When the Soul Rises : Experience of God Beyond the Body

There are moments in a spiritual journey when the ordinary boundaries of self and world fall away. After receiving Shaktipat from a powerful healer, I experienced such a moment…I felt my awareness lift, as if my very body were no longer the container of my being. Time, space, and even the usual sense of “I” seemed to dissolve. It was at once terrifying, exhilarating, and utterly ineffable.

Reading the words of Christian mystics like Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart, I find a mirror for this experience. Centuries ago, these mystics described states that go beyond thought and sense: a soul rapt in God, a heart suspended between the familiar world and the divine. Teresa spoke of levitations, but more importantly, of the profound intimacy with God they revealed. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul a purification, a surrender into something larger than oneself. Eckhart described an inner stillness in which the soul experiences God directly, quietly, without words.

In the instant of leaving my body, I felt echoes of what they called the Unitive Way—a fleeting yet unmistakable sense of union with the divine, a touch of the eternal. The experience was not about seeing visions or gaining knowledge; it was about encountering something larger than comprehension, something loving, ineffable, and real.

Christian mystics offer guidance for such experiences: integrate what arises rather than cling to it. Ground yourself in daily life, in love and service, and allow the experience to transform your inner landscape. Prayer, contemplation, and quiet reflection are not just practices, they are the way we walk back into the world carrying a deeper awareness of God.

Mystical experiences are gifts and teachers, yet they are only part of the path. What matters most is the living presence of God in the ordinary, the way this contact transforms how we act, love, and move through life. In the stillness after such an encounter, the world seems both larger and more intimate, sacred in ways that language can never fully capture.