This blog post is the story of my spiritual experiences—in a world where “soul” and “spirit” are often unspeakable.
Spirituality is usually seen as subjective and deeply personal—something you keep to yourself. (Still with me? Thank you!)
This isn’t a theoretical discussion. It’s a personal account of where I’ve got to so far in coming to terms with what soul and spirit mean to me.
It’s less about belief, and more about how I experience being in the world.
If you read on, you’ll learn things about me that I don’t usually talk about. This is the first step toward writing about music and soul. (Watch this space!)
Knocking on the door
People usually talk about spirituality when they’re trying to convert someone. Like the three friendly evangelists from a mainstream Protestant sect who knocked on our door this morning.
“Why don’t you want to talk to them?” my husband asked. “You’re looking for people to talk about spirituality—and they want to talk to you.”
I’ve had plenty of experience with missionaries. I don’t think they’d be telling me anything new.
I’m not here to convert anyone to my way of thinking. But I no longer want to stay silent about my spiritual experiences.
Growing up without sacred rituals
I spent my childhood attending the sacred ceremonies of other cultures, because my father was a social anthropologist.
It took me a while to realise that my family had no sacred ceremonies of our own. My parents didn’t even do Christmas with any real enthusiasm.
My parents—Ralph and Sue Bulmer—were 20th-century scientists. Creative, radical, big-picture thinkers. (I’ve written separate posts about my mum and my dad.)
But I can’t remember a single conversation with either of them that included the words “soul” or “spirit.” They simply didn’t exist in our family system.
Soul was the elephant in the room—tucked under the carpet, unseen but it was still there.
The unspeakable
If you can’t talk about something, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But it’s hard to make sense of it when it stays unspoken.
And because spiritual experience—especially of the mystical kind—exists beyond intellect, it’s hard to put into words.
Still, I believe that’s no excuse not to try. Like any difficult skill, it takes practice.
In my family, it was considered rude to talk about religion or spirituality. The assumption was that it would cause offense or discomfort. It was, quite literally, unspeakable.
And this discomfort isn’t unique to my family. People who aren’t part of a church often don’t want to think about spirituality at all. Many dismiss it with Karl Marx’s line: “Religion is the opium of the masses.”
But spirituality isn’t the same as religion.
What do we mean by “spirituality”?
Even defining these terms isn’t straightforward. But here are a few working definitions:
- Soul: “The spiritual or immaterial part of a human being.”
- Spirit: “The non-physical part of a person, the seat of emotions and character; the soul.”
- Sacred (Cambridge Dictionary): “Considered holy and worthy of respect, especially because of a connection with a god.”
- Holy: “Dedicated or consecrated to God or a religious purpose; sacred.”
And religion? It’s the organized, communal form of spirituality. Spirituality gives the individual autonomy to interpret soul and spirit, while religion offers communal structure, tradition, and worship.
Trouble arises when any belief system—religious or secular—claims to be the only right one, leaving no space for diversity or respectful disagreement.
I’ve heard words like “new age psycho-babble,” “deluded,” “ignorant,” “primitive,” “charlatan”—and of course, “crazy.”
In the 20th century, talking about spiritual experiences outside religion was a fast track to being labelled mentally ill.
Even speaking or writing openly about mental illness was risky. It’s a little safer now. I think.
Courageous voices
I owe a debt of gratitude to women like Gloria Steinem, who not only stood tall as a feminist icon but also wrote Revolution from Within, and Brené Brown, whose The Gifts of Imperfection and The Power of Vulnerability openly wove spiritual awakening into conversations about mental health.
Brené talks about her own “breakdown-slash-spiritual awakening.” (More on the spiritual/mental health connection later.)
No churches, no creed
Both my parents came from Protestant backgrounds, but they kept their children well away from the church. Occasionally, we visited ancient cathedrals—for historical interest, not spiritual formation.
My father, Ralph, descended from a long line of Anglo-Welsh Anglican ministers, ending with his great-grandfather. A huge oil painting of the Archdeacon John Hughes—my father’s illustrious ancestor—hung in my grandmother’s house. His eyes followed you around the room like a Hogwarts portrait.
Dad stopped attending church the moment he left boarding school. But when he was dying of cancer in 1988, he joined his local Anglican parish.
My mother, Sue, grew up in Pasadena, California—rational, secular, raised in the shadow of Caltech. In her teens, she and her older sister explored churches and joined the Pasadena Presbyterian Church. The minister was youthful, politically active, and the choir was lively. But when Sue left Pasadena, she also left Christianity behind, permanently.
Science and the sacred
In our family, science came closest to being sacred. So did social justice—especially showing respect to folks of other cultures, skin colours and beliefs.
Given this background, it wasn’t surprising when at least one of my brothers declared himself a staunch atheist. At six years old, he applied to join the Cub Scouts.
“Do you believe in God, boy?” asked the Scoutmaster.
“No,” he replied.
“I’m sorry—you can’t join.”
The Brownies never asked those questions. They just assumed we’d fall into line.
Surprisingly, I’ve never been an atheist. I’ve always had a quiet sense of the divine—something larger than myself. I wouldn’t call it a belief. It’s more of a knowing.
But I couldn’t reconcile that knowing with anything I learned about Christianity.
I wasn’t a Christian. But I wasn’t an atheist or an agnostic either.
There didn’t seem to be a category for what I was.
Into the mystic
As a child, I had moments of joy and bliss that didn’t make logical sense.
I remember one vividly: I was six, sitting with my mother, singing the three ukulele songs she’d just taught me. I was overwhelmed by a wave of joy. I thought, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
But the moment passed. Mum stopped making music soon after, and I was sent to violin lessons, which were more painful than joyful.
Later, I joined a junior orchestra, and while the violins were probably out of tune and scratchy, playing Bizet’s Farandole felt exhilarating. Something lit up inside me.
There were other moments, often in nature—sitting on a mountain in the Kaironk Valley of Papua New Guinea, or picking my way across a tropical reef at low tide. Joy, peace, connectedness.
But there were darker moments too: sudden, inexplicable fear. A creeping sense that something wasn’t right. Premonitions, nightmares, sensations that made my skin crawl. I didn’t talk about any of it. I thought I was weird—or possibly crazy.
Years later, I discovered two terms that made sense of these experiences: mysticism and peak experiences.
Maslow, James, and the mystic mind
The psychologist Abraham Maslow put “peak experiences” at the top of his famous hierarchy of needs. He described them as:
“… rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect …”
Mysticism, I learned, is more than isolated moments of bliss—it’s a worldview. A way of being.
According to William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
“In mystic states, we both become one with the Absolute and become aware of our oneness.”
Mysticism shows up in every major religion. In Christianity, you’ll find it in the writings of St. Francis of Assisi, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich. Sufism is a form of Islamic mysticism.
But for me, mysticism isn’t a belief or a choice—it’s simply how I’m wired.
Nature mysticism and yearning for apples
Some people arrive at mysticism through meditation, or psychedelics. (LSD and meditation famously turned the Beatles into mystics.)
Martha Beck, in Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, suggests that more people are being born as mystics in Western culture—perhaps because their insights are needed in a time of ecological and social crisis.
I came to understand myself as a nature mystic. I feel deeply connected to animals, plants, landscapes. I have an affinity for apple trees, European herbs, and foxes.
If I’d grown up in the UK, this might’ve felt straightforward. But I spent much of my childhood in Papua New Guinea, where the intense tropical climate pushed me inward. I loved the vivid colours and exotic fruits—but I longed for apples and parsley.
Family ghosts and hidden power
Though my mother was thoroughly secular, she had an uncanny streak in her scientific work. She could look at a landscape and see invisible human patterns from the past. She had an instinct for chosing excavation sites that bordered on the mystical – but was proved accurate, time and time again.
My father’s side had its own mystical lineage. My grandmother had books like The Power of the Pendulum. My grandfather’s Welsh aunties reportedly saw nature spirits. Dad himself claimed to have once seen a ghost at his Cambridge college.
And yet, they lived in Papua New Guinea—a country where sorcery and magic are traditional power structures—and managed to act like it didn’t have anything to do with us.
My father’s mentor in the Eastern Highlands was a community leader and a practicing sorcerer.
Looking back, I believe sorcery was sometimes directed at our family. A few personal experiences lead me to this conclusion, though they still sit in the “unspeakable” category.
Even though my father was doing work he loved in a country he cherished, he was plagued by stress, depression, and chronic back pain. (There are rational explanations—but not always sufficient ones.)
Once, when we lived in Port Moresby, he found a strange pile of objects—including what might have been human bones—hidden in his office. His office was messy enough to conceal anything.
I don’t believe you need to believe in something for it to affect you.
Prayers, hymns and silent resistance
After we left New Guinea, I went to two all-girls’ schools—both steeped in Christian tradition.
At the English grammar school, we had compulsory Religious Instruction (basically Bible Studies), regular hymns, and school prayers. It was a state-mandated requirement. Belief wasn’t expected. But as with everything about that excellent school, the Religious Instruction classes were taught well and I found them interesting.
At the New Zealand girls’ grammar school, there was regular prayer and hymn singing in the school assemblies, but no formal religious education. Just the assumption that you’d go along with it.
Then I moved to a co-ed high school in Mt Roskill. Assemblies were secular—no hymns, no prayers.
Instead, the prayers took place in lunchtime Bible study meetings. I soon discovered that half the students were born-again fundamentalist Christians. Their religion wasn’t just about believing in God—it was about being “reborn,” accepting Jesus as your personal saviour… preferably in Classroom T2.
This brand of Christianity was foreign to me, despite my wide exposure to other worldviews.
In Biology, I was taught Darwin’s theory of evolution—science, sacred to my parents. But for my classmates, it was heresy.
Nothing made sense. (But that was pretty usual in my teenage years.) I kept quiet and spent my lunchtimes in the music room, where nobody mentioned Jesus.
The limits of reason
I began to understand something that stayed with me: rational thought has limits.
Even people who claim to value reason don’t want their belief systems dismantled by it.
Not even me.
At university, I encountered even more evangelical Christians (and, interestingly, neo-liberals—but that’s another story). I seemed to attract them.
I flatted with two friendly guys who later revealed themselves to be born-again Christians. The flat disbanded when they realised my boyfriend—decidedly not a Christian—was staying overnight. It wasn’t about what the Bible said; it just broke their rules.
Church, music and disenchantment
Fast-forward twenty years: my husband and I joined a local church when our kids were small. Our eldest had started asking about churches, so we thought we’d let him see what happened inside one.
At first, it felt good. A sense of community. I enjoyed the singing, and more than that, I was welcomed as a musician—finally in a place where music was essential, not just entertainment.
But cracks began to appear.
The minister asked the musicians—including us—to perform for a Mother’s Day event. I took home a pile of hymnbooks, new and old, and started looking for songs about mothers.
There weren’t any. Almost all the hymns focused on fathers and sons. In the end, we suggested “Let It Be” by Paul McCartney.
The minister was fine with it. The congregation, less so. A few people commented that the Beatles weren’t Christian, so the song wasn’t appropriate.
That’s when I realised I didn’t resonate with the sermons either. I often disagreed—or just felt indifferent.
Our kids grew bored of Sunday School, especially after the appeal of cakes and orange cordial wore off.
Then came the push to recruit new members. We were told to go out and bring more people in.
That crossed a line for me. I’m firmly against proselytising—about religion, politics, anything. I’m happy to share my views, but not to claim they’re the only right ones. Especially when I wasn’t even sure I agreed with the church’s teachings.
So we stopped going.
The minister noticed. She sent a kind note asking whether someone had offended us.
I wrote back: “No, my beliefs just don’t sit well with Presbyterian doctrine.”
She replied, “Your beliefs are probably not very different from mine.”
In other words, she stood in the pulpit every week saying things she didn’t believe.
From soul to psyche: spirituality and mental health
I eventually found spiritual grounding through my efforts to care for my emotional wellbeing.
Mental health—now there’s another unspeakable topic.
Interestingly, the word “psyche” (as in psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry) literally means “soul.” But Sigmund Freud worked hard to strip any spiritual meaning from his field, to keep it “scientific.”
Behavioural psychology, in particular, focuses more on studying rats and conditioning responses than the human soul. Today’s medical model often defines mental illness as a chemical imbalance—something to be medicated.
But many strands of psychology connect with spiritual experience—especially humanistic and depth psychology. Thinkers like Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Roberto Assagioli, and others draw clear links between psyche and spirit.
Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina Grof argue that some mental illness may actually be a kind of spiritual awakening.
Healing, learning, and speaking freely
Over the years, I’ve worked with counsellors and psychotherapists to stave off depression.
I found safe spaces in self-development groups—places where I could talk about my spiritual ideas without being converted.
That said, I don’t think most mental health professionals are equipped to be spiritual teachers. They’ve just ended up in that role by default.
Deep Ecology, feminism, and the Divine Feminine
I devoured the self-help shelves at the library. Feminist spirituality pioneers like Carol P. Christ and Merlin Stone (author of Beyond God the Father) lit the way.
Then I discovered Marija Gimbutas, the archaeologist who unearthed evidence of pre-monotheistic spirituality centred on the divine feminine.
I found myself drawn to eco-spirituality, Deep Ecology, and neo-paganism. Writers like Starhawk, Joanna Macy, Neale Donald Walsch, Eckhart Tolle, and magazines like Resurgence (founded by Satish Kumar) were deeply nourishing.
I read widely: Arne Naess, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, Arnold Mindell, Jean Houston, Caroline Myss, Marianne Williamson, Matthew Fox, Jean Shinoda Bolen, and neo-Celtic mystics John and Caitlin Matthews.
One day, I heard Ursula K. Le Guin on the radio, talking to Kim Hill about Taoism.
I was elated.
If this wise, brilliant writer—beloved by critics and fantasy fans alike—could call herself a Taoist, maybe I could too.
(And she was the daughter of two anthropologists!)
Skills for mystics
Through all this reading, exploring, and reflecting, I gradually began to shape my own spiritual framework. Maybe not a straight line—but definitely a pattern.
But shaping ideas wasn’t enough. I needed tools—skills—to live as a mystic in the modern world.
For Christians, the tools are scripture, sermons, and prayer. In Indian and Chinese traditions, there are deep, embodied practices: breathing techniques, yoga, meditation, martial arts. Indigenous traditions offer rich spiritual technologies like shamanism—or more inclusively, animism.
As a mystic, I felt a strong pull toward shamanic journeying. I found my way to it through books by Sandra Ingerman, Michael Harner, and Arnold Mindell. But it took me years to gather the courage to experience it first-hand.
Why? Because of my family’s unspoken taboos. Both my parents would have been wary of cultural appropriation—and so was I.
When I finally booked a session with a Siberian-trained shaman based on Waiheke Island, it felt like sneaking out through a hidden door in the back of the wardrobe. Like crossing into the Forbidden Forest.
There’s more I want to say about shamanism, animism, and their intersection with music—but that will be a future post.
And so, back to the doorstep
So where does this leave me?
Back on my front step, saying “No thanks, have a nice day,” to the three kind and well-meaning evangelists who rang my doorbell.
They were offering something simple and sure: a single path, clear answers, shared certainty.
But I’ve been walking a different road. One that’s less certain, more winding, but deeply alive.
My spiritual world is wider, stranger, and much more interesting than anything that fits inside a tract or a sermon.
It’s not a belief—it’s a way of being.
And finally, I’m ready to talk about it.
More reading
How to start – and stick with – a personal spiritual practice
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