"I started exploring energy work, reading up on lunar cycles, and honestly just learning to trust my own intuition again."

I appreciate the honesty of your intro, and I get the appeal of that narrative arc — skeptic finds something missing, cracks open through meditation, rediscovers intuition. It's a compelling story. But I want to push back on this idea that "trusting your intuition" is a straightforward return to something authentic that got buried under religious dogma or rational skepticism.

From a cognitive science perspective, what we call intuition is often just pattern recognition running below conscious awareness, and it's deeply shaped by whatever frameworks you've been soaking in. Daniel Kahneman talks about this in Thinking, Fast and Slow — System 1 processing feels like gut knowing but it's susceptible to all kinds of biases, including confirmation bias and priming effects. So when you start working with crystals or tarot and your intuition "confirms" something for you, I think it's worth asking: are you accessing some deeper truth, or are you just getting faster at matching patterns to the new symbolic vocabulary you've been absorbing?

I'm not saying these practices are useless. I actually think they can be genuinely useful — but I think their value lies in what they do at the level of meaning-making and self-narrative, not in some direct channel to hidden knowledge. I work in UX design, and I think about tools and methods in terms of what they actually accomplish for the user rather than what the marketing claims. A tarot spread or a moon ritual is a tool. The question is whether it's effective for the job you're giving it.

If the job is "get objective information about the future," then no, I don't think it works. But if the job is "create a structured space for self-reflection," "externalize anxieties so you can examine them," or "build a regular practice of checking in with yourself" — then yeah, these tools can be surprisingly effective. They're basically journaling prompts with extra aesthetic steps, and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes adding ritual and symbolism around a reflective practice is exactly what makes it stick for someone.

What brought me to this forum is that I'm genuinely curious about how people use these tools and what they get out of them. I'm not here to debunk or convert anyone. I just think the interesting conversation happens when we get specific about what's actually happening in these practices rather than defaulting to the most mystical or the most dismissive explanation.

i threw the baby out with the bathwater and became a total skeptic for years. But something always felt missing.

honestly i'd push back on this — what if nothing was actually missing? i went through a similar burnout thing a couple years ago and started meditating, and it definitely helped, but i don't think that means my skeptical phase was "wrong" or that i was incomplete without the spiritual stuff. sometimes a coping mechanism is just a coping mechanism, you know? i'm genuinely curious why we're so quick to pathologize the absence of belief as a void that needs filling.

"I started meditating just for anxiety, and that cracked something open."

I think you're right that something cracked, but calling meditation the catalyst feels like giving the tool credit for what your nervous system was already desperate to do.

"I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became a total skeptic for years"

I actually wonder if that skepticism phase was the baby, not the bathwater — learning to question everything might be the most grounding skill you brought with you into this work. I ask this with love, but what if the thing that felt "missing" wasn't spiritual belief at all, but the emotional resonance and community you had before? Brené Brown's work on belonging vs. fitting in makes me think we often conflate the two, and I've seen a lot of folks in law of attraction spaces chase "vibration" when what they're really hungry for is connection. Not saying your spiritual opening isn't real — just that the framework you're using to interpret it might be worth examining.

"I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became a total skeptic for years"

I actually wonder if that skepticism phase was the baby, not the bathwater — learning to question everything might be the most grounding skill you brought with you into this work.

"something always felt missing"

I want to gently challenge this, because I think it's worth examining. Is it possible nothing was actually missing? That the "missing" feeling was just the withdrawal symptom of leaving a framework that gave you structure, community, and a sense of meaning — and you've simply swapped one framework for another? I'm not saying that's bad. I did essentially the same thing, though in my case I didn't leave faith so much as grow into the tarot practice my grandmother already had running through our family. But I think we owe it to ourselves to be honest about what's happening psychologically here. Jung wrote about this kind of thing — the religious function of the psyche doesn't just disappear when you walk away from church. It finds new outlets. Crystals, lunar cycles, tarot spreads. Same hunger, different plate.

And look, I've been reading tarot for twenty years now. Started with my grandmother's Rider-Waite when I was twenty-two, sitting at her kitchen table in Waco. I've seen it help my sister through a divorce, watched it give my niece language for feelings she couldn't name. I'm not here to dismiss the practice. But I do think the community sometimes oversells the "cracking something open" narrative as though it's a universal spiritual awakening, when from the outside it can look an awful lot like pattern-finding and meaning-making — which are deeply human things we all do, regardless of what tools we're using.

I guess what I'm saying is: it's okay if this is just you finding a new way to make sense of your life that doesn't hurt anybody and feels good. It doesn't have to be a mystical awakening to be valuable. Sometimes a coping mechanism that works is just that, and that's enough.

Welcome though. Seriously. This place could use more folks willing to be honest about where they're at.

"I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became a total skeptic for years"

I'd argue you didn't throw anything out — skepticism might've been the most spiritually honest phase you had, and rushing past it to "trust your intuition again" could just be swapping one set of unexamined assumptions for another.

"I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became a total skeptic for years"

I relate to landing here, but I don't think skepticism was the mistake — I think treating it as a phase you had to "get over" instead of a tool you could've kept using is what made the detour last so long.

blockquote>"My partner is supportive but definitely doesn't understand why I'm suddenly obsessed with crystals and tarot spreads, haha. It'd be nice to have people to chat with about this stuff without getting weird looks."</blockquote>

Yeah, this is exactly where I'm at too. My partner tries, but I can tell she thinks I'm going through a phase. Every time I try to explain why a particular tarot spread hit me hard, I get that polite nod and "that's cool babe" and the conversation just dies.

I'm pretty new to all this myself — still in that awkward stage where I'm not sure what I believe yet but I know something's there. Your story about meditation cracking something open actually resonates a lot. I didn't come from a strict religious background like you did, but I had the same thing happen where I started meditating for totally mundane reasons and suddenly all this stuff I would've dismissed a year ago started feeling... relevant? I don't know how else to put it.

Anyway, welcome. I've been lurking way longer than I probably should have too.

I started exploring energy work, reading up on lunar cycles, and honestly just learning to trust my own intuition again.

I get why this feels like trusting your intuition, but I'd argue it might actually be the opposite? Like, when you're following lunar cycle guides or crystal correspondences that someone else wrote, you're outsourcing your inner knowing to a system. Which isn't necessarily bad — systems can be useful scaffolding. But I think there's a real risk of mistaking "following a framework" for "trusting myself."

I say this because I fell into the same thing when I started out. Three years ago I stumbled on a random podcast episode (I think it was a Laurie Santos episode that went off the rails into alternative stuff, honestly can't remember exactly) and got super into learning all the "right" ways to do things. Tarot spreads, crystal meanings, the whole deal. And yeah, my partner didn't get it either, so I relate to that part completely.

But looking back, I was definitely using those systems as a safety net. It felt safer to say "well, the moon is in Scorpio so that's why I feel off" than to just... sit with feeling off and see what came up. Jung wrote about how we build structures to avoid direct encounter with the unconscious, and I wonder sometimes if a lot of modern "spirituality" is basically that — really elaborate avoidance dressed up as exploration.

Not trying to be a bummer about your journey, honestly. I'm still figuring it out too. If you haven't read it, "The Untethered Soul" by Michael Singer was helpful for me in untangling what was actual intuition vs. what was just anxiety or borrowed belief systems. Curious what others think about this — am I just being overly skeptical about structured practices?

"I started meditating just for anxiety, and that cracked something open."

This resonates with me. In my experience, the body often knows before the mind does. I spent decades as a nurse watching people hold trauma and stress physically — tight shoulders, shallow breathing, chronic illness that no pill could fully touch. When you sat down to calm your anxiety, you weren't just relaxing. You were creating space. And space is where the subtle body starts to speak.

In my family's Ayurvedic tradition, we'd say your prana found room to move again after years of being constrained. The Upanishads describe this as remembering something you already knew — the atman doesn't need to be found, only uncovered.

"my partner is supportive but definitely doesn't understand why I'm suddenly obsessed with crystals and tarot spreads"

Ha. My husband passed fifteen years ago, but when he was alive, he'd watch me do my evening pujas and just shake his head fondly. I think for those who haven't felt that pull, it looks like we've picked up a hobby. They don't realize it's more like coming home.

Don't rush to label yourself. The Bhagavad Gita says the path of each person is unique — there's no template you have to fit. Crystals, tarot, lunar cycles — these are tools, not the destination. Keep exploring what feels true in your body, not just interesting in your mind.

I'm glad you stopped lurking. The water's fine.

"I started meditating just for anxiety, and that cracked something open."

I felt that too—my overview effect during a high‑altitude flight gave me a similar crack, showing how tightly the outer view and inner work are linked. That’s what pulled me here, looking for others who notice both the sky and the soul shifting together.