My Life With Spirit: What Is It Actually Like?

People ask me quite often what it is actually like to live my life with an awareness of spirit. Have I always been like this? Have I always had this sensitivity? Do I actually see spirits? Do I hear them? Do they tell me what decisions to make? Do I ask them what I should do with my life?

The answer is not as straightforward as people sometimes expect, because my spiritual life is simply part of my life. I do not wake up every morning and enter a separate spiritual world. I wake up as Marcia. I have responsibilities, work to do, decisions to make, things to question and ordinary life to live. Spirit does not remove any of that.

I was born with these abilities. I have always had an awareness of spirit and communicated with spirit, but those abilities have changed and matured throughout my life. Some have become stronger, while others have become less noticeable. I have learned more about myself, questioned my experiences, developed my understanding and become more responsible about how I use what I have.

One of the questions people ask me the most is: Do you actually see spirits?

My answer is usually no, followed very quickly by yes, which understandably confuses people.

I do not normally see a spirit standing directly in front of me in the same physical way that I would see another human being. I do not have the experience of walking down the street surrounded by fully materialised spirits and wondering whether somebody is physically alive or not. With all honesty, I am very grateful for that because I would probably spend my life screaming.

However, how can I say that I do not see spirit when I can sometimes perceive someone beside me or see something from the corner of my eye? Sometimes I understand it as energy or presence rather than physically seeing someone. Other people describe their experiences differently. I can only explain mine.

Do I hear spirits?

Yes.

Sometimes I hear words. Sometimes information comes through intuition. Sometimes there is simply a very strong knowing or awareness. My intuition has always been strong, but that does not mean I listen to it every time.

Of course I don't.

I am still Marcia.

I can question something I already know a hundred times before finally accepting it. I have personal doubts. I have life doubts. I have ignored my intuition before, made the decision I wanted to make anyway and discovered afterwards that perhaps I should have paid more attention.

Being spiritually aware does not make me immune from being human.

Do spirits make my decisions for me?

No.

This distinction is extremely important to me. Guidance does not remove personal responsibility.

I can sit in prayer or meditation and ask my spirit team for guidance. I can ask them to help me understand a situation or show me something I have not considered. Sometimes an answer comes and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I understand something immediately, and sometimes I understand it much later.

But ultimately, I am responsible for what I do with my life.

I have received guidance and ignored it. I have felt very strongly in my body that something was not right for me and continued anyway. I have made mistakes. Spiritual awareness has never removed my responsibility for those mistakes, nor should it.

What has changed considerably as I have become older is how much more I respect my body, my intuition and what I understand as spiritual guidance.

Sometimes my body needs rest. It might only be one evening, one night or a little longer than I expected. In the past, I was much more likely to tell myself, Come on. Move. You need to do this. You need to do that. I would force myself to continue.

I have learned that when I continually force myself beyond what my body is telling me, eventually my body makes the decision for me and I become physically unwell. I therefore pay much more attention now. Rest is not always giving up. Sometimes it is information.

Do I ask deceased loved ones to guide me?

My personal practice is to speak primarily to my spirit team rather than continually calling deceased relatives.

That understanding developed through my own experiences. In my belief, somebody dying does not suddenly mean that their entire spiritual existence becomes centred around the people they left behind. They have their own spiritual journey, their own development and their own experiences.

If I need guidance, I ask my spirit team.

Does that mean I always receive an answer? Absolutely not.

Sometimes I receive guidance. Sometimes I receive nothing. And sometimes, in my own experience of spirit, the message is essentially: Marcia, stop now.

Apparently, the spiritual world does not exist solely to answer all of my questions.

Is spirituality part of my writing?

Increasingly, yes.

However, I want to be very clear about what I mean when I say that.

I am not saying that spirit sits down and writes my articles for me. I do the writing as I believe I am thinking and questioning. I do the connecting information, but I have spirit writing with me. I never write alone: I have a spirit co-author!

Then I do the work.

That distinction matters because spirituality does not require me to abandon my rational mind. Quite the opposite. My rationality, my curiosity, my willingness to learn and my spiritual understanding have to exist together.

This Is Not About Religion

I am not here to dictate religion to anybody. I am not a religious person, nor do I intend to become one.

I respect wherever you are in your own life. You may understand yourself as spiritual. You may believe in life after death. You may not believe in it at all. You may have an entirely different explanation for experiences that I understand spiritually.

I do not want you to put yourself into a box, and I certainly do not want you to put me into one.

I am open-minded. I am willing to learn. I want to see life through other people's eyes and understand what it might be like to walk in somebody else's shoes. Learning is enormously important to me because without learning, I cannot continue developing into the person I aspire to become.

Tomorrow, I want to be a better person than I am today.

And that brings me to something much bigger than whether somebody believes in spirits.

Human. Person. Spiritual Being.

What matters to me is what you do with your own body, thoughts, choices and decisions. How do you take responsibility for them? How do you recognise what needs changing? How do you use what you have learned to become better than you were before?

I believe we should work towards becoming better humans, better persons and better spiritual beings.

For me, those are three distinctive parts of ourselves. I am not talking about who you are as a parent, someone's child, a professional or a member of society. I am talking about you as a human being, you as an individual person and you as a spiritual being.

They complement one another, but that requires us to work on ourselves consciously, with dignity and respect.

My spiritual experiences have contributed enormously to the person I am today, but so have my mistakes, education, relationships, difficult experiences, happiness, love, pain and everything else that has formed my life.

Spirit has not made me perfect. Spirit has not removed my emotions or replaced my rational brain. Spirit has not removed my responsibility.

If anything, my understanding of spirituality has made personal responsibility even more important to me.

And This Is Part of Why I Created TFC

This is also part of why I created Thrive Forward Coaching and why my sessions developed into the deep sessions I offer today.

My experiences with spirit, the guidance I believe I have received, the lessons I have learned through pain, tears, happiness and love, and everything I have learned through my own human experiences have contributed to the way I sit with another person.

When I say that spirit is part of my work, I am not saying that I stop being Marcia and become merely a messenger. I bring my listening, reasoning, knowledge, experience, intuition and spiritual awareness into the room while the person sitting opposite me remains responsible for their own life.

That responsibility belongs to them.

Perhaps that is the most important thing my life with spirit has taught me.

I can receive guidance. I can listen. I can question. I can ignore it. I can make mistakes. I can learn. I can change my mind. I can grow. And I am still learning.

That is what my life with spirit actually looks like.