart before getting out of bed

Throughout the day: Look past surfaces when frustrated, offer silent blessings to difficult people, pause for 1-minute gratitude moments

Sensing the One Energy: Feel unity within you – let yourself sense the world of energy, and the material world, both being real and true, with every breath you take. This gives you a sense of harmony, and lets you let go of feelings of being fragmented or lost.

Evening (5 min): Review your day and notice where you remembered (or forgot) your deeper awareness

The key is consistency, not perfection. Even one moment of deeper awareness each day begins to transform how you experience this material world.

Joel Bruce Wallach