Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior
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Thank you for reading my work. Feel free to contact me with your thoughts or if you want to chat. [email protected]
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Empty Yet Full: The Spiritual Paradox at the End of Life
There is a paradox at the heart of every authentic spiritual path, a paradox that becomes clearest at the end of life: a life well‑lived should be empty and yet full. Empty of what was never truly ours, full of what can never be taken. Empty of illusion, full of truth. Empty of grasping, full of grace. Empty of ego, full of soul. This paradox is not a contradiction but a revelation. It is the culmination of the human journey, the moment when the soul recognizes what mattered and what never did. It is the moment when the Divine whispers through the quiet spaces of a life that has been lived with intention, surrender, and love.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior3 days ago in Humans
Emotion Is Not a Flaw of the Human Experience: It Is One of Its Greatest Gifts
Emotion Is Not a Flaw of the Human Experience: It Is One of Its Greatest Gifts For centuries, human beings have wrestled with their own emotional lives. We have tried to master them, suppress them, transcend them, or explain them away. Entire philosophies have been built on the suspicion that emotion is a weakness, a distortion, or a threat to reason. Yet the deeper we look—into psychology, spirituality, neuroscience, and the lived experience of the soul—the clearer it becomes that emotion is not a flaw of the human experience. It is one of its greatest gifts. Emotion is the language of the heart, the compass of the soul, the bridge between the seen and the unseen. It is the way the Divine moves through the human form. To feel deeply is not a sign of fragility but of aliveness. It is the evidence that we are connected, responsive, and capable of love.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior3 days ago in Humans
I Know God’s Plans Are Better Than Mine
There is a moment in every sincere spiritual life when the heart finally whispers what the mind has resisted for years: I know God’s plans are better than mine. It is not a statement of defeat, nor a gesture of passivity, nor a relinquishing of responsibility. It is the quiet recognition that the human view is partial, limited, and shaped by fear and desire, while the Divine view is whole, timeless, and rooted in love. This recognition does not arrive all at once. It unfolds slowly, through experience, through loss, through unexpected blessings, through the unraveling of our own illusions, and through the gradual awakening of trust. It is a truth learned not by theory but by living. And once it settles into the soul, it becomes the foundation of a different way of being—one marked by surrender, humility, and a deeper peace than the ego could ever manufacture.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior3 days ago in Humans
Healing Is Not an Event: The Pilgrimage of the Soul and the Slow Unfolding of Truth
Healing is often imagined as a moment, a breakthrough, a sudden shift in which everything that once hurt is resolved and everything that once confused becomes clear. But anyone who has walked the inner path long enough knows that healing rarely arrives as a single revelation. It is not an event. It is not a destination. It is not a point on the map where the soul finally arrives and declares itself complete. Healing is part of the journey itself. It is a pilgrimage. It is the soul’s long work, the slow unfolding of truth across the landscape of a lifetime, and often across many lifetimes. It is the gradual softening of what has been hardened, the gentle illumination of what has been hidden, and the patient integration of what has been fragmented.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior3 days ago in Humans
Learning as Love and the Unlearning of Human Ways
To say that learning is a form of love is to make a profound claim about the nature of the soul, the nature of truth, and the nature of the Divine. It suggests that learning is not merely the accumulation of information or the refinement of intellect, but an act of devotion, an opening of the heart, a willingness to be changed. It implies that the soul learns not to become more knowledgeable in the worldly sense, but to become more aligned with the Divine. And it suggests that the greatest obstacle to this alignment is not ignorance but the deeply ingrained habits, assumptions, and defenses that constitute what we call “human ways.” To embrace divinity, we must unlearn these ways. We must release the patterns that keep us bound to fear, separation, and illusion. We must allow ourselves to be taught by something greater than the mind. Learning becomes love when it becomes surrender.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior3 days ago in Humans
The Veil of Nothingness: Reality, Meaning, and the Hidden Architecture of Existence
The phrase “veil of nothingness” carries a strange and paradoxical power. It evokes both emptiness and concealment, both the absence of substance and the presence of a barrier. It suggests that something essential is hidden not behind a wall or a curtain, but behind a kind of metaphysical emptiness—a void that obscures the deeper nature of reality. Throughout history, mystics, philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have wrestled with this idea in different forms. Whether described as maya in Hindu philosophy, sunyata in Buddhism, the cloud of unknowing in Christian mysticism, or das Nichts in existential philosophy, the veil of nothingness has served as a metaphor for the limits of human perception and the mysterious ground from which meaning arises.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior3 days ago in Humans
The Shadow That Follows the Seeker
The phrase “the shadow of doubt” is so deeply woven into our language that we rarely pause to consider what it actually means. It appears in literature, philosophy, psychology, and sacred texts across cultures, always pointing toward a particular kind of inner experience—an obscuring, a dimming, a sense that something once clear has become partially hidden. Doubt is not described as a wall, a storm, or a wound, though it can feel like all of these. It is described as a shadow. That metaphor is not accidental. It reveals something profound about the nature of doubt itself, the structure of the human psyche, and the way spiritual growth unfolds. To understand why doubt takes the form of a shadow, we must explore the interplay between light and obscurity, certainty and uncertainty, ego and humility, and the ancient human struggle to discern truth from illusion.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior3 days ago in Humans
I AM and the Mirror of the Self: Navigating Objectivity, Subjectivity, and the Spiritual Ego
Spirituality has always lived at the crossroads of two powerful forces: the objective reality of the Divine and the subjective experience of the seeker. Every tradition, every mystic, every philosopher has wrestled with the tension between what is universally true and what is personally felt. This tension becomes especially vivid when we return to the moment in Exodus 3:14 when the Divine names itself simply as “I AM.” That declaration stands as one of the most profound statements in the history of spiritual thought. It is not a metaphor, not a symbol, not a psychological projection. It is a claim about the nature of Being itself. Yet the moment a human being encounters that truth, it becomes filtered through the lens of the psyche, shaped by memory, culture, trauma, longing, and the developmental stage of the soul. The result is a paradox: the Divine is objective, but our experience of the Divine is always subjective. How we navigate that paradox determines whether our spirituality becomes a path of humility or a performance of superiority.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior3 days ago in Humans
