Finally finished!!! So excited!!! On Amazon soon! Still undecided about the cover. What do you think?

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter One

Chapter One

If you were charged with identity theft, would the charges stick?

The question is provocative because it asks whether you have participated in the disappearance of your own life. Have you become more pleasing,…

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People love to talk about thinking outside the box. I love to talk about it. It feels like a declaration of freedom. It feels empowering. It gives me language to express a defining moment. An aha! moment in my life. If felt so big until from the outside I walked around it and took another look and another and another. I realized stepping outside the box…

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Sometimes we wonder if life is a collection of unrelated events or is it something more like a sacred conversation. Something inside suggests that there is meaning in all of this collectively or meaning in isolated experiences.

An encounter arrives at precisely the right time. A longing refuses to disappear. A gift keeps pressing toward expression, sayin…

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This is often where the phrase Spiritual But Not Religious, or SBNR, enters the conversation.

For some, SBNR sounds vague, ungrounded, or rebellious. For others, it names the only honest place they can stand. It describes a person who hasn’t abandoned the sacred, but has begun to distinguish between the Divine and the institution, between inner knowing and external permission, between spiritual truth and religious control.

This distinction matters.

Religion and spirituality are related, but they’re very different. Religion is usually organized around shared doctrine, ritual, tradition, sacred texts, clergy, communal identity, and inherited structures of meaning.

Spirituality is the lived experience of connection with the Sacred, the Divine, the Infinite, the Presence, the More, the Ground of Being, the God within and beyond all forms.

Religion gives language. Spirituality gives encounter.

Religion offers a house. Spirituality asks whether the soul is alive inside it.

At its best, religion can be a sacred container. It can teach reverence, discipline, service, moral imagination, and spiritual community. It can preserve wisdom across generations. It can hold grief, bless transitions, cultivate compassion, and remind people they’re part of something larger than themselves.

At its most distorted, religion can become a system of fear, control, shame, exclusion, and spiritual dependency. It can train people to distrust their own inner knowing. It can confuse obedience with holiness, conformity with faith, and institutional loyalty with spiritual maturity.

Spirituality, at its best, restores the soul to direct relationship with the Divine. It awakens the inner life. It invites consciousness, healing, wonder, self-examination, compassion, and transformation. It asks the human being to become spiritually responsible, not merely religiously compliant.

At its weakest, spirituality can become unrooted, consumer-driven, sentimental, or overly private. It can borrow from many traditions without depth, commitment, or ethical accountability. So the question isn’t whether religion is bad and spirituality is good. The deeper question is: What form, language, practice, and community actually help the soul awaken?

That’s the more serious inquiry.

New Thought offers a powerful bridge in this conversation because it doesn’t begin with external authority alone. It begins with consciousness. It teaches that the inner life is creative, that thought, belief, imagination, assumption, word, and spiritual alignment shape how we experience reality. New Thought doesn’t reduce God to doctrine. It understands the Divine as Presence, Principle, Mind, Love, Life, Spirit, and Infinite Intelligence.

This is one reason New Thought has been so compelling for spiritual seekers who’ve moved beyond conventional religious frameworks. It offers spiritual seriousness without requiring a return to fear-based theology. It honors scripture, prayer, metaphysics, consciousness, and spiritual law while making room for direct inner realization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson stands as one of the great ancestors of this movement of consciousness. His essays, especially “Self-Reliance” and “The Over-Soul,” helped articulate a spiritual vision in which the individual soul participates in something universal, eternal, and divine. Emerson didn’t ask the seeker to abandon God. He asked the seeker to stop exiling God to distant systems of approval.

For Emerson, the Divine wasn’t locked inside religious machinery. It was present in nature, intuition, conscience, genius, and the deep interior life. His spirituality was intellectually alive and spiritually daring. He trusted the soul’s capacity to hear Truth inwardly.

That’s one of the major turning points between conventional religion and mature spirituality. Religion often asks, “What have you been taught to believe?” Spirituality asks, “What is becoming true in consciousness?”

Florence Scovel Shinn brought another dimension to this through her practical metaphysics. Her work emphasized the power of the spoken word, divine order, intuition, and alignment with spiritual law. She taught that life isn’t random chaos but a field of correspondence, where consciousness, speech, faith, and expectation participate in the unfolding of experience.

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For the SBNR seeker, Shinn’s teaching can feel liberating because it moves spirituality from abstract belief into daily practice. The question becomes: What am I affirming? What am I expecting? What am I speaking over my life? What inner agreements am I making with fear, lack, love, abundance, or Divine guidance?

Neville Goddard deepened this even further through the power of imagination and assumption. For Neville, imagination wasn’t fantasy. It was spiritual faculty. It was the creative power through which consciousness participates in reality. His teaching challenges the seeker to stop looking only outside for rescue and begin examining the inner state from which life is being perceived and received.

This is crucial for anyone navigating the movement from religion into spirituality. Many people leave a religious system but carry the old God-image with them. They may no longer attend the church, but still live under the psychic architecture of fear, punishment, unworthiness, or divine distance. Neville’s work asks the seeker to revise the inner image. What are you assuming about God? About yourself? About your worthiness? About the future? About what’s possible?

SBNR, at its most mature, isn’t merely leaving religion. It’s revising consciousness.

Ernest Holmes, founder of the Science of Mind movement, gave New Thought a theological and philosophical architecture. He taught that there’s a creative law operating through consciousness, and that spiritual practice aligns the individual mind with the Infinite Mind. Holmes didn’t present prayer as begging a reluctant God. He understood prayer as spiritual realization, an affirmative movement of consciousness into truth.

This is one of the most healing distinctions for spiritual seekers. Prayer doesn’t have to be pleading from separation. It can become communion from union. It can become the disciplined recognition of what’s already spiritually real.

That’s a profound shift.

Many people who identify as Spiritual But Not Religious are not spiritually lazy. Often, they’re spiritually sensitive. They’ve felt the gap between what was preached and what was practiced. They’ve seen doctrine used without compassion. They’ve watched sacred language become a tool of superiority. They’ve experienced the pain of being told that their questions were dangerous when, in truth, their questions were signs of spiritual awakening.

A soul that questions isn’t necessarily rebellious. It may be becoming honest.

This is especially important for those healing from religious trauma. The movement away from organized religion may not be a rejection of God. It may be a movement toward a God no longer filtered through fear. It may be the soul’s attempt to recover its direct relationship with the Divine after years of mediation through guilt, shame, threat, or exclusion.

The sacred question becomes: What did I inherit, and what do I now consciously choose?

That question is the beginning of spiritual maturity.

Religion can give us inherited maps. Spirituality asks us to walk the terrain. Religion may say, “Here is the tradition.” Spirituality asks, “Where is the transformation?” Religion may preserve sacred memory. Spirituality asks whether that memory is becoming living wisdom in the present moment.

The spiritually mature seeker doesn’t need to despise religion in order to grow beyond certain forms of it. There’s no need to burn down every sanctuary in the psyche. Some sanctuaries need to be honored. Some need to be renovated. Some need to be left with gratitude. Some need to be left without apology.

Discernment is part of the path.

There are people who are deeply spiritual inside religious traditions. There are people who are deeply spiritual outside religious traditions. There are people who are religious but not spiritually awake. There are people who are spiritual but not yet spiritually disciplined.

The label isn’t the essence. Consciousness is.

Spiritual But Not Religious becomes most powerful when it doesn’t remain a reaction against religion, but becomes a sacred commitment to inner transformation. It asks for practice, not merely preference. It asks for integrity, not merely independence. It asks for humility, not spiritual performance. It asks for a living relationship with the Divine that expresses as compassion, courage, wisdom, justice, creativity, and love.

New Thought supports this movement because it places responsibility back in consciousness. Emerson reminds us to trust the soul’s inward authority. Florence Scovel Shinn reminds us that word, intuition, and expectation matter. Neville Goddard reminds us that imagination is sacred power. Ernest Holmes reminds us that spiritual law responds to the consciousness we embody.

Together, they form a lineage of spiritual empowerment.

They don’t ask us to merely believe something. They ask us to become conscious.

And perhaps that’s the deepest distinction between religion and spirituality. Religion can tell us what a community believes about God. Spirituality asks what our consciousness has realized of God. Religion can describe the sacred. Spirituality seeks to experience it, embody it, and live from it.

The future of spiritual life may not be found in the old argument between religion and spirituality. It may be found in a more luminous question:

What helps the soul awaken?

For some, the answer will include church, temple, mosque, synagogue, sangha, ritual, scripture, and tradition. For others, it will include meditation, metaphysics, nature, silence, writing, healing, energy work, New Thought, sacred imagination, and direct interior communion. For many, it will be a living combination.

The soul is not always asking us to choose between religion and spirituality. Sometimes it’s asking us to locate the foundation beneath both.

That foundation is the Divine Presence itself.

Not secondhand.

Not inherited without examination.

Not imposed by fear.

Known inwardly. Practiced consciously. Lived honestly.

That is the sacred task of the SBNR seeker: to stop living from borrowed certainty and begin living from awakened consciousness.

And once consciousness awakens, religion may become more spacious, spirituality may become more disciplined, and the seeker may discover that the true temple was never only outside them.

It was also within.

On July 4, 2026, the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially, America250 describes this milestone as an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s past, honor the contributions of Americans, and look toward the future being created for the next generation.

Metaphysically, that language matters.

A…

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On July 4, 2026, the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially, America250 describes this milestone as an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s past, honor the contributions of Americans, and look toward the future being created for the next generation.

Metaphysically, that language matters.

A…

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There are stories that appear to be about escape, until we look more deeply and realize they are about consciousness. Rod Serling’s classic Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” is one of those stories. On the surface, it’s the tale of Gart Williams, an exhausted advertising executive who longs to step out of the harsh machinery of modern life an…

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There are eras that do more than pass through history. They reveal history. They gather what has been hidden beneath the national floorboards and bring it into the visible room. They interrupt the story a culture tells about itself. They unsettle inherited language. They expose the distance between public virtue and private fear, between democratic idea…

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There’s a moment in every awakened life when the old self no longer fits.

It may not arrive dramatically. There may be no thunder, visible sign, or public announcement. It may come quietly, in the stillness after a conversation, the grief of outgrowing an old belief, the ache of no longer being able to pretend, or the holy exhaustion of trying to remain …

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Stillness is an experience that happens within. An experience that becomes a place, a sacred interior chamber where the soul stops negotiating with noise and hears only the thoughts of the self, the space to remember its own center. Stillness isn’t emptiness because you’re there. It isn’t a void because the entire Universe is quietly there. It isn’t spi…

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Karma is often misunderstood as spiritual punishment, cosmic revenge, or some invisible force waiting to “get” people for what they’ve done. I’m curious about everything so I wanted to see what Karma looked like through a different lens. Could Karma be interpreted as instructive verses punitive and divine punishment?

From a metaphysical and New Thought p…

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Karma is often misunderstood as spiritual punishment, cosmic revenge, or some invisible force waiting to “get” people for what they’ve done. I’m curious about everything so I wanted to see what Karma looked like through a different lens. Could Karma be interpreted as instructive verses punitive and divine punishment?

From a metaphysical and New Thought p…

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Time is one of the most persuasive ideas in human experience. We organize our lives around it. We schedule by it, age and grieve by it, remember by it, and often measure our worth by it.

We say we’re running out of time, wasting time, making up for lost time, waiting for the right time, or healing over time. Yet from a metaphysical and New Thought perspe…

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There are lots of formulas for manifesting. Manifesting is generally thought of as the realization of a tangible desire or event that happens hopefully sooner rather than later. Ah! Yes, there is that time factor involved in the thought The unpleasant waiting.

But time isn’t when.

In the metaphysical sense, saying “there is no such thing as time” doesn’t …

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There are moments when life feels less like a series of accidents and more like a sacred conversation. Something happens, an encounter, a wound, a calling, a loss, a longing, a strange inner insistence, and suddenly we sense that life isn’t merely happening to us. It’s revealing something to us and through us.

This is where the idea of The Sacred Contract

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Personal agency is the inner authority to choose, discern, respond, create, and begin again.

There’s a quiet misunderstanding around personal agency. Many hear the phrase and think of willpower, independence, ambition, or the right to do whatever one wants. But personal agency, spiritually understood, is deeper than self-assertion. It’s the sacred capaci…

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