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I can’t remember if I asked this question before, so here goes. When you feel the Spirit, what physical sensations do you experience?
Here it is for me — when I have a light manifestation of the spirit, my tongue rests at the top of my mouth where I feel a tingling feeling I associate with peace. I sometimes feel a thick, warm, tingling feeling come over my chest and neck area. This is the most common manifestation of the Spirit I feel.
When I have a medium experience, my eyes well up with tears and I feel a warm halo around my head and chest.
When I have had powerful spiritual experiences, my eyes water and feel enveloped in a kind of power that is ALMOST painful, but not quite. It is a feeling of energy surrounding my upper body. For a period of time I don’t feel like moving, or
can’tmove — I am not sure which. These experiences are few and far between, having happened only twice in my lifetime and both when I was under the age of 20. I once had an answer to a prayer that made me feel like my Spirit had been split with an axe and tears came forth. Accompanying the tears was a repeating statement in my head that blocked out all other thoughts, telling me what I had to do in a short phrase. This happened only once in my lifetime. Incidentally, I acted on that inspiration and it blew up in my face.
For you, how do you feel when you experience the Spirit?For me it is the sensation to verbalize my feelings or thoughts a gospel principle or lesson. As a missionary, it was to tell the investigator how I felt about a particular topic being taught.
Recently, it was to tell my children & daughters in law how proud I am of how they were raising their children.
(Even though they are not in the church anymore.) They are doing a better job than I did.
It is rare to feel prompted emotionally or have physical sensations.
I can’t say I have a physical or emotional reaction to what I’ve come to recognize as the Spirit. This was a major factor in my faith crisis and a new recognition of how the Spirit interacts with me was/is part of my faith rebuilding. I also believe the Spirit may interact differently with different people (as may God in general). For me it’s a feeling of peace, often felt during prayer and sometimes at other times even randomly. For me, I usually feel it in one of two ways. The first and more common for me these days is a feeling of unique peace. It’s a feeling that can’t be artificially replicated by mediation or anything else. It’s just a quieting of the mind and soul that I can’t really describe. The other is an opposite feeling, more like a shot of adrenaline mixed with anxiety. Like a heavy feeling in the chest that there is something that I need to do.
Either seems rare for me these days though. More than once I’ve been in a room where every other person was in tears and saying how strong the spirit was, while I sat there feeling nothing. It definitely not a feeling I can create on my own. It just seems to come whenever it will.
PazamaManX wrote:
For me, I usually feel it in one of two ways. The first and more common for me these days is a feeling of unique peace. It’s a feeling that can’t be artificially replicated by mediation or anything else. It’s just a quieting of the mind and soul that I can’t really describe.
I like this description of it. You articulated it much better than I could/did. It is not just your average peace, it is unique (peculiar) and that’s how I have come to distinguish it as the Spirit. Definitely not something I would describe as a “burning in the bosom.” I have not tried to replicate it, although I do sometimes randomly feel it as I have pondered or perhaps informally meditated – but that’s an exception, not the rule. As I said earlier, I often, but not always, feel it during prayer. The caveat there is that my prayers are infrequent.
I have had tears come when reading the BoM with a friend. I do not know how to explain the tears. They were super embarrassing at the time. I took that to be the spirit. I have felt a feeling of power/tingling when I helped set a young man apart for missionary service.
I have felt a sense of peace when my soul was in turmoil.
Of course, IMO, it matters less what physical sensations we might experience and matters more what meaning we assign to those sensations. (IOW if I understand that God is telling me to join a particular church based on that sensation – that is very impactful.)
I like the description of the spirit being multifaceted and affecting different people in different ways. I know the Sunday School answer of how the spirit works is too general and I don’t like that it can be pigeonholed into someone saying that you can’t feel the spirit listening to certain types of music etc. For me if I was to quantify it I’ve only had a few instances where I could affirm that the feeling and sensation I had was from both an outside and inside force at the same time.
It is a feeling that I can’t adequately put into words and trying to do so would probably diminish or not convey the feeling and sensation adequately. It is almost an out of body experience, a lifting or expanding spiritually to another plane almost. Physically you can say it’s almost slightly light-headed, but all of these descriptors pale in comparison.
More often it is the feeling of warmth, peace, a sharpening or enlightening of intellect, a relief from doubt or what might have been plaguing me.
Some of these can be mixed, interpreted, and blended with natural human emotions and feelings, making it hard to differentiate what is truly from the spirit and not just from within me.
Another experience and I would relate this closer to the seldom felt more powerful feelings; is the lifting and connecting to everything around me where my physical spiritual mental and emotional are all joined in a connection to the universe. This is also very hard to describe because my description is nothing. But the experience is remarkable.
Could be said that these come and go of their own will, (like the wind, or satori in Zen) but I have had them where I could almost induce them, but it takes a lot of meditation and quieting within. Which I don’t do often enough.
I think we tend to describe it as something unique – or powerful – or particularly special – or uplifting – or some other form of special goodness. I accept that fully. It is whatever it is to me – and you – and everyone.
With how incredibly varied the experiences people report when feeling the spirit, it makes me wonder if what I’m feeling is the spirit or just a chance feeling that happens at different times. Hard to consider “feeling the Spirit” as a reliable method of spirit-detection when everyone feels it so differently. SilentDawning wrote:
With how incredibly varied the experiences people report when feeling the spirit, it makes me wonder if what I’m feeling is the spirit or just a chance feeling that happens at different times. Hard to consider “feeling the Spirit” as a reliable method of spirit-detection when everyone feels it so differently.
IMO, it doesn’t really matter what feelings one attributes to the spirit. What matters is the person’s decision to define those feelings in that way and then the sense of confidence that they can have as they move forward.
I remember having fears about moving forward with my girlfriend (now wife). She seemed perfect for me, but how could I really know how she might change in the future. I prayed every night for weeks to know if I was doing the right thing. One day we did an endowment session at the temple and we were asked to serve as the witness couple. I felt really good kneeling at the altar in the temple with my GF. I took this to be an answer to my prayers and I asked her to marry me.
In this situation, “feeling the spirit” was helpful to gain a sense of confidence to move forward purposefully and holding nothing back.
As missionaries we ask people to search for feelings as they pray or read the Book of Mormon. If they say that they feel good then we reference Galations 5:22-23 to convince them that this good feeling is actually God talking to them through the spirit (as an aside, this is an odd twisting of Paul’s words to the Galations because Paul seems to be saying that the spirit will cause you to DO good and not that good feelings are some sort of holy litmus test to determine truth). Anyway, If that person can identify those feelings as God talking to them then we build on that by trying to identify what God is trying to say.
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