After my brother died, I started having experiences I couldn’t explain. Hearing voices. Feeling as if I was communicating with long-dead relatives. After I while I had to draw a line. I said out loud, “This is too much. I don’t know which voice is my own. I need you to go away.”

They did.

And almost immediately, I wanted them back.

What happened next was my journey into other people’s accounts of after-death communication, near-death experiences, and mediumship. Sometimes the accounts varied greatly. Sometimes the author had very specific interpretations about what happens after we die.

But beneath all those differences, I kept finding a few common threads: some part of life continues after physical death. Communication is possible. And whatever lies beyond our understanding appears to be characterized by a love more pure than anything I’ve experienced on earth.

I didn’t need to have detailed explanations of the afterlife. In fact, I was turned off by someone who thought their explanation was the one correct and true interpretation.

How can we ever know all there is to know about Infinity? The Eternal?

Yet I could trust what I experienced without pretending I understood it completely. I could listen to other people’s experiences without assuming their explanations had to become mine.

And I could leave some of the Mystery as mystery.

One of the greatest lessons I took from this is that our understanding is always incomplete. There is always more we don’t know than what we do.

Maybe that is part of what spirituality asks of us — not to believe without question or to have all the answers, but to pay attention to what we experience, discern what we believe those experiences mean, and remain humble about how much we still don’t know.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net

This week we lost Dolly Parton, an extraordinary talent and an even more extraordinary humanitarian. She had an outsize impact on the world, donating hundreds of millions of books to children. She didn’t start out donating millions of books. She started with one.

There is power in small actions. These seemingly small actions pile up and, before you know it, there are millions upon millions of actions. Like water upon a rock, these actions can change everything.

And those actions don’t have to look the same for each of us. We can speak up. We can protest. We can volunteer. We can educate ourselves. We can have a conversation. We can simply treat the person in front of us with kindness. What matters is that we keep asking: What can I do today?

There is power in living from our values of love, compassion, and understanding, especially as a counterpoint to fear and hate. Every time we act from those values, we help create more of the world we want to live in.

We can’t control the world, nor create a guaranteed outcome. But we can choose who we want to be while living every day.

Let’s put our love into action, together.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into our live video! Join us for our next live video on Friday, September 4 at 11 am, eastern, 8 am, pacific.

So many of us want the world to change. Sometimes we find ourselves wishing some outside force would come in and create a magical transformation.

But what if we are part of that magical force?

In today’s live broadcast, Christy and I talked about how what looks like a miracle may actually be thousands of small actions accumulating over time. A conversation. A protest. A vote. A story shared with someone who needed to hear it. We don’t always get to see what our actions set in motion.

And some miracles are already happening: new voices emerging, new organizations forming, new relationships being forged. Something is being built even while we resist what is happening around us.

We don’t need a gigantic platform. We can start where we are, with the people we already know.

We don’t know what becomes possible when our actions join with the actions of thousands of others.

Let’s put love into action. Together.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net

This is continuing the story of what happened after my brother suddenly died, when I felt like I started hearing from him directly.

We each interpret our experiences, whether the experiences are “otherworldly” or “everyday.” I interpreted my “otherworldly” experiences one way, and my interpretation ran afoul of someone else’s spiritual beliefs. That conversation raised a question I spent years pondering: if two people can look at the same event and come to very different conclusions, how do we determine the “right “ way to think?

My answer forms the basis of my Spiritual Geography work. The person who had the experience gets to decide, as long as that interpretation is life-giving to them. That is, the interpretation brings them closer to love, joy, compassion, and understanding.

I can’t prove that I have heard from my brother, nor that I’ve had experiences with him since he died. But I do know that my belief that I have brings me more peace and love, helping me both with grief and with life.

Have you ever interpreted something one way and had someone else question your interpretation? How did you resolve it? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net

It’s true that we want to reclaim our ability to influence the political outcomes of our country. But we can start by reclaiming our own personal power. Fear and hopelessness can immobilize us, but joy, compassion, and love move us out from within ourselves to impact the greater world around us.

And when we bring that power together, we become a force for change. What becomes possible when we stop being tethered to “this is the way we’ve always done it” and start imagining the world we want to see? We are more resilient — and more powerful — than we sometimes remember. Embracing moments of beauty, grace, humor, and joy can be effective resistance.

Let’s turn love into action. Together.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net

People don’t usually wake up all at once. They wake up with each conversation, each new piece of information, and every time they’re willing to be curious about their perspectives.

Think about how we wake up in the mornings. There’s the sudden, startling alarm clock waking us up, and then there’s waking up gradually, with the sunrise. When we start seeing the world differently, it usually happens more gradually, with new information and ideas entering our consciousness a little at a time.

We don’t have to try to change someone’s opinions who believes the polar opposite of what we do. That would be counter-productive. But helping someone become more resolute — moving from indifference to concern, or from concern to motivation to act — can work. We have the most influence on people who share some point of commonality with us.

We also talked about not shaming someone for not “waking up” sooner, or for “waking up” only when the issues personally impacted them. Every crack becomes an entry point for the person to begin to see the world differently.

Changing your opinion isn’t automatically growth. We defined growth as moving towards greater wisdom, greater compassion, choosing love over fear, and being more concerned with the common good than with their own personal welfare.

Let’s put love into action. Together.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net

Every one of us has moments that divide life into before and after. For me, that moment came on the day my brother suddenly died.

This is the experience that changed the trajectory of my life – my spiritual life, my vocation, and the way I understand the world. I'm not trying to convince anyone of what happened to me. Instead, I hope my story invites you to explore how curiosity can open us to seeing the world in new ways.

This is the first of a new video series, Before and After, where I’ll share the spiritual turning points that shaped my life.

Have you ever had an experience that changed the way you see the world? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net

“All politics are local.”

In today’s live, Christy and I explored that familiar phrase. Yes, national decisions shape our local communities, and local elected officials have tremendous influence over our daily lives.

But we also discovered another meaning. Our own lives are local. Every conversation, every purchase, every relationship is an opportunity to shape the kind of community we want to live in. We can support small businesses, buy from local farmers, and share our values with the people around us.

National problems can feel overwhelming. Local action reminds us that we are not powerless.

We practice the world we want to see — one person, one conversation, one purchase … one act of love at a time.

Let’s put love into action. Together.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net

This week on Evolving Democracy, Christy and I talked about how to keep moving forward when the news feels overwhelming.

We kept talking about this idea: brainstorming instead of doomstorming.

When we’re brainstorming, we don’t assume the old ways are the only ways. We ask, What are we really trying to accomplish? What haven’t we thought of yet? That’s how new possibilities emerge.

We also talked about why the people living with a problem are often the ones who understand it best. Whether it’s foster youth helping redesign foster care or citizens weighing in on public policy, better solutions come when we begin with curiosity instead of assuming we already know the answers.

Uncertainty can be frightening. I sometimes wake up at 3 a.m. imagining the worst, when the monsters under the bed seem loudest.

Uncertainty is real, but it doesn’t have to be our anchor. We can stay grounded in love, connection, and the belief that ordinary people, working together, really can create something better.

Momentum comes as we put love into action. Together.

Sometimes changing your mind begins with wonder.

This week I’m sharing something a little different: a sermon I gave in 2023, before Spiritual Geography existed as a podcast. Listening to it again, I realized many of the ideas that have become central to my work were already taking shape.

On the surface, it’s the story of how marrying my husband, with his infinite curiosity about insects, changed the way I see the world. But it isn’t really about bugs.

It’s about curiosity. Humility. And the recognition that there’s always more we don’t know than what we do.

The more I learn, the more I’m convinced that approaching life with wonder opens us to new possibilities. It allows us to see the sacred in unexpected places, to loosen our grip on certainty, and to remember that every new discovery reveals just how much more there is to understand.

Whether or not the Christian tradition is part of your own spiritual path, I hope you’ll hear the deeper invitation beneath this message: to meet the world with curiosity rather than certainty, and with wonder rather than fear.

I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the early roots of Spiritual Geography.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net