A note before you read:

This piece is deeply personal. It comes from a place of reverence and truth.

For most of my life, I’ve walked the path of Christianity, and I still hold great love for Christ and the wisdom I’ve found in that journey. But after deep loss, I found myself searching for more—not because I had lost faith, but because I was longing for peace and alignment. Before I stepped outside the traditional structure of my beliefs, I prayed and asked God if it was okay.

This is not a story of abandoning faith. It’s a story of letting it expand.

What follows is my honest experience of grief, awakening, and the spiritual shift that helped me rediscover joy. I don’t claim to have the answers. I just know that when I sincerely asked for truth, everything began to change.

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There comes a moment when the pain becomes too much to carry. Not because we’re weak, but because something deeper in us finally says, enough.

That’s where I found myself—being dragged through betrayal by someone I trusted, experiencing grief and heartbreak from being widowed a second time in the midst of it all, and losing both of my parents during that season. The pain was so raw it didn’t feel survivable. I wasn’t enlightened. I wasn’t floating above it all with wisdom and grace. I was hurting. I was sick of hurting.

I didn’t set out to be transformed. I didn’t ask for a spiritual awakening. I just wanted to feel whole again.

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I had owned The Power of Now for years—bought it three or four years before I ever understood it. Back then, it felt impossible to grasp. We live in a world that constantly pulls us out of presence. We’re trained to be productive, to stay in control, to relive the past and obsess over the future. It’s exhausting. The idea of stillness? Foreign.

But something shifted in the summer of 2023.

That summer, I hit a wall, not just emotionally but spiritually. It was the second year after my second husband passed away, and honestly, I didn’t care whether I survived or not. The grief was brutal, even sharper than the first year. I was no longer in shock. The world seemed to have moved on, and yet to me, it felt like it had just happened. My heart still ached every day.

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That summer, I began praying—not for answers, but for truth.

I had been a Christian my entire life, and I still hold a deep reverence for the teachings of Christ. But after so much loss and heartbreak, I felt called to seek a deeper connection with God, one that brought peace, not just doctrine. Before I stepped outside the traditional bounds of my religion, I prayed and asked if it was okay to search for more understanding.

And the answer I felt was peaceful and loving.

I wasn’t abandoning God or Christ. I was simply asking to know our divine Creator in a deeper, truer way.

That’s when everything began to shift.

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I’ll never forget the day it started.

I had bought The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra long before. It sat on my coffee table for the longest time, but I never opened it. I didn’t love the format—about five by seven inches—and for whatever reason, it just didn’t appeal to me.

Then one day, during one of my almost weekly visits to Barnes & Noble (I was searching for something… knowledge, healing, anything), I walked over to the spiritual section and reached for a bright yellow book with my left hand. It was The Book of Secrets by Deepak Chopra. As I slid it off the shelf, I noticed a smaller book tucked between its pages.

I didn’t even know the title yet, but I knew I was meant to read it.

That little book was The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success—the same book I already owned, but now in a smaller, simpler four by six inch format. It was literally being placed into my hands.

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I bought both books that day and went straight home. I laid on the couch and quickly read The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success from beginning to end.

It changed everything.

I’m not saying this book is for everyone, but I know it was for me. I still keep that smaller version close by and open it from time to time. The larger version now sits on a bookshelf, and maybe one day I’ll feel nudged to pass it along to someone else. I often do that with books.

That moment was more than coincidence. It was guidance. It was grace.

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The books I once set aside began to speak to me like scripture. The Power of Now finally made sense. The Universe Has Your Back helped me trust again. I wasn’t reading for information—I knew I was reading to survive. And through that process, something deeper awakened in me.

And it wasn’t just a mental shift. My body changed. My energy shifted. One of my closest friends told me my voice sounded different, that I even walked differently. I stopped craving the same foods. My favorite colors changed. I barely recognized myself, but for the first time in a long time, that felt like a good thing.

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By following my intuition, I stopped spending every day processing pain. Instead, I started experiencing joy. Not because anything in my outer life had changed, but because something within me had.

Peace became my baseline. Tranquility started to rise where crushing torment used to live.

And the joy? It was real. Gentle. Abundant. Not loud—just steady and alive inside me.

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Not everybody sees truth the same way. Not everybody’s truth is the same.

But I do know this: the path I’m on has finally made sense of my life.

And I now have the freedom to let peace and happiness rise within me, and to allow that joy to flow outward into the world around me.