Secular spirituality or, a practical approach to intuition

Ever since I was a child coming out of a cult-like religious upbringing, I developed a secular spiritual practice tethered to my own direct experience and in my adulthood am learning to lean more into networks of community and accountability over religious belief systems or groups with doctrine and dogma.

Intuition can be quite practical (see definition 1 and 2 below), and the more ‘woo’ spiritual elements of ritual, storytelling, mythologizing can still be effective in alleviating suffering and creating opportunity in modern contexts. There are well-documented reasons that ritual, even prayer, have positive outcomes on a person’s well being. However, the increasingly difficult conditions of late stage capitalism seems to drive more and more people towards the problematic and many times, harmful parts of New Age and self-help. Magical thinking without practical application, cultural appropriation, toxic main character syndroming, bio-essentialist energy work. The people practicing some of this problematic work are often flawed, loving people with intentions to help others and themselves. Many have been very generous in teaching me. Spiritual teachers, energy workers, and spiritual leaders are human beings. Regardless of what we do, we all have to participate in harmful capitalist systems, so our work becomes tied intimately to systems that are have grown to be extremely harmful. It is inevitable that navigating harm is part of the human-who-seeks-to-alleviate-suffering-and-find-deeper-meaning-in-existence-experience.

This is why as a Queer, Korean American practitioner of the systems I’m learning, I can’t quite fully recommend my peers and curious readers hop wholeheartedly into the same path that I’ve followed learning from so many varied systems. White supremacy has a simultaneously overt and sneaky way of interlocking with energy and spiritual systems led by influential people (often entrepreneurs). Masculinity and patriarchy do their things. Cis heteros link their work to gendered definitions of who we are and how our energies apparently can work. What if we are meant to honor the human experience in exact concert with the spiritual? Could we handle the constant and everlasting feedback loop between being a racialized body, experiencing gendered violences, grappling with what it means to be working towards liberatory futures in community but not wanting to completely host our consciousness in identities?

I’ve learned from and also critiqued these systems and teachers, while seeing the benefit that they bring. Just like I can’t recommend it, I also can’t quite discourage path I’ve taken of learning and experimentation either. I can only say this is the way I’ve gone and what I’ve seen along the way. Depending on the teachers, and the spaces, spiritual work can and does alleviate suffering, helps people heal otherwise unreachable trauma. But the systems are not evaluated or held to standards of trauma informed care. There is exploitation, racism, colorism, sexism, every dang ism you find in life, you will also find in spaces where vulnerable people come for help. In the states, you will also find people of all races spiritually bypassing the deeper work of unlearning racism.

This is partially why, in the past several months I have leaned away from providing ‘spiritual’ insight into most client’s readings. For example, although I can find the Akashic Records to be wildly fun, informative, and ‘healing’, there is absolutely no way to prove these stories true. It either resonates with a person or not. And in that way, one can continue to receive the stories of parallel and past lives, if one is also able to assess how useful they can be to them. Another way to ensure you’re not going on a ride is to only go to people you trust for spiritual insight. You can build that trust by researching that person’s lineage (who they learned from, who they are in community with, what is their background). If you’re able to continue to question information and look at these stories with curiosity, it’s more possible to learn how to access the Records, share with consent, without being harmed.

In the coming months, I am sticking to a more practical intuitive approach, that allows me to guide a person’s physical energy or give them reads based on what is reachable and sensible to the person. This practicalness also includes still pursuing evidentiary mediumship practices, which seeks verifiable information from medium to client that the medium wouldn’t be able to know. In addition, I will try to prioritize the human experience when giving intuitive reads or participating in energy work of any kind. In these sessions, I find understanding the following definition of 3 types of intuition helpful, with a particular interest in the 3rd definition. The 3rd type is what is enacted with mediumship.

This quote was pulled from a study on ‘repeat entrepreneurs’ in Tehran, Iran which isn’t necessarily the context I’d like to learn about intuition. But hey, we are speaking practically. here, emphasis mine.

“McCraty has proposed that there are three different categories or types of processes that the term intuition is used to describe. The first is often referred to as implicit knowledge or implicit learning. It refers to something we learned in the past and either forgot or didn't realize we learned. A number of “pattern-recognition” models have been developed to explain how this fast type of “intuitive” decision and action can be understood purely in terms of neural processes in which the brain matches the patterns of new problems or challenges with stored templates in memory based on prior experience. The second type is called energetic sensitivity and refers to the ability to sense environmental signals such as electromagnetic fields. The third type, which is the subject of this study, is nonlocal intuition, the knowledge or sense of something that cannot be explained by past or forgotten knowledge.”

I don’t quite know if this research is legitimate (it looks like it), and I haven’t read the full study. What I am pulling this quote for is to help me get what intuition is and how it works without jumping to larger-than-life spiritual narratives. I do have those narratives of my own and practices grounded in a developing sense of my own Korean practices as well as other lineages. But when it comes to working with others, I believe each individual has a right to their own stories, their own sense of right/wrong, their own knowing and skepticism. As more people start utilizing their practical intuitive skills, research and study will help us better understand what before, felt like magic. Just as it has done for millennia.