I’m Not the Church Lady | It’s Spooky

||| I’M NOT THE CHURCH LADY from ROSIE KUHN |||

Whether you call it awakening, enlightenment, ascension, grace, expanded consciousness, or simply being fully alive, something seems to be happening. Ordinary people are having extraordinary experiences. They describe moments of profound clarity, unexpected knowing, waves of compassion, overwhelming love, deep stillness, and a sense of connection that transcends their usual understanding of who they are and how life works.

And here’s the thing: these moments are no longer reserved for mystics, monks, gurus, or spiritually advanced people. They are woven into ordinary human life. They are happening while walking the dog, washing dishes, sitting with a friend, grieving a loss, folding laundry, or watching Netflix. No woo-woo required. No special beliefs required. No need to decide whether it was God, intuition, coincidence, grace, synchronicity, quantum physics, or the Unified Field. The experience itself is. And for many people, how they describe that moment?

“It’s spooky.”

When people have these moments—when the boundaries between self and other blur, when time seems to stop, when synchronicities arise, when forgiveness dissolves decades of resentment, when an impossible knowing appears, when miracles happen, or when love that doesn’t belong to any one person is simply true—the last thing they usually say is: “I have just experienced a non-dual state of consciousness characterized by an expanded awareness of the unified field.”

Nope.

What they say is, “That’s crazy.” “That can’t be right.” “I must be making it up.” “It’s just a coincidence.” “What the heck just happened?” And perhaps my favorite: “It’s spooky.”

For most of us, these experiences don’t fit our understanding of how life is supposed to work. We live in a world that values facts, evidence, material proof, and certainty. If we can’t measure it, explain it, research it, or categorize it, we often automatically dismiss it. Yet, despite the fact there is no scientific proof—people continue to have these experiences. What the….?

Quite a few of my clients, in fact, are currently describing unexplainable waves of something within themselves. They speak of an awareness they didn’t have before. An opening. A knowing. A clarity that suddenly provides options and choices that weren’t available to them moments earlier. Not only are they becoming aware of these new possibilities, but they also choose them.

One client recently said, “Up until that moment, I didn’t even have access to those tools. Nor would I have used those tools. And I just did something I would never have done before. What the heck?”

Exactly! What the heck?

That’s Spooky

I think “spooky” is often a great response when encountering something outside our ordinary map of reality. Not spooky as in frightening, but spooky as in: “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened according to what I thought was possible. Something knew me before I knew myself. Something connected events that seemed unrelated. Something dissolved my certainty about who I am and how reality works.

Something opened a doorway that I didn’t even know existed.”

Over the years, I’ve been blessed to work with ACISTE—the American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences. I’ve listened to people describe profound spiritual experiences in countless ways. They’ve called them awakenings, breakthroughs, moments of grace, encounters with God, glimpses of Oneness, and transformational shifts in consciousness. I’ve heard stories of the unfathomable, the miraculous, the deeply loving, and yes, the spooky.

I’ve had my own experiences too—hundreds of them. One of them involved being hugged by an Angel. Yep. I have absolutely no words to describe that moment, and yet it remains unfathomably exquisite.
A few years ago, I offered a workshop at the Senior Center on Orcas Island called, “Am I Crazy or Did I Just Have a Spiritually Transformative Experience?” It was so popular that it became a monthly gathering where people could safely share their non-ordinary experiences. Again and again, someone would say, “I thought I was the only one.” And someone else would respond, “Nope. That happened to me too.”
I’m not sharing any of this to convince you of the existence of non-ordinary states of consciousness. I’m simply sharing that these experiences occur—more frequently than many of us realize—to ordinary people.

People like you and me.

I’m Not Crazy—Thank God!

Perhaps the greatest relief comes when we realize we’re not crazy. We’re not special. We’re not required to adopt a new belief system, be more spiritual, or become some Guru. We simply begin to trust our own lived experience.

The Need to Quantify and Qualify
It’s pretty common for us humans to try to grok our “spooky experiences.” The moment we start explaining these experiences, we unintentionally move them into the realm of concepts. They become something to believe in, rather than something we have lived. Experts in spirituality, psychology, neuroscience, and quantum physics often rush in to explain them, to legitimize them, to make them real. And perhaps those explanations have their place. However,….

I wonder if there is another invitation available to us.

What if we simply stayed? What if we stayed with the awe, with the wonder, with the mystery?
What’s that like to be in experience without immediately dismissing it, diagnosing it, analyzing it, explaining it, or turning it into certainty?

I know. This is a big ask. I regularly practice this whenever some unexplainable and whacky thing shows up! It’s like training your puppy to sit and stay: “Stay? Stay? Stay? STAY!!!”
We rarely allow ourselves to simply experience our experience. Instead, we think about it, interpret it, assess it, qualify it, quantify it, and attempt to control it. In doing so, we often lose the exquisiteness of the moment itself.

How Do We Explain the Unexplainable?
There are words that mean unexplainable, ineffable, unknowable. But that doesn’t stop us from trying to share such an experience with others. One of my clients said to me recently, “I only know myself through metaphors.” Jeesh.

Don’t we all?

We say we were touched by grace, flooded with love, cracked open, lifted by something larger, or stopped in our tracks. We reach for metaphors because ordinary language cannot fully hold what we have experienced. The metaphors help us get close, but they can never quite articulate the embodied truth of the moment.
That’s okay. Because life isn’t asking us to explain everything. The mystery isn’t asking to be solved. We are just being asked to just experience the isness of is—the moment as it is—no thinking required. And those asks are coming more frequently to more of us!

Now I think that’s fun!

These spooky moments free us, if only briefly, from our addiction to certainty and control. For an instant, we stand at the edge of what we know, only to discover that life is larger, stranger, weirder, more fantastic, extraordinary, and more connected than we ever imagined.

What an invitation.

And yes, it is a little spooky.”

Every Sunday morning at 10 AM, pacific time, I’m now hosting a live radio show on KIXP 102.3 FM called I’m Not the Church Lady. The show is a slightly irreverent (and playful) conversation exploring spirituality, everyday life, and the mystery of being human.

If you’re out of reach of the radio signal in Eastsound, WA, you can livestream the show at KIXP.org or listen to the recordings at Dr. Rosie Kuhn on KIXP FM