PART THREE — WHAT I CAME TO BELIEVE

Over the seven  to eight years following my Awakening, I questioned almost everything I had once assumed to be true.

I explored religions, history, ancient cultures, science, language, consciousness, and my own experiences. Some discoveries confirmed what I had already felt. Others challenged me to look even deeper.

What follows is not doctrine, nor is it an attempt to persuade anyone.

It is simply where my journey has led me... at least for now.

What began as a deeply personal awakening gradually became something much larger. Over time, I came to believe that humanity itself may be moving through a similar process of remembering. 

When my epiphany finally arrived, I knew I had been shown moments from the past, yet I believed everything else I experienced during those eight months had already unfolded. 

Only years later did I realize that some of what I had been shown had not happened yet. It wasn't until COVID arrived that I understood I had also been shown glimpses of the future. What I had believed were memories of completed events were, in part, experiences that had yet to unfold.

There were beautiful moments during that Eight Months. One day in the desert, a swarm of insects suddenly came toward me, sending me retreating back into the house. Moments later, I heard a quiet inner message reminding me not to be afraid. So I walked outside again, this time around the opposite side of the house. The swarm found me anyway. To my surprise, they were baby dragonflies. They swirled above me, shedding their delicate wings upon me like a gift. It felt magical, as though nature itself was trying to communicate something I could not yet fully understand.

Not all of the moments were beautiful. I was barely eating, and the stomach pain was intense. At times, I felt as though I were dying in a hundred different ways. There were moments where it felt difficult to breathe, as though I were drowning despite not being in water. I lived in near-complete isolation. Aside from my children, whom I only had part of the week, and occasional interactions with a grocery clerk, I spoke to very few people.

The birds became my friends. I watched them daily. I listened to them. Somehow, they brought comfort during a time when I felt disconnected from nearly everything else.

Then something shifted.

I reached a state of peace unlike anything I had ever known. I had forgiven everyone. I had forgiven my past. I had even forgiven the church. 

For a time, all I felt was love… for people, for nature, for life itself. Unconditional love for everyone and everything. I felt completely at peace and one with God.

Then, suddenly and without warning, I felt myself descend back into my body.

What surprised me most was that I had not realized I had been taken to the clouds until I returned. Only then did I become aware that something extraordinary had happened.

It was as though I had briefly experienced the destination before fully understanding the journey required to reach it.

I will also say, putting words to any of this did not come easily. I had never heard anyone speak of experiences like these. At the time, I had no idea that many people believed Christ had ascended into the clouds and would one day return in the same way. 

What I can share is this: more than once, after a profound realization or breakthrough, I have heard what I can only describe as the heavens cheering. The first time it happened I was outside and assumed it was neighbors gathered somewhere in the distance. Yet it kept happening. Always in the same moment, always tied to something shifting inside me. 

Until I understood what it actually was, which was after moving across the state and hearing the same cheerleaders!

The sound I once mistook for a neighbor’s gathering was something else entirely... what I have come to lovingly call my Divine Cheerleaders.

It was within that same sacred space that I was also shown something I have never forgotten.

In that moment, I was shown both the chaos of the world and the possibility of something far better. I saw humanity struggling. I saw systems that were no longer serving people. I saw suffering, division, and disconnection… and yet beneath all of it, I sensed the possibility of something more. I realized I was not yet fully at that place of complete peace and that there was still inner work ahead of me. I remembered asking God to show me myself healed. What I received was a glimpse of what was possible. Not only for me, but perhaps for humanity as well.

Looking back now, I can see that I was shown some of the road ahead. Not every detail. Not every lesson or every challenge. But the light at the end of the tunnel.

Many of the experiences and realizations that unfolded during the seven years that followed seemed to mirror things I had sensed or felt during those eight months. At times, life has felt like one long moment of déjà vu.

Since the fall of 2018, I have spent every day working toward the level of healing, peace, and wholeness I touched during that time. Only later did I understand that I had been given a glimpse of the destination… not a map of the journey. And so the journey became the teacher.

What followed those eight months was years of isolation, questioning, loss, and slowly rebuilding from the inside out. My relationships changed. Money became scarce. There were many times when simply putting food on the table felt difficult. Those experiences opened my eyes to a reality I had never fully seen before. Many people are carrying this same weight, quietly and alone.

And I was shown the urgency of it, because so many human beings do not have enough to eat. And I also became aware that so many cannot see the reality of this, because they have never truly been in that situation. Just as I hadn't before my awakening. And for those who do have food, what passes for food today is often barely recognizable as what God originally provided. It has been altered, processed, and stripped of its life... not unlike the way the sacred texts were altered, processed, and stripped of their wholeness. 

Those years also deepened something within me. The longer I lived close to the edge of what survival actually feels like, the more I understood what truly matters and what does not. The soul does not care about status. It does not measure a life in possessions or appearances. What I found in those stripped-down years was a clarity I could not have reached any other way.

Those years changed how I understood the Soul.

Not as a religious concept, but as something living and deeply personal.

I came to believe we arrive carrying a light that remains connected to something far greater than this lifetime. Through fear, trauma, conditioning, and the pressures of survival, many of us gradually lose awareness of that connection.

To me, awakening is the process of remembering it.

As my healing continued, I also became increasingly aware of energy. I noticed how people, environments, conversations, and even thoughts affected the way I felt. The more attention I paid, the more convinced I became that everything carries a kind of frequency.

Across every tradition I explored, one truth continued to emerge.

Not doctrine.

Not ritual.

Love.

Compassion.

Forgiveness.

Unity.

Whether through my own experiences, Near-Death Experiences, ancient teachings, or the words attributed to Jesus, the deeper message always seemed to point in the same direction.

Across every tradition I explored, I found both wisdom and shadow. Beneath different languages, rituals, and beliefs, people were asking the same questions: Why are we here? What connects us? What happens when we die? Some teachings encouraged love, compassion, and connection with the Divine. Others, shaped by fear, politics, or control, seemed to create separation where there could have been unity. 

I came to feel that many of Jesus’ teachings pointed inward rather than upward. Toward inner transformation, direct communion with the Divine, and the kind of radical love and forgiveness that challenges everything ego and fear would prefer to hold onto. The verse that stayed with me most was not one of thunder or judgment. It was quiet. Profound. “Your Father knows what you need before you ask.” To me, that says everything. You do not need perfect words. You do not need elaborate ritual. You simply need connection. The door was never locked from the outside.

We are spiritual beings.

It is not something you follow. 

It is something you are.

One of the things I came to grieve as I explored history was a pattern I kept encountering. The quiet, steady erasure of the feminine from the sacred. That understanding changed everything about how I read history.

Medicine women became witches. Goddesses disappeared. Ancient texts were excluded. It was a thread I would follow all the way into the origins of language itself... and what I found there stopped me completely.

The more I looked at the systems shaping modern life—our financial systems, food systems, educational models, and the relentless pace of survival that so many people are locked inside—the more I saw how far they had drifted from anything resembling human flourishing. Most people are so busy surviving that they rarely have time to ask why. And the divisions we are taught to focus on, religious, political, racial, cultural, often serve to keep us looking at one another instead of at the systems themselves.

I am here to encourage people to ask deeper questions, think for themselves, and look within before looking to someone else for the answers.

Many people have been taught to avoid conversations about religion, spirituality, politics, and other deeply held beliefs because those discussions can quickly become uncomfortable or divisive. Yet meaningful growth often begins with the willingness to ask honest questions and to listen with an open mind.

I am not here simply to make people comfortable. I am here, as I once said, as your Sister. And sometimes love requires us to examine what we have inherited… not to destroy it, but to decide what to carry forward.

Perhaps that is what Jesus was doing when He overturned the tables. Not attacking truth. Challenging what stood in the way of it.

As I look back across everything… the wormhole, the dragonflies, the years of isolation, the birds, the forgiveness, the long walk through silence… I can see a thread running through all of it. 

My healing was never only mine. 

The deeper I went, the more I understood that it was connected to something much larger. To the healing of the people around me. To the healing of patterns carried for generations. To a question humanity has been circling for a very long time.

I believe we are living through a collective awakening. Not a religious event. Not a political revolution. Something quieter and more fundamental than either. More people are questioning what they have been handed. More people are choosing to heal rather than simply cope. More people are recognizing, across every difference, that they are searching for the same things… meaning, connection, truth, and a world that actually makes sense.  

Awakening no longer feels isolated. It feels global. And that gives me more hope than I can fully express.

Real change, I believe, begins internally. When people truly do the work of healing themselves, forgiving themselves, learning to love themselves, regulating their nervous systems, finding their way back to peace, it begins reflecting outward in ways that no external system could manufacture. 

Awakened people often recognize this light in one another without needing words. It is something felt before it is understood.

I believe humanity is moving toward a great remembering. A time when more people awaken to love, to unity, to their own deep connection to the Divine and to one another. I believe future ways of living will eventually center more around human well-being, community, sustainability, and care for the Earth. 

More rest. 

More presence. 

More connection. 

Less survival. 

Less division. 

Less fear.

We depend on clean water, clean air, healthy food, and a living planet. 

We were never meant to be this disconnected from nature, from one another, or from ourselves. 

The Earth is alive. 

Conscious. 

And humanity is part of it… not above it.

Since the day I returned to my body in the fall of 2018, I have been searching for ways to help others remember. Not by convincing anyone of my experiences, but by sharing them honestly and trusting that what is meant to reach someone will. 

I chose to come back. 

To Awaken. To Heal. To Unite.

To help create the kind of change people have been singing about for as long as I can remember.

Earlier in this book, I asked a question I was not yet ready to answer.

What is "The Word"?

I said we would return to it.

We are returning to it now.

Most people who grew up around Christianity have heard the opening of the Gospel of John:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

I had heard those words before.

Yet I never stopped to ask what they actually meant.

What word?

Written words?

Spoken words?

The Bible itself?

When I finally began looking deeper, I discovered something that stopped me completely. The original Greek text does not say "word" the way we understand that term today.

It says Logos.

And Logos means something far greater than language.

In ancient Greek philosophy, Logos was not simply a word spoken or written down. It was understood as the Divine Organizing Intelligence behind All of Creation. The invisible force that brought order out of chaos. The living principle through which everything came into existence.

It was reason.

It was truth.

It was the breath of the Divine expressed through the fabric of reality itself.

When John wrote "In the beginning was the Logos," he was not saying the Bible existed before creation.

He was saying that Divine Intelligence existed before creation.

And then I found something else.

Something that connected to everything I had already come to understand about BALANCE. 

About what has been lost. 

About the Feminine being removed from the Sacred.

In the Hebrew tradition, long before the New Testament was written, there is another presence described at the beginning of creation.

Her name is Chokmah.

In Greek, she is called Sophia.

Both mean the same thing.

Wisdom... and She is not a concept.

In the Book of Proverbs, 

Wisdom speaks in Her own voice:

"The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old. I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be."

She was there.

Present at creation.

Standing beside the Divine as the world was formed.

Wisdom. Feminine. Ancient. 

And largely forgotten.

What struck me deeply was realizing that Logos and Sophia... The Word and Wisdom... were once understood as two expressions of the same Divine Truth.

One reaching outward.

One moving inward.

 One that receives. One that holds. 

Masculine and Feminine.

Working together.

In BALANCE.

And yet, just as I had seen throughout history. 

One voice was gradually elevated while the other was slowly erased.

Sophia faded.

Wisdom became a concept rather than a presence.

And the fullness of what "The Word" originally pointed toward was reduced to something smaller than it ever was meant to be.

I share it because it matters.

Because when you remove Wisdom from The Word, you lose something essential.

You lose the BALANCE.

You lose the Feminine half of the Divine.

And I believe, with everything I have come to understand, that this is not a small loss. It is one of the deepest wounds humanity is still carrying.

The Word without Wisdom speaks. Yet it does not always know when to be still. Together, they are whole. And wholeness, I have come to believe, is exactly what we are being called back to. 

AND THEN I FOUND MYSELF SITTING WITH A QUESTION...

A QUESTION I COULD NOT LET GO OF.

That verse in Proverbs, the one where Wisdom speaks in Her own voice. Contains a word that gave me pause.

"The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works..."

The Lord.

I had to stop there. Because by this point in my journey, I had already learned something important about that word.

"Lord" is a translation.

It is not the original.

In the Hebrew text, the word used is YHWH.

And YHWH is not a title like Lord or Master.

It is a name.

A name so sacred that many Jewish traditions consider it too holy to speak aloud. And its meaning is unlike any title humanity has placed on the Divine.

YHWH is most often interpreted as "I Am," or "I Am That I Am," or "The Ever-Existing One."

It does not point to a figure sitting on a throne.

It points to existence itself.

Pure being.

The source from which everything flows.

And here is what matters.

YHWH, in its original understanding.  Carries no gender.

It is not masculine.

It is not feminine.

It is the totality.

And here I want to pause , because a question naturally arises.

If YHWH was never masculine, then why do the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions we explored earlier refer to "YHWH and his Asherah?"

That is not a contradiction.

It is actually the same truth expressed two different ways.

The name YHWH, in its deepest philosophical meaning... points to something beyond gender entirely. A divine source so vast it contains everything.

But the people who lived and worshipped in that world were not abstract philosophers.

They were human beings who experienced the sacred through relationship.

Through story. Through symbol. 

Through things they could feel.

And so in lived practice, YHWH took on a masculine character,  because that is how the people related to Him. And in doing so, they instinctively understood that something was missing.

That He needed a counterpart. 

A Feminine presence to make Him whole.

That was Asherah.

The people themselves were expressing,  without perhaps even knowing it... the very wholeness that the name YHWH originally pointed to.

They felt it. So they named Her.

And then She was taken away.

They started with wholeness. 

And were left with half.

And this brought me to something I had felt for a long time but had never quite put into words.

When I think of God, I think of the whole. Not a man on a throne. Not a figure with a name and a gender. The totality. The source. Everything that is.

Throughout this book, whenever I use the word "God," this is what I mean: not a masculine being, but the whole. The Divine source that contains both the Masculine and the Feminine, and everything beyond those human distinctions. 

And yet I understand that we need language to reach toward something infinite. So when I speak of God, I speak of both. 

Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father 

Mother Goddess and Father God 

Soul Mother and Soul Father

Because I want people to feel the totality, not just the half they were handed. We have been so conditioned to say He, to picture a man, to relate to the Divine as masculine alone...  that simply saying "God" often carries all of that baggage without anyone realizing it. When I say They, I mean the whole. When I say Mother and Father, I mean the complete source from which everything flows.

But I also understand something about being human...

We need relationship in order to comprehend.

We need something we can feel. 

Something we can reach toward. 

Something that mirrors back to us the love and intelligence we sense at the heart of existence.

And so the whole, in its infinite wisdom.  

Expresses itself as two.

Father God + Mother Goddess.

Not because the Divine is actually divided.

But because that is how we begin to grasp something infinite.

Think of light passing through a prism.

The light itself is whole, colorless, containing everything within it.

And when it passes through the prism it becomes a spectrum.

Something we can actually see.

 Soul Father and Soul Mother are the prism through which the whole becomes visible to us.

And when I understood it that way, something else became clear.

The ancient traditions that honored both, that held the God and the Goddess together... were not practicing something lesser.

They were not primitive.

They were not wrong.

They were holding both halves of the one whole.

And perhaps they understood something we forgot.

Go back to the very beginning. Genesis 1:26.

"Let us make humanity in our image."

Us. Our.

Elohim : the word translated as Gods in that verse... is plural.

Not a single figure speaking alone. (Eloah)

A wholeness, speaking as one.

After everything you have just read, does that verse land a little differently now?

It was not until one half was removed, until the Mother was taken away and only the Father remained. That humanity was left trying to comprehend the infinite through half a prism.

And a half prism does not produce the full spectrum.

It never could.

So when I read that verse again with fresh eyes, something shifted.

"The Ever-Existing One brought me forth as the first of its works..."

Suddenly Wisdom is not subordinate.

She is not the creation of a masculine God who came first and made her second. She is the first expression of a Divine that is whole: vast, genderless, beyond any form humanity has placed upon it.

That realization was significant to me.

Because it raised a deeper question.

If YHWH was never masculine, then why does the Divine feel so masculine to so many people today?

The answer, I came to understand, is the same answer I kept finding everywhere I looked.

Human hands.

Human translation.

Human interpretation.

As the ancient texts were written down, copied, debated, compiled, and translated. Mostly by men, working within cultures that had already placed men at the center of power.  

The Divine gradually took on a masculine face.

Male pronouns.

Male titles.

Male imagery.

Not because the original truth demanded it. But because the people transmitting that truth lived inside a world that did. And over time, what began as a reflection of the culture became mistaken for the truth itself.

This is the same pattern I described when I spoke about the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions. The traces of the Feminine that once stood alongside the Divine in ancient Hebrew tradition.

The same erasure.

The same slow disappearance.

The same hand of history quietly removing what it did not understand or could not control.

And so what we inherited was not the whole picture.

We inherited one half of it.

The masculine half.

Named, titled, and placed above everything else.

While the Feminine half: Wisdom, Sophia, Chokmah, was quietly moved to the margins.

Reduced to a chapter in Proverbs.

A metaphor.

A footnote.

But She was never meant to be a footnote.

She was there at the beginning.

Before the world was formed.

She was part of the whole.

And I want to be clear about something.

I am not saying God is feminine.

I am saying God is neither, and both.

I am saying the Divine, in its truest and most original understanding, contains everything.

Masculine and Feminine.

Reaching outward and moving inward.

Speaking and listening.

Creating and holding.

That is wholeness.

And what humanity has been living with for a very long time, is a version of the Divine with one half missing.

Is it any wonder we are out of balance?

Is it any wonder our world reflects that same imbalance back to us. In our relationships, our institutions, our systems, our own inner lives?

We were handed an incomplete picture and told it was the whole truth.

I do not say this in anger.

I say it with grief.

And with hope.

Because you cannot return to something you do not first remember.

AND REMEMBERING! 

I have come to believe, is exactly what is happening now.

The more I dug, the more I kept finding the same thing.

Verses hiding in plain sight.

Words that had been there all along, sitting inside the very texts millions of people claim to follow. Pointing toward something far greater than what most of us had ever been taught.

And I kept asking myself the same question.

How did we miss this?

Another one that stopped me was in:

 1 Corinthians 3:16.

"Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?"

I had heard versions of this before.

Most people interpret it as a reminder to take care of your body.

Don't drink too much. Don't do drugs. Treat yourself well.

But that is not what it is saying.

Read it again.

You are the temple of God.

Not, you should behave as though your body is a temple.

YOU ARE THE TEMPLE.

The Divine does not live in a building.

It does not reside in a cathedral, a church, a synagogue, or a mosque.

It lives in you.

That is a radical statement.

Because if the Divine already dwells within you, then you have never been separated from it.

You do not need to go somewhere to find God.

You do not need an institution to grant you access.

You do not need someone standing between you and the sacred, 

interpreting it on your behalf.

The door is already open.

It has always been open.

It is inside you.

And then I found John 10:34.

Jesus is speaking, and someone has just accused him of blasphemy... of claiming to be God.

His response is extraordinary.

He quotes the Psalms directly.

"Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods'?"

You are gods.

He is not speaking only of Himself.

He is quoting scripture back to the very people who want to stone Him, reminding them that their own texts already said this.

That human beings carry divine nature within them.

Not someday.

Not after death.

Not if they are holy enough or obedient enough or believe the right things.

Now. As they are. As we are.

I sat with that for a long time.

Because it completely reframes everything.

If Jesus was pointing people toward their own inner divinity, then the entire message changes.

It is no longer about reaching upward toward something far away and separate.

It is about recognizing what is already within.

It is the same truth as the temple verse.

The same truth Sophia has been whispering from the margins of Proverbs.

The same truth I had been slowly uncovering throughout my entire journey.

The Divine is not out there.

It is in here.

And then there is John 10:2-3.

"The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out."

What struck me about this passage was not the shepherd.

It was the sheep.

They do not need to be told whose voice to follow.

They already know.

They recognize it.

There is no confusion. No intermediary required to explain it to them. No authority needed to validate what they are hearing.

They simply know.

And I believe that is the deeper teaching.

That each of us carries within us an inner knowing, a capacity to recognize truth when we hear it.

Not because someone told us it was true.

Not because an institution certified it.

But because something deep inside us already recognizes the voice.

That is not blind faith.

That is wisdom.

And then I came across something in the Book of Jeremiah that I genuinely could not believe I had never heard before.

Jeremiah 10:2-4.

"Do not learn the ways of the nations... For the practices of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter."

I read that and I stopped completely.

That is a Christmas tree.

Written in the Old Testament. Centuries before the birth of Jesus.

The decorated tree, cut from the forest, adorned with silver and gold. It was not a Christian tradition. It was an ancient pagan practice. One that predated Christianity by a very long time. And the text is explicitly telling people not to do it.

Because it was a practice of the surrounding cultures.

Cultures whose relationship with nature, with the cycles of the earth, with the Divine feminine expressed through trees and seasons and the natural world, was being actively discouraged.

Sound familiar?

It is the same pattern I had been tracing throughout this entire book.

Ancient traditions... many of them honoring the earth, the feminine, the sacred cycles of nature... absorbed, rebranded, and folded into a new framework.

Their origins quietly forgotten.

Their meaning quietly replaced.

Until what was once a living connection to the natural world became a decoration in a shopping mall.

I do not say this to diminish anyone's Christmas.

I say it because the history matters.

Because when you understand where something came from, you understand something deeper about what has been lost...  and what might still be remembered.

Earlier I promised we would return to Matthew 6.

We are returning to it now.

When I first encountered these words I had already been living them. I had gone within. I had cut out the noise. I had chosen deep meditation over outside answers. I had no idea that what I was doing had been written down centuries before I was born.

Now, having walked through everything we have explored together — Logos, Sophia, the temple within, the sheep who already know the voice — these words carry a weight they could not have carried at the beginning of this book.

"Do not be like the hypocrites... go into your inner room, close the door, and pray in secret."

Here is how the same passage reads in the King James Version, published in 1611: 

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in synagogues" KJV

As I began exploring some of the original Greek words behind the English translation, I noticed meanings that felt significant.

In the Original Greek (OG), the words attributed to Jesus include: 

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites..."
"Go into your inner room, close the door, and pray in secret..."
"Do not use vain repetitions..."
"Your Father knows what you need before you ask."

Greek Meanings

Hypocrites - hypokritai
Originally referred to actors or performers wearing masks and playing a role before an audience.

Closet / Inner Room - tameion
A hidden chamber, inner room, private place, or secret space.

Vain Repetitions - battalogeo

To speak thoughtlessly, mechanically, or with empty repetition lacking awareness, presence, or understanding.

Father Knows - pater / oida
Pater means father, source, or origin. Oida means to know fully, perceive, understand, or be completely aware. The phrase suggests a Divine Presence that already knows and understands our needs before they are spoken.

My Interpretation

To me, these verses point toward something deeply personal and inward.

What I call going within.

Stillness.
Silence.
Inner connection.

Jesus does not appear to be encouraging public displays of spirituality. Instead, He speaks of entering a private place, removing the mask, becoming quiet, and connecting directly with the Divine.

The "private place" is not merely a physical room, but a quiet space within your own mind and heart, where the noise of the world falls away and you can truly listen.

Whether that means sitting in silence, taking a walk in nature, camping alone, turning off your phone for a day, or creating a regular time each week without distractions, the purpose is the same: to reconnect with the Divine already within you.

To me, these verses speak of an intimate relationship with the Divine that exists beyond ritual, beyond repetition, and beyond the need to be seen by others.

Not because it felt religious.

Because it felt true.

This was never about religion.

It was always about going within.

The inner room Jesus described and the stillness I found in the desert are the same place. Different languages. Same door.

And it was never locked.

All of these verses: the temple within, the divine nature of humanity, the inner knowing of the sheep, the ancient tree adorned with silver and gold. They all point toward the same truth.

That what we have been searching for has never been as far away as we were told.

That the sacred is not locked inside an institution.

It is woven into you.

Into the very fabric of your being.

Into the intelligence that beats your heart without you asking it to.

Into the wisdom that knows, even when your mind is uncertain of what is true.

We were handed a version of spirituality that placed the Divine above us, outside us, and beyond us.

Requiring permission.

Requiring intermediaries.

Requiring the right building, the right words, the right authority to grant us access.

Yet the texts themselves. The very texts that tradition is built upon, tell a different story.

They say you are the temple.

They say you are gods.

They say the sheep already know the voice.

They say the Divine was never somewhere else.

It was always here.

It was always you.

I did not arrive at any of this through years of searching in the dark. Much of what I know was shown to me directly. In the clouds, in the stillness, in moments where truth arrived not as a conclusion but as something I simply knew. What took time was not the knowing. It was learning how to speak it into a world where so many people have been so deeply shaped by what they were taught that anything outside of it feels like a threat.

And I say that with compassion, not judgment. Because I understand it. When your entire framework for understanding God, life, and meaning has been handed to you since childhood, the idea that it might be incomplete. 

Or that truth might arrive through someone you weren’t expecting. In a form you weren’t taught to recognize and can feel like an attack on everything you hold sacred.

What strikes me, though, is this: many of the same people who are waiting for Christ to return. Who are watching the skies for something miraculous, have not always been willing to pause and consider what is being placed right in front of them. I am truly not sure what they are expecting. A man descending from the clouds, walking on water, saying believe me now? I am Jesus or will it be Yeshua?

I have laid my hands on people and watched them heal. I have sent healing energy to a woman I did not know was flatlined. I was called to do it without knowing why, and fifteen minutes later, her doctor walked out and said she had come back. I have felt energy move through my body in ways I have no conventional language for. I have witnessed things that have no explanation inside the framework most people were handed.

And yet, so many people have never been taught about energy, about the chakra system, about the energetic body that surrounds every human being. They were never shown what the soul actually is, or what it came here to do. They were given a book, a building, and a set of instructions. And told that was enough. And many are unaware, or unwilling to consider, that books were removed from the sacred texts altogether. I am starting to feel that the books that were removed may be the most important ones to read.

The Gospel of Philip. Found among the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945, speaks extensively about sacred union, the bridal chamber as a spiritual concept, the nature of the Soul, and the Divine Feminine. It also portrays Mary Magdalene in a significantly more prominent role than the canonical gospels.

The Gospel of Mary portrays Mary Magdalene as a spiritual authority who received direct visions and inner knowing from Christ. It emphasizes the Divine within, the soul’s journey, and inner transformation over external religious law. It also shows the male disciples struggling to accept Her authority. Which is itself a statement about the suppression of the Feminine.

Their removal was not accidental. It truly feels as though the church did not want people to know the truth. That the entire system, from the beginning, was built more around control than liberation.

One of the things that struck me most deeply on this journey was the realization that so many human beings have placed a boundary around God. A finishing point. A moment in history where the Divine spoke, and then went silent forever. But that has not been my experience. The God I came to know in the stillness. In the desert, in the darkness, in the unraveling... was not distant or finished. That Presence was alive. Moving. Still reaching. Still speaking. Still creating. And I have come to believe that revelation did not end with a book, or a prophet, or a moment in time. It ends only when we stop listening.

Which is why I am genuinely grateful for this moment in history. For the internet. For information at our fingertips. For the ability to connect with people across the world in an instant. To share, to question, to remember together what was never meant to be forgotten.

For all of it. Every moment that required me to trust what I could feel over what I had been told, I remain deeply grateful.

And if there is one thing I can offer to anyone who is searching. 

It is this.

You do not need a building. 

You do not need permission. 

You do not need the right words or the right tradition or someone else to tell you what is true. 

What I discovered, again and again, is that the answers were never outside of me. They came in the stillness. In the silence. In the moments when I finally stopped reaching outward and turned inward instead. 

That is where I heard it. 

That is where I felt it. 

That is where God was, and has always been waiting. 

Going within is not a spiritual concept. 

It is the most direct path I know. 

Be still. Go inside. Listen. 

What you find there may change everything.

Despite everything. The isolation, the loss, the years of surviving on very little, the moments of feeling completely unseen. I remain deeply grateful.

Grateful for the AWAKENING that broke me open. 

Grateful for the healing that required me to fall apart. 

Grateful for the wisdom that only arrived through experience. Not through books or certainty or someone else telling me what to believe. 

Grateful for the people who stayed, for the lessons that came through those who did not, and for every moment that pushed me further inward until I had no choice but to find what was there.

Grateful, above all, for LOVE. Because in the end, after all the searching, the questioning, the unraveling and rebuilding. LOVE is still the only thing that consistently remains. It is the ground beneath the ground. The truth beneath the story. The thing that every tradition, in its own imperfect language, has been trying to point toward all along.

This book is a reflection of the path I have walked and the understanding I gathered along the way. I do not claim to have arrived. I am still learning, still questioning, still growing… and I hope I always will be.

But this much I know:

You are not just a body. You are a soul. You are part of something far greater than what we have been taught. And the world you are hoping for… a world rooted in love, in balance, in healing, in truth… is not out of reach.

It begins within.

You might not yet be ready to accept that religion is the root of the problem. 

Energy and Souls go way beyond man-made religion... 

And I want to be clear. This is not an attack on anyone's faith.
Many people go to church, to temple, to mosque, simply trying to be good. To love others. To live with meaning. And that is beautiful.

But there is a difference between the person in the pew and the institution around them.

Every religion carries some truth. Every religion also carries the fingerprints of the humans who shaped it, with all their fears, their politics, and their need for control.

It is not Christianity alone. It is not Islam alone. It is not any single tradition.
It is what happens when the Divine gets filtered through human power.
And when half-truths are handed down as the whole truth, generation after generation, the world reflects that back to us.

We are living in that reflection right now.

The goal was never division.

 IMAGINE:
A world our Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father look upon with pride.
A world cleaned up, restored, and made whole. 

The goal was always Heaven on Earth.
That is what remembering is for.

Long before we learned different languages, wore different labels, or divided ourselves by borders, beliefs, and identities, we were simply human.

This alphabet is not about spelling words. It is about remembering ourselves.

Each letter represents a quality that already exists within every person. These are not rules to follow or ideals to chase. They are reminders of what becomes possible when we reconnect with our true nature.

Perhaps humanity has spent thousands of years learning how to survive.

Now it is time to remember how to thrive.!!

A — Awareness
Notice your thoughts, your emotions, and the world around you.

B — Balance
Seek harmony rather than extremes.

C — Compassion
Meet yourself and others with kindness.

D — Discernment
Learn to recognize what is true and what is not.

E — Empathy
Listen with your heart as well as your ears.

F — Forgiveness
Release what no longer serves your peace.

G — Gratitude
Appreciate the gifts already present in your life.

H — Harmony
Celebrate differences while remembering our unity.

I — Integrity
Let your actions reflect your values.

J — Joy
Choose the light that already lives within you.

K — Kindness
Offer goodness freely, expecting nothing in return.

L — Love
Let love guide your thoughts, words, and actions.

M — Mindfulness
Be fully present in this moment.

N — Nourishment
Feed your body, mind, heart, and soul with care.

O — Openness
Remain willing to learn, grow, and understand.

P — Presence
Give others the gift of your full attention.

Q — Questioning
Stay curious, for every answer begins with a question.

R — Respect
Honor the dignity within every person.

S — Service
Use your gifts to make life better for others.

T — Truth
Seek what is real, even when it challenges you.

U — Unity
Remember that beneath our differences, we are one humanity.

V — Vision
Imagine the world you wish to help create.

W — Wisdom
Let experience deepen your understanding.

X — eXploration
Have the courage to discover what lies beyond the familiar.

Y — Yes
Say yes to growth, love, and new possibilities.

Z — Zenith
Become the highest expression of who you are… then begin again with Awareness.

A Note of Gratitude

This book was shaped by a lifetime of experience and a journey I never planned to take. Along the way, countless souls left their mark on my thinking, my healing, and my understanding — teachers I never met, strangers who said one right thing at the right moment, friends who stayed, and friends who left.

Neighbors Who Showed Kindness

I would like to mention the neighbor who taught me to pray. After the wonderful review this neighbor gave me about 4Gratitude.com and my mission, I was excited to share this book with them. I spontaneously invited my neighbor over for breakfast.

Before we ate, my neighbor asked if it was alright to pray. I smiled and said yes.

The prayer began:

"Thank you, Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, for this breath, this life, Your love and guidance..."

It continued with gratitude for the food nourishing our bodies. The moment I heard Heavenly Mother, my face must have lit up.

After the prayer, I asked about it, and my neighbor told me that I had inspired that change. Soon after we met, we had gone on a long walk together and discussed many topics, including the balance of the Feminine and Masculine.

To hear that I had inspired someone to pray to both Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father expanded my light even further. It was a beautiful reminder that even the simplest conversations can quietly plant seeds that continue to grow. 

And since I am planting seeds, I hope to inspire you to see other countries as your neighbors. When we zoom out and look at the greater whole, we are all human. 

The Alphabet of Humanity

The Alphabet of Humanity was inspired in part by a creative soul I encountered on TikTok whose own alphabet reminded me that the simplest ideas often carry the deepest truth. I do not know your name, but I felt you deserved to be acknowledged.

And above all, to the one whose name I carry in my own — whose teachings pointed inward when the world pointed outward, whose life demonstrated what Love in human form actually looks like:

Thank you, Jesus Christ

You were never what they told me you were.

You were so much more.

Continue the Journey

If something in these pages stirred something within you, there is more waiting.

If you scroll down the homepage, you'll find years of writing I've shared since 2020. Looking back, you'll see that the heart of my message has remained the same since I returned. 

I wrote an entire book about love, divine union, and soul connection — and somehow never once mentioned my mate. That story, along with more of my writing, reflections, and whatever comes next, lives at 4Gratitude.com.

Come find us there.

— Jill Christine