When I started my spiritual search, something inside me opened up. I felt as if a cosmic ray fell on me. I started to see things differently, to go to courses and read books. An existential emptiness that I had from a very young age began to disappear. However, much of this knowledge stayed with me on an intellectual level.
Different people spoke about the immense love they felt for God and that they felt from him, and I was left cold, because I didn’t feel anything. I knew it, but I didn’t feel it. It was difficult for me to feel that great love for or from someone I didn’t see, for something or someone that was abstract to me.
I started to say to myself, well Yve, start looking at what is not abstract, and I, immediately, thought of my children, my grandchildren, and my dog. I only needed to think about them and a love so great, that I have no words to explain it, came to me.
I began to think that if I felt such great love for them, imagine how God would feel for me. But I couldn’t feel his love for me. I could only analyze it.
One day I went to a training and the facilitator told us that people who’ve had an emotionally distant father had difficulty feeling God’s love, because God was seen as a father, and our physical father was our first experience of that love. I knew this was what was happening to me.
My father was an excellent human being and provider, he adored my mother, but as for the children he was emotionally handicapped. He never knew how to show us love in the way that children expect from parents. So I grew up with that emotional emptiness thinking that he did not love me.
As I developed spiritually, one day I learned to see the way my dad did express love to me, but in the limited way that he knew how and not in the way that I expected. By eliminating my preconceptions, I began to feel his great love for me.
When I did that, I decided to learn, as I did with my dad, to see God’s love in all the ways he expresses it.
So how can you feel God?
• I feel God and I communicate with Him through silence. To achieve this it is necessary to quiet the mind. In silence you manage to feel that you are one with God. The barriers that you have imposed with your physical body are eliminated, because in a very deep meditation you only feel your true self.
• I feel God through love. When you can connect with love through your loved ones, like children, grandchildren, our pets, strangers, with everything and everyone, you feel the presence of God.
• I feel God when I am in contact with nature. When I see a flower, a sunset, a lake, a forest, so much beauty, so much harmony and perfection, this inspires in me the most sublime feelings and reminds me of God.
• I feel God through art. I love impressionism and when I see a Monet painting, for example, it touches my soul and I feel God. When I listen to music, especially music that has a high energy, my spirit rises and I feel very close to God, in total communion with Him.
• The easiest and fastest way to feel God through others is through service. Nothing makes you feel so much love as serving others, because giving and receiving is the same and to the extent that you do for others, you do for yourself.
• But it is very easy to give love to others who treat you well or to those you see as innocent, such as children and the elderly. But how do you love your neighbor when you think he is hurting you? Well, I feel God when I forgive.
• We feel God choosing peace no matter what is happening outside.
If you are like me, try these things or look for your own. I’m sure you will feel Him.