Spiritual gifts discernment can feel like walking a tightrope. On one side, you’re pulled by curiosity, the dreams, the intuitive nudges, the mystical experiences that seem too real to ignore. On the other side, there’s fear, a whisper that exploring these experiences might mean betraying your faith or opening a door you can’t close.
If you’ve ever found yourself caught between wonder and worry, you’re not alone. Many spiritual seekers who come from a Christian background face the same tension. The church may have told you to stay away from mystical encounters, while new age spaces might dismiss your faith altogether. So where does that leave you? This is where spiritual gifts discernment becomes not just helpful, but essential.
In a recent Leading With Spirit conversation, SpiritBird of Holton Healing Arts sat down with TruthSeekah and Arien, two Christian mystics who know this struggle firsthand. Through music, sound healing, and deep spiritual exploration, they’ve walked the uneasy path between faith and mystical curiosity and discovered insights that can help others trust their own experiences without losing their spiritual foundation.
The Crossroads of Faith and Mysticism
For those who grew up in Christianity, mystical experiences often feel loaded. You might remember being told that anything outside traditional prayer or scripture is “demonic.” Yet when you feel the presence of something loving in meditation, or sense guidance in your dreams, it doesn’t feel evil, it feels holy.
TruthSeekah spoke about growing up in the church and later discovering mystical practices like meditation and yoga. At first, these practices triggered fear, warnings he’d internalized about “opening doors to the demonic.” Yet over time, he realized that many of these encounters drew him deeper into love and peace, not away from it.
Arien echoed this, sharing her journey of gradually softening to the possibility that mystical gifts were not demonic but biblical. She described how intuition, dreams, and even messages from loved ones who had passed away began showing up in her life experiences that felt condemned by the church but aligned with her faith when tested against the fruits of love and truth.
Is Intuition a Gift from God?
One of the most common struggles for seekers is the question: is intuition a gift from God?
Think about the moments when you “just know” something without evidence, a gut feeling that proves right, or a sudden nudge that saves you from making a mistake. These flashes of clarity often bring peace, not fear. Scripture itself speaks of wisdom, prophecy, and knowledge as gifts of the Spirit. Could intuition simply be another language God uses to guide you?
Arien reflected on her own journey with this question, noticing that her intuitive gifts often opened pathways to compassion and healing. For her, intuition wasn’t a distraction from God, it became one of the most intimate ways she experienced God’s presence.
Breaking Through Religious Conditioning
The hardest part of embracing spiritual gifts isn’t the gift itself, it’s breaking through years of conditioning. Many seekers describe the moment they first tried something like yoga, meditation, or sound healing as both thrilling and terrifying. A voice inside warned, “This is dangerous.” Yet another voice whispered, “This is love.”
TruthSeekah recalled feeling torn when mystical experiences began to unfold in his life. He even stepped back at times, deleting projects and albums because he feared leading others astray. But each time, the inner calling to explore returned stronger than before. For him, discernment became the key to moving forward: judging each experience by its fruit rather than by fear.
Arien emphasized that God meets us gently, in ways we can handle. For her, it wasn’t about rushing into the mystical but allowing curiosity and trust to grow step by step.
How to Tap Into Your Spiritual Gifts
Once you begin trusting that your gifts may actually be holy, the next step is learning how to nurture them. You might wonder how to tap into your spiritual gifts without feeling like you’re abandoning your faith.
In this conversation with SpiritBird, both TruthSeekah and Arien admitted that there isn’t a neat, step-by-step formula. For them, it wasn’t about following a checklist — it was about learning to stay open when curiosity and fear collided.
- TruthSeekah spoke about deleting projects and stepping away from mystical practices when fear took over, only to find himself called back to the work again and again. His experience shows that tapping into your gifts is less about “doing it right” and more about noticing when Spirit refuses to let you turn away.
- Arien reflected on how God meets us gently. For her, tapping into gifts wasn’t a sudden leap but a gradual softening — moments of saying “yes” to experiences that felt aligned with love, even when they challenged what she’d been taught in church.
The Role of Spiritual Intuition
Beyond external practices, there’s an inner compass that grows sharper with use: spiritual intuition.
For both Arien and TruthSeekah, intuition became a teacher. TruthSeekah described how his encounters with angels and synchronicities deepened his faith instead of weakening it. Arien spoke about intuitive dreams that brought healing from long-held grief. In both cases, intuition was not a threat but a guide back to God.
Learning to trust these signals takes time. The more you practice noticing them, the more reliable they become.
Why Fear Isn’t the Final Word
Fear often disguises itself as wisdom. It tells you to stay safe, to never step outside familiar walls. But fear can’t discern truth — it only protects what it knows.
Through spiritual gifts discernment, Arien and TruthSeekah learned that fear wasn’t the final authority. Instead, the presence of peace, love, and compassion became the real markers of God’s voice. As Arien put it, “Not everything that feels uncomfortable is bad, sometimes it’s just showing us what still needs to be healed.”
Embracing Mysticism Without Losing Faith
At the heart of this journey is a simple but profound truth: you don’t have to abandon your faith to embrace your gifts. Mystical experiences don’t have to mean turning your back on God. They may, in fact, be God’s way of drawing you closer.
By practicing spiritual gifts discernment, and listening to the wisdom of voices like TruthSeekah and Arien, you begin to see with new eyes. Intuition may indeed be a gift from God. Your mystical experiences can be trusted when they bear good fruit. And exploring your gifts doesn’t have to mean losing faith — it can mean deepening it.
Conclusion: Walking the Path of Discernment
Spiritual seekers often feel stuck between two worlds: faith and curiosity, tradition and mysticism. Yet you don’t have to choose one over the other. With spiritual gifts discernment, you can learn to walk with both, holding your faith while honoring the gifts that arise within you.
In this conversation with SpiritBird on Leading With Spirit, TruthSeekah and Arien remind us that discernment is not about shutting down spiritual curiosity. It’s about learning to listen with wisdom, test with love, and discover that God often speaks in the very places we were taught to fear.
Your mystical experiences don’t have to be a threat to your faith. They may be the doorway into a deeper, truer connection with the divine.
You can listen to the full story on Leading With Spirit [Episode 108]: Spiritual Gifts Discernment: How to Trust Mystical Experiences Without Losing Faith