One morning in late January, I found out. I now believe it was every energy that supports me declaring, “Tracey, this is how you do it.”

I picked a track: thirty minutes of chanting and singing meant to awaken gratitude for being here, in this body. But getting past that first five minutes was often the biggest challenge in those early days. Distracting myself with reading about the teacher, the track, quelling the “am I doing it wrong” narrative. Finally, finally getting quiet. Closing my eyes, I pushed away the doubts and settled on a mantra of “I am here.”

The response was immediate. Transported to the deck of our cabin in the Sierra foothills, I was looking out at the trees and a wave of gratitude came up through me so fast I started to cry. Not misty. Big crying. It went on for over a minute, just me and the gratitude…and then joy…and then love. Overwhelming. And then my conscious mind woke up. What if my wife hears me and thinks I’m being silly? That thought put me right back in my body, embarrassed. Bliss or self-consciousness. Ugh.

I wanted to get back to that ecstasy. Focus on breath, eyes, scalp, neck, hands. Mantra. Again. Breath, eyes, scalp, neck, hands. Mantra.

And then there was a ball of energy in my hands.

This is where the question of perception stops being abstract. I did not see a ball of energy, exactly. I felt it, the way you feel anything you’re holding. It had size and presence. Like a fiery basketball. And it wasn’t behaving the way energy had behaved in other meditations, where it flowed through me on its own schedule. This just sat there in my hands, waiting. I had to decide what to do with it.

So I squished it. I packed it like a snowball, and the energy went up into my arms. I squished and squished until all the energy was in me. I then looked up, if “looked” and “up” mean anything with your eyes closed on the floor of the spare bedroom, and I saw beams of light coming down the way sun comes through a break in clouds, through an opening in a ceiling that wasn’t there. I grabbed one like it was a rope and pulled it toward me. Piled it up, packed it, squished it, took in the energy. Did it again.

And then, instead of pulling the next beam down, I climbed it. Hand over hand, like the rope in gym class, which, for the record, I never made it to the top of. This time there was a top. I got to the edge and I could see that I was quite in the dark down below. I knew that represented the earth, the physical body, the ordinary. I could see glorious light above, as I grabbed the edge and pulled myself up into the light.

Here is what I can still describe in detail, five years later: standing up on a pedestal, rotating in this glorious, warm, healing, cleansing light. The mantra shifted on its own. I am cleansed. I am energy. I am the light. And when I noticed I’d gone nearly translucent, the light filling me from head to toe and my chest puffed out, the image that arrived was Superman. Not flying. Just standing there, lit up. That powerful. Possibly that good. I basked, taking it all in.

Then it faded, the way these things do, and I was back on the floor with the mantra I’d started with. I am here.

What that morning taught me, beyond the obvious lesson that the deep end is deeper than advertised, is how I receive.

Because look at what actually happened, sense by sense. There were images, detailed ones, but they lived in the mind’s eye, the same screen where memory plays. There was touch, and the touch was not in the mind’s eye at all. My hands were doing things. The tears were real and wet. And there was language, arriving rather than composed. I didn’t decide to change my mantra. It changed, and I noticed.

I’d been asking how a person perceives a world she can’t see, and the answer, at least for me, turned out to be: with everything. Inner sight for the pictures. The body for the energy. Some quiet channel underneath language for the words. Your equipment may be tuned differently. Some people get sound. Some get color. Some get nothing visual at all, just a feeling that arrives with more authority. The only way to find out what you’ve got is to lie down, turn it on, and pay attention.

Was any of it real? That probably depends on your definition of real. But I can tell you that I remember that morning the way I remember things that happened. Not like a dream, which is gone by lunch. Like an event. My hands still remember the weight of the light.

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I was also deep into a podcast about the medium Edgar Cayce, and one episode covered angels, faeries, and the unseen forces around us. The host said we all have the ability to see these beings in other dimensions. We just have to be open to it, at the right consciousness. I was totally into that, but really? From the journal, January 20th: “It will be a sign I’m in the right direction if I see one of these unseen forces like a faerie or brownie. Hopefully I will realize it when it happens!!”

Two exclamation points. It was kind of a joke, but secretly, I wanted that sign.

The same day, I hung a whiteboard in my home office. My wife informed me I couldn’t leave it blank, that a whiteboard needs something written on it. Fine. I wrote my job description: Sell wine. And underneath, my loftiest professional goal: DRC.

If you don’t sell wine for a living: DRC is Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the most exalted producer in Burgundy. And the most expensive…like $5000 a bottle expensive. The kind of wine that gets allocated, fought over, and locked in cages. Nobody needs to be “sold” DRC. Writing it on a whiteboard was pure aspiration.

That afternoon, my phone rang. In wine sales these days, the phone does not ring. New clients do not call you; you chase them, charm them, buy them lunch. But there he was, a brand new client, out of nowhere. He wanted DRC. He bought everything I had, asked what else I could get, and wanted other high-end wines while I was at it.

His name was Jason Angel.

I ask to see an angel. Within a day, an Angel calls me on the telephone and buys the exact wine written on my whiteboard. Not a shimmering being of light. A client. With a purchase order.

From the journal, January 21st: “Is it a sign? I have to say yes on that one. Obviously I have not raised my vibration enough to see an angel but I think I’m on the right track.”

I told you in my first post that the universe is very literal. This was the first time I caught it in the act, filling an order exactly as written, down to the name. It would not be the last. (There’s still that phone call involving a 401K and seventy-seven thousand dollars. Soon.)

I still have the whiteboard. I’m a little more careful what I write on it now.

TR

Have you had a moment of total synchronicity? I’d love to hear about it…

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January 3rd, 2021. Twenty-three days after I wrote This journal is dedicated to my spiritual journey in that blank black notebook, I finally sat down to meditate.

I know. I know. I was already worried the procrastination thing was surfacing once again. But I had promised myself no rules, no pressure, no schedule. The only commitment was to show up when it felt right. January 3rd, it felt right.

I set up in the spare room, the same little bench, the same blue blanket that I’ve already described, and opened the Insight Timer app. Then I nearly talked myself out of it. The meditation app kept glitching. I switched to Google music only to find it had been cancelled. Looking back, I honestly think it was a test. I could have easily called it a technical failure and gone to make coffee. I almost did. But something made me stay. I went back to Insight, found some piano music that reminded me of George Winston’s December album, hit play, and hallelujah, it worked. I sat there with my hands on my knees, wondering what exactly I thought I was doing.

What I was expecting: transcendence. A sign. Some immediate confirmation that I was on the right track.

What I got: a sore back, a very busy mind, and a to-do list I couldn’t stop writing in my head.

Here is what nobody tells you about meditation when you’re starting out: it is almost entirely an exercise in noticing how little control you have over your own thoughts. I spent the first several minutes of that first session composing what I was going to write in my journal afterward. I was performing for a future audience…and I knew it was happening! I was meditating about meditating. If that isn’t an <insert roll eyes>, I don’t know what is.

But somewhere around the ten minute mark, something shifted. Slowed down. I started to forget my hands. Then I’d remember them. Then forget again. I slipped, briefly, into something that felt almost like the edge of sleep, that hypnagogic state where the body gets a little twitchy and the mind loosens its grip. I came back. I tried again. I kept going.

When I opened my eyes, I sat for a minute before I wrote anything down. And what I wrote surprised me.

Focus on the process, not the results.

I hadn’t planned it. It arrived the way things arrive in that loosened state…not quite a thought, more like a knowing. I wasn’t sure if it was my own voice or something else. I’m still not sure. But I wrote it down and I kept going.

January 6th. My second meditation. I woke up early and went straight to it, which felt virtuous. I chose a drumming track with “energy” in the title. And then…I had back pain. My neck kept drooping. I kept trying to bring my attention back to my breath and losing it again almost immediately. I asked the universe to raise my vibration, a sentence I could not have conceived writing five years ago, yet tried to imagine the top of my head opening to receive whatever was being offered.

Nothing profound happened. I wrote in my journal: Nothing profound today.

January 8th, morning. Fifteen minutes of guided meditation. Very monkey mind. An itch on my eyebrow derailed me for a full minute. I noted that my back hurt again, that I’d had to readjust and shake it out mid-session, and that I kept drifting to thoughts about whether meditation could literally strengthen the brain (I’d read a study) which was itself a fairly impressive act of monkey mind, turning a meditation about stillness into a research project.

I gave the track four out of five stars anyway.

January 8th, evening, was different.

I hadn’t wanted to meditate. I was attempting sober January and after five days of no alcohol, I was definitely not feeling the benefits. No bounding energy, and my face, still puffy. I’d weighed myself that morning and the number hadn’t moved (not even water weight!), and I couldn’t quite shake the sour mood. I reasoned with myself the way I used to about karate: even when I felt at my worst going in, I always felt better after class. So I sat down and found a track called Deep Cleansing and Healing with Archangel Michael by Sofia Light Jewel, which is exactly the kind of title that would have made me roll my eyes six months earlier. Today I chose it without hesitation.

The guide led me through surrounding myself with light, inviting Archangel Michael in to clear away negativity with what she described as a sword of blue light, moving through each chakra. I tried to imagine each part of the body, but heck if I knew what root or sacral meant. When she reached the eyes (I know where those are!), “opening the veils”, she said something about who we are and who we have been, about leaving behind the negativity from past lives and sending what doesn’t belong in this life back to source. Something resonated.

And then inside me, I felt I am Giuseppi repeat and repeat.

Giuseppi is the World War II submariner I encountered in a past life regression years ago — a man who died carrying the weight of a failure he could never release. It wasn’t just that Giuseppe felt failure, but that he thought he let everyone down - crewmates, family, country. I had spent years trying to figure out what my current relationship with him was. I certainly knew that weight of failure, and of letting people down. Was that Giuseppi or was that me? Was I carrying something that didn’t belong to me?

What the guide said next felt directed right at me: accept and forgive yourself. I let it sink in for a moment, and I started to cry a little. I felt, for the first time, that I was accepting Giuseppi as part of me with no judgement…not a past mistake to be corrected.

I wrote in my journal: I felt love surround me, starting inward at my core and moving outward. Quite overwhelming.

Eight days in. I was not expecting any of that.

January 9th. I sat with no backrest and cupped hands, karate-style, and got emotional again, though this time more gently. I found a peaceful place in my mind that reminded me of Janet’s void from The Good Place…a room of one’s own inside the silence, alone but not lonely. I noted that when I woke up that morning, I had thought about writing, about this project, about the daunting task I had set myself across more than one lifetime, apparently, and for the first time I didn’t feel the familiar undertow of dread. The weight of the thing was still there. The dread wasn’t.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I wrote it down anyway.

January 10th. Five sessions in. I put on a guided track — Om Shanti Ananda, finding the stillness in silence. The teacher said something early on that I underlined in my mind: find the space between words, between thoughts, between breaths. That extra moment of stillness. Respond, don’t react.

Then we were instructed to chant Om Shanti Ananda, and to return to the chant whenever we wandered.

And as I got started, my inner critic, right on schedule, said: you’re not doing it right.

I almost laughed. Ten days into a meditation practice and the committee in my head had already convened to evaluate my performance. I stayed with it for a moment — the critic, the chant, the slight absurdity of the whole situation — and then something came through, the same thing that had come through on day one:

It’s the process, not the result.

There it was again. Process, not results. Not a mantra I had chosen. One that seemed to have chosen me.

Five sessions. Two visits from the same message. Maybe there is something to pay attention to here.

I’m trying to be honest about what those first ten days looked like from the outside, because I think it matters for anyone considering their own experiment. There was no dramatic awakening. There was back pain and monkey mind and a track I abandoned after three minutes because I couldn’t stand the production quality. There was a morning I nearly skipped because my meditation app crashed. There was an evening I meditated specifically to improve my mood about a number on a scale, which is not exactly the stuff of spiritual enlightenment.

Yet inside all of that, between the itch and the to-do list and the inner critic and the drooping neck: something was building. A signal I was learning to recognize. A phrase that kept returning. A tearful moment I hadn’t seen coming. A morning without dread.

Process, not results.

I was beginning, slowly, to believe it.

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In December 2020, something was pulling at me with a seriousness I couldn’t really put my finger on. Not a crisis exactly. More like a deadline I couldn’t figure out. I found a blank notebook and wrote on the first page: This journal is dedicated to my spiritual journey.

And then I procrastinated for another month before I did the first meditation.

I had no religious training to speak of — a Catholic mother, a Jewish father and no real tradition to draw from. Baptized, a few catechism classes, saying grace at Grandma’s house and decorating a “Hanukkah bush” at Christmastime was the extent of it. No guidance or education in any real sense. When I was seven I went to church with a friend and came home excitedly talking about how the angels were falling from the clouds because I accepted Jesus as my savior. I wasn’t allowed to play with that friend anymore.

In sixth grade, I discovered C.S. Lewis, read and reread in the Buffalo Grove Public Library until I understood, somewhere around age thirteen, that Aslan had another name. The seeds of my spirituality were planted by a children’s fantasy series about a lion and a wardrobe. Maybe embarrassing or maybe kind of perfect depending on how you look at it.

What I wanted, in this mid-life moment, was to stop looking for the door through other people. Psychics, past life regression sessions, Edgar Cayce, Sylvia Browne — I had spent decades asking other people to tell me what I already suspected: that we are eternal beings having a physical experience, that consciousness survives the body, that the energy of the universe is available to anyone who learns how to be quiet long enough to receive it. I wanted to find out for myself.

So I became the experiment. The rules I set were simple: meditate, write about it. Don’t read instruction manuals. No Google. Find my own way in, and document whatever I found there.

What I found, in the first week, was that my hands buzzed.

It sounds ridiculous. I know it sounds ridiculous. But somewhere between five and fifteen minutes into most sessions, the palms of my hands would begin to feel electric, almost uncomfortably warm, and that sensation became my signal…something is here. Something is happening. Whether the something was neurological or spiritual, I couldn’t say. I still can’t. What I can say is that the feeling became reliable, and reliability, in matters of faith, is not nothing.

And that buzzing energy brought me back to another long past karate class. Whether I hated meditation or not, I had to attend class to graduate to the next level. Was this meditation stuff for real? This time I went with a plan. I sat on the mat, hands in the traditional hokkai-join with right hand cupped in the left, thumbs lightly touching. Eyes half closed, the candle flame in the center of the circle dancing and blurring as Sensei recited the lesson, her voice drifting away as I put my question to the universe. Why am I here?

Yes, that is the question I asked. Why am I here? Why shouldn’t I start with the most ancient existential query?

I repeated and repeated that simple phrase, definitely not expecting an answer. I felt like Natalie Wood in The Miracle of 34th Street, swinging her legs as she recited, “I believe, I believe, it’s silly, but I believe.”

Minute after minute I kept my mantra going, blocking out Sensei, the candle, the singing bowl. Filling my mind with those four words. And then it started. The buzzing. First in my thumbs, a tingle, then in my hands, a wave. A wave emanating up and around and out into the rest of my body. And all I can say is I felt love. And not just any love, the kind of love that makes your eyes well up. The kind of love that is all the things. Supportive, unconditional, overwhelming.

Like a six year old bursting into tears when Mommy forgives her for jumping on the bed and breaking the lamp. Or a 49 year old bursting into tears when all her friends yell Surprise! for that almost milestone birthday. This feeling of being seen, of being accepted, that I will be carried gently through this life whether I know it or not. I was cracked open with every vulnerability exposed, yet I was being held in a cocoon of love. I could feel it. I was overwhelmed by it, and tears streamed down my face as I vibrated to this truth that our true essence is love, that, and I know this sounds super woo, that is what we are, have been and shall be unto eternity. Question answered.

That was twenty years ago. I filed it away and spent the next two decades looking everywhere else. But tarot cards and psychic readings can be vague as hell. Even a very vivid past life regression where I came up as a World War II submariner named Giuseppi who died carrying the weight of failure didn’t convince me 100%.

I was looking everywhere except the one place the proof actually lived, which was in twenty minutes of silence with my eyes closed and my hands on my knees, buzzing.

When that buzzing came back, I recognized the signal. I finally had a destination. The question became, could I get there intentionally? Not once upon a time sitting on a training mat twenty years ago, but reliably, repeatedly on an ordinary Tuesday morning in a Napa apartment with my wife sleeping across the hall.

Turns out you can.

Ask for five minutes. Listen for fifteen

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So I sat down on the little bench at the foot of the bed in the spare room, blue blanket over my legs, headphones on, and opened one of those blank books. I wrote: This journal is dedicated to my spiritual journey. I had no idea what that meant yet.

Here’s who you’re dealing with: not a pastor, not a therapist, not a yoga teacher. A wine sales rep. A band geek. A pickleball enthusiast. Gay, married (spoiler: not now), no real religious upbringing to speak of...a Catholic mom who lost her church, a Jewish dad who wore a yarmulke at the cemetery and otherwise kept his faith quietly to himself. What filled that gap was C.S. Lewis and a children’s library card, and later, in junior year English class, Emerson’s “The Over-Soul”... the idea that we are all connected, that there is a universal energy we can tap into for support, for answers, for something.

The seed got planted and, well, kind of just sat there. Over the decades I visited psychics, explored past life regression, read the Celestine Prophecy and Edgar Cayce, collected the idea that there are no coincidences. I believe in spirit guides and the energy of the universe. I also have strong opinions about Burgundy vintages and WNBA draft picks. These facts coexist without apology.

Basically, I watered that seed of universal energy for thirty years with everything but the one thing that would get me there: stillness. It was time to find out.

I’ve long been a fan of the “I did this for a year” memoir, so I decided to run my own experiment. Simple and specific: every day, meditate. Write down what happened. Repeat. No classes, no guru, no certification required. Just, find my own way in and document whatever I find there.

One question underneath it all: can a regular person with no credentials, no lineage, no religious authority, access this invisible world directly? My hypothesis — yes. Everyone can. The door is always open. We just keep closing it.

Four notebooks and hundreds of meditations later, I can tell you a few things. First, there’s a method here, and it’s simpler than you think. Ask for five minutes. Then listen for fifteen. That’s most of it. Second, the universe, it turns out, is very literal. And apparently keeps excellent records. There’s a story involving a phone call, a 401K, and seventy-seven thousand dollars that I’ll get to soon. It still makes me shake my head. Third, sometimes the universe answers a question you didn’t know you were asking. My niece Kaitlyn died in early 2021. The grief was real and piercing. However, what followed deepened everything.

This Substack is where I put it all out. Essays about what I found. Practical how-to posts drawn from actual journal entries. Guided meditations built from my own process. Shorter reflections when something comes up that can’t wait for a full essay. My Spirituality Experiment is my accountability to all those stutter starts with writing: comedy, The Moth, so many orphaned journals, a career in copywriting instead of creative writing. (And maybe I’ll tell you about how the psychic told me I need to get started by age 53.)

But here’s what this is not: a conversion project. I’m not asking you to believe what I believe or adopt my framework or follow any particular path. I’m asking something much simpler. Get quiet for a few minutes a day and see what happens.

I’m not the guru. I’m the experiment. There’s a difference, and it matters. I can still see myself on the bench. Blue blanket. Headphones. Staring at that blank notebook.

I’ve been seeking the punchline my whole life, but the joke might just be on me. I had no idea what was coming. But that’s the only way any experiment works.

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My Spirituality Experiment is exactly what it sounds like — one year, daily meditation, four notebooks, one question: can a regular person harness the energy of the universe without a church, a guru, or a certification?

Check out the first post. Subscribe if it resonates. I’m glad you’re here.

— TR