How to have a real spiritual experience

Why some teachers say everything is spiritual… and others say nothing is real

You’ve read about mystics, spiritual teachers, and people who’ve had profound experiences. Maybe you wonder if such experiences are only for special people, or if they require years of practice. The good news is simpler than you think: real spiritual experiences are available to you right now, exactly where you are.

But there’s a catch. What you’ve been told about spiritual experiences might be backwards.

The Backwards Teaching

Many spiritual teachers say this physical world is an illusion—something to escape from or transcend. They point to atoms, which are mostly empty space and vibrating energy, as proof that everything is a dream.

Yet notice what happens when you accidentally step on that teacher’s toe. Suddenly, the pain is very real. The body they just called an illusion now demands attention and care.

This reveals something important: the physical world isn’t less spiritual than some invisible realm. In fact, your body and this physical reality are your doorway into spiritual experience.

Think of it like this: You can’t learn to swim by avoiding water. You must get in the pool. Similarly, you can’t have spiritual experiences by trying to escape the physical world. You discover the spiritual by diving deeper into what’s already here.

PRACTICE #1: Sensing Through and Sensing At

This simple exercise will show you how physical and non-physical realities work together. You’ll need just one minute.

Step 1: Choose any object near you—a cup, a book, your phone, or even your own hand.

Step 2: First, sense through it. Close your eyes and imagine your awareness moving through the object like water flowing through a sponge. Notice how it feels mostly empty, made of tiny particles with space between them. Stay with this for 20 seconds.

Step 3: Now, sense at it. Open your eyes and look at the object’s surface. Notice its color, texture, shape, weight. Touch it if you can. Feel how solid and real it seems. Stay with this for 20 seconds.

Step 4: Finally, hold both experiences at once. The object is both energy-space (when you sense through) and physical-solid (when you sense at). Both are real. Both are true. This is the beginning of spiritual awareness—holding two truths together.

What did you discover? Most people feel a shift—a sense that reality is bigger and more mysterious than they thought. That shift is a spiritual experience. It’s simple, but it’s real.

What Makes an Experience Spiritual?

A spiritual experience isn’t about seeing visions or hearing voices from celestial beings. Those things might happen, but they’re not required. A real spiritual experience is much more ordinary and more profound:

A spiritual experience happens when you become aware of your own awareness.

Let that sink in. You’re not waiting for something magical to happen from outside. You’re noticing what’s already happening inside—how your thoughts form, how your feelings shift, how your body senses the world.

Think of consciousness like an ocean. Most of the time, you’re a wave on the surface, tossed by wind and weather. But when you pause and pay attention, you realize you’re also the ocean itself—deep, vast, and connected to everything. That recognition is spiritual experience.

PRACTICE #2: The Three-Level Check-In

This practice takes 90 seconds and helps you experience different levels of yourself. You can do this anywhere, anytime.

Step 1: Body awareness (30 seconds). Notice your body right now. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice your breathing—is it fast or slow, deep or shallow? Feel any tension in your shoulders or jaw. Don’t change anything; just notice. This is your physical level.

Step 2: Thought awareness (30 seconds). Notice what you’re thinking. Is your mind planning something? Worrying? Remembering? Just watch your thoughts like clouds passing in the sky. Don’t judge them as good or bad. This is your mental level.

Step 3: Feeling awareness (30 seconds). Now tune into your heart area. What emotion is present? Calm? Curious? Anxious? Excited? Place your hand on your chest and simply acknowledge what you feel. This is your emotional level.

The spiritual part? It’s not in any of those three levels. It’s in the YOU who just noticed all three. That witnessing awareness—that’s your spiritual essence. You just experienced it.

Why Spiritual Symbols Aren’t Enough

Many people think spirituality means certain symbols: meditation cushions, incense, spiritual clothing, sacred music, or visiting holy places. These things can support your practice, but they don’t create spiritual experiences by themselves.

You could sit in the most beautiful temple in the world, but if you’re scrolling through your phone in your mind, planning dinner, and worrying about tomorrow, no spiritual experience is happening.

On the other hand, you could be washing dishes, completely present to the warm water, the soap bubbles, the sensation in your hands—and that’s a genuine spiritual experience. Why? Because you’re aware. You’re present. You’re experiencing consciousness exploring itself.

Here’s a useful comparison: A menu at a restaurant lists delicious foods, but reading the menu doesn’t fill your stomach. The symbols and trappings of spirituality are like that menu—they point to something real, but they’re not the actual experience. You have to taste the food yourself.

PRACTICE #3: Finding the Sacred in the Ordinary

This exercise proves that spiritual experience doesn’t require special conditions. Choose any simple activity you do today.

Step 1: Pick one ordinary activity. Examples: drinking water, walking to another room, putting on your shoes, or opening a door.

Step 2: Do it with complete attention. If you’re drinking water, feel the glass in your hand. Notice its temperature. Watch the water move as you lift the glass. Feel the water touch your lips, enter your mouth, move down your throat. Notice every sensation.

Step 3: Notice what happens to time. When you’re fully present, time often seems to slow down or become fuller. This is because you’re actually experiencing each moment instead of rushing through it on autopilot.

Step 4: Ask yourself: What just happened? You probably felt more alive, more connected, more here. That’s spiritual experience—not because the activity was special, but because your awareness was present.

The Paradox That Changes Everything

Here’s where it gets interesting. Spiritual truth contains a paradox—two things that seem opposite but are both true:

1. This physical world points you toward a deeper, non-physical reality (like atoms showing you they’re mostly energy and space).
2. That deeper reality always points you back to this physical world (because you can’t experience energy without matter).

It’s like a mirror reflecting a mirror—each one shows the other, endlessly. Neither is more real or more important. They’re two sides of one reality.

Think of it like this: Imagine a coin. You can look at heads or tails, but you can’t separate them—they’re both part of one coin. The physical world and the spiritual world are like that. Different perspectives on one unified reality.

This is why trying to escape the physical world to reach the spiritual is like trying to throw away tails to keep only heads. It doesn’t work. The spiritual is found by going deeper into the physical, not by leaving it behind.

PRACTICE #4: The Breath Bridge

Your breath is the perfect example of how physical and spiritual unite. It’s completely physical (air, body, lungs) and totally connected to consciousness (awareness, life, presence).

Step 1: Sit comfortably and place one hand on your chest, one on your belly.

Step 2: Notice the physical sensations of breathing. Feel your chest rise and fall. Feel air moving through your nose or mouth. Feel your belly expand and contract. This is the physical level—measurable, tangible, real.

Step 3: Now notice the mysterious part. What makes the breath happen? You don’t have to think “breathe in, breathe out”—it happens by itself. There’s an intelligence running your body that you don’t control. Feel into that intelligence. This is the non-physical level—awareness, life force, consciousness.

Step 4: Recognize that both levels are happening simultaneously, in the same breath. Physical and spiritual, material and mysterious, body and consciousness—all one thing.

Do this for 2-3 minutes. Each breath is a spiritual experience because each breath shows you the unity of physical and non-physical reality.

Your Own Path Within the Larger Journey

Here’s something important: Your spiritual experiences will be unique to you. They won’t exactly match the stories you’ve read or the experiences others describe. And that’s exactly how it should be.

Your soul—your deepest essence—has its own frequency, its own way of experiencing reality. This doesn’t mean you should avoid learning from teachers, books, or spiritual traditions. These can be incredibly valuable guides. But even when following a specific path or tradition, your actual experience of that path will be uniquely yours.

Think of it like learning to play music. You might study with a teacher, follow a particular method, and learn the same songs as other students. But the music you create will have your own touch, your own feeling. Two students of the same teacher will each bring something different to the same piece of music.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to call your experience spiritual. If you are consciously aware of your own consciousness, you’re having a spiritual experience—whether that happens in a church, a meditation hall, during prayer, while reading sacred texts, or simply walking in nature.

Think of it this way: Every person sees colors slightly differently based on their unique eyes and brain. But we don’t question whether someone else is “really” seeing blue. Your spiritual perception is like that—uniquely yours and completely valid, whether you’re exploring on your own or within a tradition.

PRACTICE #5: Honoring Your Unique Perception

This practice helps you trust your own spiritual experiences instead of comparing them to others.

Step 1: Think of a moment today when you felt more aware than usual. Maybe you noticed something beautiful, felt suddenly grateful, or experienced a moment of clarity. It doesn’t matter how small.

Step 2: Replay that moment in your mind. Don’t analyze it or judge whether it was “spiritual enough.” Just remember how it felt in your body, what you noticed, what shifted in your awareness.

Step 3: Say to yourself (out loud or silently): “This was real. This was mine. This mattered.” Let yourself honor the experience without needing it to be dramatic or fit any particular description.

Step 4: Ask your heart: What did this moment teach me about being present? Let the answer come without forcing it. Trust whatever arises.

When you validate your own experiences this way, you’re training yourself to recognize spiritual moments as they happen. You’re becoming your own teacher.

The Value of Teachers and Your Own Experience

Teachers, books, spiritual communities, and religious traditions offer tremendous value. They provide maps for the journey, practices that have been tested over centuries, and support from others walking similar paths. Many people find great benefit in following a specific spiritual tradition or working with a teacher.

Here’s the key understanding: Even the wisest teacher or most profound book can only point you toward the experience. They can’t have the experience for you.

Meeting a wise teacher is like getting directions to a beautiful place. The directions help, and they can save you years of wandering. A good teacher or tradition can show you practices, warn you of pitfalls, and encourage you when the path gets difficult. But you still have to make the journey yourself. You still have to see the view with your own eyes.

This is why some people benefit greatly from: – Following a specific spiritual tradition or religion – Working with a teacher or guide – Being part of a spiritual community – Reading sacred texts and spiritual books – Attending services, ceremonies, or group practices

All of these can deepen your practice and provide structure, wisdom, and support. The important thing is that alongside these external supports, you also cultivate your own direct experience.

The real spiritual work happens both in community and in your own quiet moments of reflection. It happens when you apply the teachings you’ve learned and discover what they mean in your own life. It happens when you take what a teacher shares and taste it for yourself.

This is actually empowering. You can benefit from teachers, books, and traditions while also trusting your own experience. You can follow a path while bringing your own authentic presence to it. You don’t have to choose between guidance and direct experience—you can have both.

The Practice of Everyday Awakening

Spiritual growth isn’t about reaching some final state of enlightenment. There’s no finish line where you become “completely spiritual” and never need to grow again.

Instead, spiritual growth is like peeling an onion—there’s always another layer. Tomorrow you’ll be more aware than today. Next year you’ll understand things you can’t yet imagine. This continuing discovery is the point, not the endpoint.

Each moment offers you a choice: Will you be present or distracted? Will you notice or ignore? Will you dive deeper or skim the surface?

The beautiful thing is that you can choose presence right now. You don’t have to wait until you’re more prepared, more spiritual, or more evolved. The doorway is always open.

PRACTICE #6: The Now Check

This is the simplest practice of all, and you can do it anytime, anywhere. It takes 10 seconds.

Step 1: Stop whatever you’re doing. Right now.

Step 2: Take one conscious breath. Notice the breath coming in and going out.

Step 3: Ask yourself: “What is happening right now?” Notice one thing you can see, one thing you can hear, and one thing you can feel.

Step 4: Recognize that in this moment, you are aware. That’s it. That’s the practice.

Do this several times throughout your day. Each time is a spiritual experience—a moment of consciousness recognizing itself. These small moments add up to a transformed life.

The Secret Hiding in Plain Sight

So is everything spiritual? Is nothing spiritual? The question itself points to the secret:

Everything is potentially spiritual because everything can be a doorway to deeper awareness. But nothing is automatically spiritual just by existing. The difference is your consciousness.

When you’re on autopilot, rushing through your day without awareness, even a sunset is just background scenery. But when you pause and really see that sunset—notice the colors, feel the shift from day to night, sense your connection to the turning earth—that same sunset becomes a spiritual experience.

The sunset didn’t change. You did.

This is the secret: The spiritual isn’t somewhere else. It’s here, waiting for you to notice it. Every moment is full of divine essence, but you have to bring your awareness to see it.

Living the Mystery

When you understand this, something shifts. You realize you’re living in a mystery—a world that is simultaneously:

• Solid and empty
• Physical and spiritual
• Ordinary and extraordinary
• Mundane and miraculous

You don’t have to choose between these opposites. You can hold them both, like holding both ends of a jump rope. This ability to embrace paradox marks spiritual maturity.

People who only see the physical world miss half the picture. People who only see the spiritual world also miss half. But you—you can see both. You can live in both. You can be both.

This makes you what you truly are: a mystic. Not someone who escapes reality, but someone who sees reality more deeply than most.

Beginning Your Practice

You now have six practices you can use anytime:

1. Sensing Through and Sensing At (1 minute)
2. The Three-Level Check-In (90 seconds)
3. Finding the Sacred in the Ordinary (varies)
4. The Breath Bridge (2-3 minutes)
5. Honoring Your Unique Perception (5 minutes)
6. The Now Check (10 seconds)

Start with whichever practice feels easiest. Do it once today. Then do it again tomorrow. These simple practices will change how you experience life.

Remember: A spiritual experience is not a rare, special event reserved for saints and mystics. It’s available to you in every moment. It’s as close as your next breath. It’s as simple as noticing what you’re noticing.

Your consciousness is already divine. Your body is already sacred. This world is already the doorway. You don’t need to become something different to have spiritual experiences. You just need to pay attention to what you already are.

The mystery is here. The magic is now. And you are the one who brings it to life through the simple act of being aware.

Welcome home to your spiritual life. It’s been waiting for you all along.

Joel Bruce Wallach