Spirituality doesn’t have to be complicated. Practical Spirituality is about understanding your Soul, recognising the guidance around you and learning how to use that awareness in your everyday life.
In this Article:
What Is Practical Spirituality? | Listen to Your Soul | Guides & Signs | Spiritual Awakening | Soul Growth | Explore Practical Spirituality
Welcome to Practical Spirituality. This is where we take spirituality out of the “too hard to understand” basket and bring it into everyday life. Together, we’ll explore what it means to listen to your Soul, recognise guidance from Spirit, understand your spiritual awakening and, most importantly, actually use what you learn while navigating the very human ups and downs of life.
Let’s say I rented out a room in my house to a counsellor. There would be times when we’d find ourselves standing at the kitchen sink, washing and drying the dishes together. And I can guarantee there would be times when I’d be tempted to ask, “Can I just ask you something? I’ve got this problem in my life…”
Of course I would ask. You probably would too. “Can I just ask you a question about this? I’ve got this problem in my life. What do you think?” And hopefully, not over a cup of tea but over a tea towel, my live-in counsellor would help me make sense of whatever was going on.
That conversation would probably feel very different from making an appointment, sitting in a counselling room and paying for a professional service. It would be relaxed, natural and part of everyday life. And that is how I think Practical Spirituality should feel too.
The difference is that a counsellor works with the human side of us — our thoughts, feelings, experiences and what is going on in our head. But what about what is going on in our Soul? Where do we go when the questions we are asking aren’t only about our human life, but about something deeper?
Do we go to church? Do we meditate? Do we book a Reiki or healing session? Do we speak to a psychic reader? Or do we simply need somewhere we can sit down, make sense of what is happening to us spiritually and learn how to use that understanding in our everyday life?
What Is Practical Spirituality?
For me, Practical Spirituality is about learning to see with our inner eyes and listen with our inner ears. It is recognising that we are not just a human body with a busy brain trying to get through another day. We have a Soul too — and sometimes our Soul has been trying to get our attention for a very long time.Practical Spirituality is about bringing that spiritual part of ourselves into ordinary life. Not just when we meditate, have a reading or experience something we can’t explain, but while we’re working, parenting, making decisions, dealing with relationships, washing the dishes and trying to understand why life sometimes feels so incredibly hard.
It is learning to recognise the difference between the voice in our head and the quieter voice of our Soul. It is noticing the signs, trusting our intuition, listening to our Guides and beginning to understand that some of those moments we once dismissed as coincidences may be worth paying attention to.
The more we begin to recognise these things, the more life can start to make sense in a completely different way. We begin asking different questions. Why am I here? Why do I feel everything so deeply? Why don’t I seem to fit in anymore? Why do certain people feel instantly familiar? Why does the same lesson keep appearing in my life?
And this is where the journey becomes practical. Instead of simply wondering whether there is more to life, we begin learning how to recognise it, understand it and actually live it. We start getting out of our head and back into our Soul.
Are You Wired, Not Weird?
For years people used to call me weird. Then one day I realised that when you rearrange the letters in WEIRD, you can make WIRED. That changed everything for me. I wasn’t weird at all. I was wired — connected to something I couldn’t always see with my eyes, but had spent much of my life learning to recognise, feel and trust.
Maybe you’ve spent much of your life feeling different too. Perhaps you have always known things without knowing how you know them. You may feel other people’s emotions, need time alone after being around crowds, feel deeply connected to animals and nature, notice signs that other people dismiss as coincidence, or simply know there is much more to life than what we can physically see.
If any of that sounds familiar, Practical Spirituality isn’t about turning you into someone more spiritual. It is about helping you understand the part of yourself that may already have been there all along — and learning how to trust it, work with it and live comfortably with it in the real world.
Why Don’t I Feel Like I Fit In Anymore?
One of the things I hear so often from people who are awakening spiritually is, “I just don’t feel like I fit in anymore.” Conversations that once interested you may suddenly feel empty. You might find yourself needing more time alone, questioning things you once accepted without a second thought, or feeling drawn towards people who seem to understand you without needing an explanation.
Sometimes this can feel lonely, but it can also be the beginning of understanding yourself on a much deeper level. Instead of constantly asking, “What is wrong with me?”, you may begin asking a very different question: “What is my Soul trying to show me?”
As we begin listening differently, we also start noticing the ways our Soul and Spirit may already be communicating with us — through intuition, signs, dreams, those sudden lightbulb moments and the quiet guidance we so often talk ourselves out of trusting.
Learning to Listen to Your Soul
Our brain is incredibly good at making noise. It worries, analyses, questions, plans, remembers and tries to protect us from everything that might possibly go wrong. Our Soul is different. It doesn’t need to shout. Learning Practical Spirituality is partly about learning to quieten all that human noise long enough to hear what our Soul has been trying to tell us.
You may have already experienced this without realising it. That sudden knowing. The feeling that something is right or wrong before you have any logical reason for thinking it. The answer that seems to arrive from nowhere. Or perhaps you’ve heard yourself give someone advice and wondered afterwards, “Where on earth did that come from?”Sometimes that quiet knowing is your intuition. Sometimes it may be guidance from Spirit. Learning to recognise the difference between our own thoughts, fears and worries and the guidance we receive is something that develops with practice. The more we listen, notice and trust, the easier it becomes to recognise our own spiritual language.
How Do Our Guides Communicate With Us?
Our Guides don’t usually communicate with us by appearing at the end of the bed and introducing themselves! Their communication can be much quieter than that. A thought may suddenly drop into your mind. You might hear a word or phrase internally, notice the same sign repeatedly, have a vivid dream or simply know something without being able to explain where that knowing came from.
The difficulty is that guidance can be subtle, especially when our head is busy trying to analyse everything. We can receive an answer and dismiss it seconds later because we tell ourselves, “I just made that up.” Part of learning to hear your Guides is learning to recognise how your guidance arrives and then developing enough trust to listen to it.
The more you pay attention, the more you begin to notice your own patterns. Your Guides may use signs, numbers, songs, dreams, words, feelings or perfectly timed moments to get your attention. What matters is not learning somebody else’s spiritual language, but beginning to understand your own.
Signs From Spirit: Coincidence or Something More?
Signs from Spirit can appear in the most ordinary moments of our lives. A particular number keeps appearing. A song plays at exactly the right moment. You find something meaningful in an unexpected place, or something happens that makes you stop and think, “Okay… THAT was a bit too perfect to be a coincidence!”
The important thing is not to become obsessed with looking for signs everywhere. A sign should help guide, reassure or confirm something for you — not make you frightened that you’ll miss an important message. Some of the most powerful signs I’ve received have appeared when I wasn’t looking for them at all.
Over the years, signs have become an important part of how I understand guidance from Spirit. Some have been so specific and perfectly timed that they have stayed with me for years. The number 24 is one of those stories — and it’s a wonderful example of how something seemingly ordinary can carry extraordinary meaning when you understand the message behind it.
When Spiritual Awakening Turns Your Life Upside Down
A spiritual awakening isn’t always peaceful, beautiful or comfortable. Sometimes it can feel as though someone has picked up your entire life, shaken it vigorously and put everything back in the wrong place. The people, relationships, priorities and beliefs that once made sense may suddenly not make sense at all.
This is often when we begin questioning everything — who we are, what we want, why certain people are in our lives and what we’re actually doing here. What can initially feel like everything falling apart may, in time, become the beginning of putting our life back together in a way that feels much more aligned with our Soul.
For some people, this period can become what is often called the Dark Night of the Soul — a time of deep questioning, change and inner upheaval. It can be difficult to understand what is happening while you’re in the middle of it, particularly when you’re trying to work out whether what you’re experiencing is spiritual, emotional, or something you may need additional support with.
Empaths: When You Feel Everything
Being an empath can sometimes feel as though you have an emotional antenna permanently switched on. You walk into a room and sense the mood before anyone says a word. Someone tells you they’re “fine”, but something inside you knows they’re not. You may even find yourself carrying feelings that don’t seem to belong to you at all.
For me, understanding empathy is part of Practical Spirituality because it helps us recognise what belongs to us and what we may be picking up from somebody else. Without that understanding, it can be exhausting. We can carry other people’s emotions around with us without even realising we’re doing it.
Learning how to protect your own energy, create healthy boundaries and give yourself time to recharge can make an enormous difference. Being empathic doesn’t have to mean spending your life overwhelmed by everyone around you. It is about understanding your sensitivity and learning how to live comfortably with it.
Dreams: When Your Soul Speaks While You Sleep
Dreams can be much more than strange stories our mind creates while we’re asleep. Sometimes they can bring insight, guidance or a feeling so powerful that we wake knowing the dream meant something. You may even have had a dream that felt completely different from an ordinary dream — clearer, stronger and almost impossible to forget.
Paying attention to our dreams can help us recognise patterns, emotions and messages that we might overlook during our busy waking hours. I don’t believe every dream needs to be analysed or turned into a spiritual message, but some dreams deserve our attention — especially the ones that stay with us long after we wake.
Manifesting, Positive Thinking and the Law of Attraction
Manifesting isn’t simply about thinking positively and waiting for the Universe to deliver everything on our wish list. Our thoughts matter, but so do our choices, actions, timing and the lessons our Soul may have chosen to experience. Sometimes what we think we want and what we actually need for our spiritual growth can be two very different things.
Sometimes the greatest lesson in manifesting is learning when to hold onto something and when to let it go. We can spend so much energy trying to force an outcome that we forget to stop and ask, “Is this actually right for me?” Practical Spirituality teaches us to work with our Soul rather than trying to make the Universe follow our instructions.
Karma, Soul Contracts and the Lessons We Come Here to Learn
I believe we come into this life with lessons our Soul has chosen to experience. Some arrive through relationships, some through loss or change, and some seem to keep coming back around until we finally stop and ask, “What am I supposed to be learning from this?”
This is where Karma and Soul Contracts begin to make more sense to me. Rather than seeing Karma simply as punishment for something we’ve done wrong, I see it as part of our Soul’s learning. The people and situations in our lives can become some of our greatest teachers — even when, at the time, they are the people we’d least like to thank for the lesson!
Understanding our Soul lessons doesn’t mean we have to like everything that happens to us, or simply accept situations that are harmful. It means learning to look beyond “Why is this happening to me?” and sometimes asking instead, “What can I learn about myself from this?”
Soul Food: Looking After Yourself Spiritually
We spend so much time looking after our human needs that it can be easy to forget that our Soul needs looking after too. Soul Food is anything that nourishes that deeper part of you — time alone, nature, music, creativity, quiet reflection, laughter, meaningful conversations or simply giving yourself permission to stop being busy for a while.
Sometimes looking after your Soul means doing less, not more. It means recognising when you need to step away from noise, people and expectations and simply reconnect with yourself. The better we become at listening to our Soul, the easier it becomes to recognise what nourishes us — and what quietly drains us.
Are You a Human Being or a Human Doing?
We have become very good at doing. Working, rushing, organising, worrying, achieving, scrolling, planning and constantly thinking about what needs to happen next. But somewhere amongst all that doing, we can lose touch with simply being — and with the quieter part of ourselves that doesn’t need a to-do list to know who we are.
Practical Spirituality reminds us that we are human beings, not human doings. Sometimes the most spiritually productive thing we can do is stop. Sit quietly. Go outside. Put the phone down. Listen. Give our Soul enough space to catch up with the life our brain has been racing through.
Lightbulb Moments: When Everything Suddenly Makes Sense
We all have those moments when something suddenly clicks. One minute we are confused, going around in circles and trying desperately to understand what is happening, and then — LIGHTBULB! — we see it differently. The important part isn’t only having the lightbulb moment. It’s recognising what we’ve just learned and actually doing something with it.
A lightbulb moment can be one of the ways we grow spiritually, but only if we pay attention to it. Otherwise, we can have the same realisation over and over again and still keep repeating the same pattern. The real growth comes when we take that new understanding and live differently because of it.
Psychic Ability: Learning to Trust What You Receive
Psychic ability isn’t about knowing everything or predicting every detail of the future. For me, it is about learning to recognise information that comes through our intuition and spiritual senses, and then developing the confidence to trust what we receive. Often the hardest part isn’t receiving the information at all — it’s believing ourselves when we do.
Many people have intuitive or psychic experiences without ever calling them psychic. They know who is calling before the phone rings, think about someone moments before hearing from them, sense that something is about to happen or receive information they simply can’t explain. Practical Spirituality is about noticing these experiences without fear and learning to understand how your own intuition works.
The Spiritual Super Highway
As we awaken spiritually, it can feel as though a whole new road has suddenly opened in front of us. Things we once dismissed begin to make sense, connections become clearer and we start recognising that there may be much more happening around us than we ever realised. The Spiritual Super Highway is open — and you’ve got the green light.
But awakening isn’t a race, and there is no prize for getting there first. We all learn in our own time and through our own experiences. The more we understand ourselves spiritually, the more we can begin to navigate this human life with greater awareness of who we are, why we’re here and what our Soul may be trying to teach us.
Your Y-O-U-niverse: Learning to Trust Yourself
Your Y-O-U-niverse is the spiritual world within you — your intuition, your experiences, your inner knowing and the wisdom you’ve gathered along the way. We can spend our lives looking outside ourselves for answers, when sometimes the guidance we need has been quietly waiting inside us all along.
Learning to trust yourself doesn’t mean believing that every thought is a message from Spirit. It means becoming familiar enough with yourself to recognise the difference between fear, wishful thinking, intuition and genuine inner knowing. That discernment is one of the most important parts of becoming spiritually aware.
Practical Spirituality Is About Living It
You can read every spiritual book, watch every video, attend every workshop and collect all the wisdom in the world, but Practical Spirituality begins when you take what you’ve learned and live it. It is what you do with that understanding when life gets difficult, when relationships challenge you, when your intuition speaks, when a sign appears or when your Soul quietly tells you that something needs to change.
That’s why I call it Practical Spirituality. It isn’t something we practise only when we’re sitting quietly with our eyes closed. It’s something we can use at work, at home, in our relationships, in the difficult moments and even while we’re standing at the kitchen sink with a tea towel in our hand.
My hope is that Practical Spirituality becomes a resource you can return to whenever something in your life makes you stop and think, “There has to be more to this.” Because very often, there is. Sometimes we just need to learn how to see it with our inner eyes and listen to it with our inner ears.
Explore Practical Spirituality
Understanding Your Spiritual Self
Understanding yourself spiritually can explain why you feel things so deeply, why you sometimes need to withdraw from the noise around you and why listening to your Soul can feel very different from listening to your head.
- Why Am I So Sensitive? Understanding the Sensitive Soul
- Spiritual Loneliness – Why Can a Spiritual Awakening Feel So Lonely?
- Do You Feel Unseen? When Nobody Seems to Truly See You
Do You Feel Lost – Or Are You Slowly Starting to Feel Found?
Energy – Understanding the Energy Within Us and Around Us- Remembering Where You Left Off in Your Last Lifetime
- Accelerating Your Soul Journey
- Are You a Warrior or a Worrier?
- Impossible or I’m-Possible?
- Empaths
- Blood Family vs Soul Family
- The Importance of Spending Time on Your Couch
- Navigating Your Human Life as a Soul – “I Just Want to Go Home”
- Journalling – Learning to Listen to Yourself and Your Soul
- Who Is Who in Your Zoo?
- Meditation – Why Being Still Can Be Louder Than Words
- The Soul Knows Way More Than the Mind
- When the Universe Gives You a Nudge – When Do You Listen and When Do You Ignore It?
- Kundalini – A Spiritually Sexual Awakening
- Are You a Human Being or a Human Doing?
- Soul Food
- How to Be Your Best YOU
- How to Actually Benefit From Your Own Lightbulb Moment
- Why Do I Keep Seeing Repetitive Numbers?
Death, Dying & Going HOME
Death can leave us with some of our biggest unanswered questions. What happens when we die? Will someone be there waiting for us? What happens to relationships that were left unresolved? And how can we help someone we love when their time comes to go HOME?
- When I Die, Will My Loved Ones Be There to Meet Me?
- How to Help Someone You Love Prepare to Go HOME – and How to Prepare Yourself
- What If We Weren’t Speaking When They Died? Can We Reconcile After Death?
- Reincarnation – Why Do We Keep Coming Back?
- What Next? What Happens After We Arrive HOME?
- Suicide – A Spiritual Perspective
Spiritual Awakening
If your life, relationships or even your sense of who you are seem to be changing, your spiritual awakening may help explain why everything suddenly feels so different.
What Is a Spiritual Awakening? Understanding Old Souls and Your Spiritual Journey
- Is It Depression or the Dark Night of the Soul?
- How to Take Care of Your Soul During Your Awakening
- The Spiritual Super Highway Is Now Open and You Have the Green Light
- Wired Not Weird
Signs, Guides & Spiritual Communication
Spirit can communicate with us in many different ways. Learning to recognise your own signs and understand how your Guides communicate can help you trust what you are receiving.
- Introducing My Team of Guides – Who They Are and How We Work Together
- How Do I Really Know Who I’m Talking to in Spirit? Understanding the Role of a Gatekeeper
- How to Hear Your Guides
Marion’s Guide to Automatic Writing
- Angels
- Signs From Spirit to Guide You
- Signs, Signs, Everywhere There’s Signs
How Do You Know If a Loved One in Spirit Is Trying to Contact You? 16 Signs
- Why 24 Is Important to Me
- Dreams
Spiritual Lessons & Soul Growth
Some of our greatest spiritual growth comes through the people, experiences and lessons that challenge us most. Understanding these experiences from a Soul perspective can completely change the way we see them.
- Karma
- Soul Contracts
- Positive Thinking and the Law of Attraction
- Souls Are Simple, We Just Want to Love and Be Loved
Psychic & Intuitive Development
Developing spiritually can also mean becoming more aware of your natural intuition and psychic ability. The important part is learning to understand what you receive, trust yourself and use that awareness responsibly.
- So You Want to Be Psychic
- Telepathy
- Pendulums and Ouija Boards