Belief, experience, & why this feels harder for Christians

For many Christians, the most confusing part of Sahaja Yoga isn’t the meditation itself. It’s the internal conflict that follows.

The stillness feels real.
The peace feels familiar.
And yet something in us tightens.

Why does this feel right—and still feel hard?

How Christians are taught to recognize truth

Most of us were trained to approach faith through belief. We’re taught to evaluate what’s true by examining ideas, doctrines, and statements we can agree with or reject.

This isn’t wrong. Christianity has a rich theological tradition. But it’s not the whole picture.

When belief becomes the primary measure of truth, experience tends to come second. We’re cautious about inner sensation. We’re wary of anything we can’t immediately explain. Silence can feel suspicious rather than sacred.

So when an experience arrives first—before we have language for it—it can feel destabilizing.

Sahaja Yoga begins with experience

Sahaja Yoga doesn’t start by asking, What do you believe?
It starts by asking, Where is your attention?

The practice is experiential. You sit. You become still. Something may happen—or it may not. There’s no requirement to adopt a belief system, repeat a creed, or resolve anything intellectually. In fact, our intellect can get in the way by offering up conditionings (the way we’ve always done things) or our ego (the way we like to think about ourselves.) Meditation doesn’t happen until that endless chatter quiets.

For Christians, this reversal can be unsettling. We’re used to understanding first and experiencing second. Here, experience leads and understanding follows.

That gap is where the discomfort often lives.

When familiarity creates tension

What surprises many Christians isn’t that meditation feels foreign, it’s that it doesn’t.

The quiet.
The inward attention.
The sense of presence.

These are deeply familiar elements of Christian spirituality, even if we don’t practice them often. Contemplative prayer, silence, surrender, listening—these are not new ideas.

When meditation touches something we already recognize, it can create an unexpected conflict: If this feels so aligned, why wasn’t it emphasized? Why was I taught to be wary of it?

That tension isn’t a sign you’re doing something wrong. It’s often a sign that your inherited frameworks are being asked to stretch.

The pressure to resolve everything

Christians often feel an unspoken pressure to resolve spiritual questions quickly and publicly.

If something matters, we think we should be able to explain it. If we can’t, we assume something is off.

But not all understanding arrives through analysis. Some understanding unfolds through living with an experience long enough for it to clarify itself.

In Christianity, we’re comfortable with mystery in theory, but much less so in practice.

Experience doesn’t cancel faith

One of the deepest fears underneath this struggle is the idea that experience might replace faith.

For me, the opposite has been true.

Silence has gone deeper than prayer, because “just sitting” with God is profound. (In a way that I don’t have words to explain.)

Sahaja Yoga doesn’t ask you to stop being Christian. It asks you to become quiet enough to notice what’s already present.

Why this feels harder than we expect

I can’t help but ask, why is it hard when the meditation itself is so simple. I’ve become convinced that:

It feels harder because it touches places belief alone never reached.

It feels harder because it invites humility rather than certainty.

It feels harder because it doesn’t hand us a neat doctrinal package to defend (because that isn’t the point).

And it feels harder because Christians care deeply about faithfulness—and don’t want to mistake novelty for truth.

That care is not a flaw. It’s part of the discernment process.

Living with the tension

You don’t have to resolve this all at once. You don’t need a finished explanation before you’re allowed to stay with what’s real.

Experience and belief don’t have to be enemies. Over time, they can inform and refine one another.

If you find yourself in that uneasy middle—between what you’ve been taught and what you’re experiencing—you’re not failing at faith.

You’re paying attention to a God who is appropriately bigger than us.