For a person to deepen into, to come to a spiritual awareness or consciousness, something from beyond them has to start happening around them that takes on meaning and puts them on a journey.

There are historical examples of this – the Hebrew-murdering Saul who was knocked off his horse and made temporarily blind before becoming the number-one apostle Paul; Sadhartha, who accidentally caught a glimpse people’s pain outside his kingdom walls before leaving home to become the Buddha; then too, any of us who have heard that voice calling in the night.

It’s a calling forth, a gathering up, a stopping moment, where the spiritual gravity or pull of the place stops everything in its path because of the mystery of it, because of what it awakens in a person. It’s a taking-off-your-shoes experience, a you’re-on-holy-ground experience that starts a person on a path, to follow that voice, that light that first captivated them so.

The spiritual journey is putting words to that sense of holy gravity that pulls us to it, calls us by name, sets us on a path. We’re stopped in the middle of what we’re doing by some inexplicable but profoundly alive encounter that compels us to turn over everything we thought we knew in return for one more encounter, one more experience of that sacred energy.

We surrender, then, to that felt gravity, to that spiritual pull, to that non-physical presence that compels us forward to a particular experience where we encounter the sacred and experience ourselves as more than what we appear. We develop an inner knowing, a third ear, an intuitive resource within that receives this presence, this instruction in ways we can’t articulate.

We begin to experience ourselves as inwardly anchored in some solid, trustworthy place, out of which our energy and decisions freely flow. This carries a certain weight that influences us from within to trust it as having more perspective, more insight and wisdom than we have from our shortsighted view. It’s as if we begin to act out of a higher intelligence, a larger wisdom.

We surrender to a higher reality – call it the Universe, Higher Power, God, Divine Intelligence, or whatever metaphor we choose – that proves itself trustworthy in informing us how to fulfill what lies at the center of our lives. We come to trust in an inner voice that reveals the better choice, the more fulfilling option, the right thing to do in a particular situation.

The journey is marked with intuitive clues that allow us to live in between states of knowing, without rigid expectations. We live fully in the world yet keep one ear cocked, just in case we hear that voice, that inner pull, that clear directive that informs us of the next right step. When we relax into it, it leads us to deep connections we could not make by our own choosing.  

The place within to which we let go becomes sacred ground — It grounds us. We become more hopeful, more confident we are not alone on the journey, but led. We experience in specific ways how the non-physical world supports our physical world – shifting shapes of divine energy at work around us and in us – like a face we can immediately pick out in a crowd, a song that pulls us to the side of the road. We give up security for authentic selfhood.     
  
This kind of spiritual surrender is holy, and healthy, and highly personal. We each enter the forest in a different place, for different reasons, with different potentials. Listening for that voice within and being sensitive to clues spread throughout the forest are all the guides we need to lead us home.