Why You May Not Recognize Your Spiritual Gifts

Spiritual Gifts Don’t Always Feel Spiritual 

One of the biggest reasons people question their spiritual gifts is because they expect receiving to feel extraordinary.

They expect a voice, a vision, or something so unmistakable there could be no question about what just happened.

But spiritual gifts don't always arrive that way.

Sometimes it's a thought that seems to come from nowhere. You know something without knowing how. An image flashes through your mind. Your body responds before you understand why. A dream stays with you long after you wake up.

And because the experience happened inside of you, it's easy to assume it was you.

This is something I think we misunderstand about spiritual gifts.

Whatever you believe the source to be—your Higher Self, Divine guidance, spirit, consciousness—the information still has to reach your awareness.

That means it may come through the same mind, body and senses you use every day.

For one person, receiving may feel like knowing. For another, it may come through images, words, physical sensations, dreams or emotion. It doesn't have to look dramatic to be meaningful.

This was part of learning to understand my own channeling. Information would come through that I didn't consciously know, but the experience wasn't always as obvious as you might imagine. Over time, I began recognizing the difference between what I was consciously thinking and what I was receiving.

The gift didn't suddenly appear.

I learned how to recognize it.

We hear someone describe seeing spirit clearly, so we think we're supposed to see.

Someone else hears words, so we wait to hear.

We learn the definitions of clairvoyance, clairaudience or clairsentience and start measuring ourselves against someone else's experience.

Meanwhile, our own gifts may already be communicating with us in a completely different way.

Instead of asking, What am I supposed to experience? I think there is a better question:

How does information naturally come to me?

Start there.

Pay attention to what happens before you explain it away. What did you know before you had time to reason through it? What impressions keep returning? What happens in your body? Do certain kinds of information arrive differently from your ordinary thoughts?

You don't have to label every experience as spiritual. And you certainly don't have to believe every thought is guidance.

Discernment is part of developing spiritual gifts.

But you can't learn to discern something you dismiss before you've even noticed it.

I think we spend too much time asking whether we have spiritual gifts and not enough time learning how we receive.

Your gifts don't necessarily need to become stronger, louder or more dramatic before you can trust that something is happening.

Sometimes what needs to change is your expectation of what receiving is supposed to feel like.

Your spiritual gifts may already be speaking.

They may simply be speaking your language.

Are you ready to understand how your spiritual gifts communicate with you?