the Pnictogen Wing was late to developing any sort of direct sense or perception of the numinous. our "third eye" didn't open until we were past forty. there's a lot of reasons for that but anyway the event happened, thanks in part to a torrid and disastrous relationship with an otherkin lover in 2015-16, and we've been dealing with it ever since.
it's probably just as well that we didn't start having direct spiritual experiences until such a late age, when we were old enough and experienced enough. our personality may not have been been that well-developed, but we were at least able to put our gnostic experiences into some sort of reasonable perspective; they didn't blow us completely away. (we suspect that our elder sibling, while still alive, wasn't so lucky in this regard.)
still, we were faced with the problem of dealing with the experiences and the information that we thought we were getting from them. "should we do anything about these gnostic perceptions? should we develop a religious practice based on them?" were the key questions.
in our opinion one isn't "required" to have a religious practice, even if you feel that you've got direct experience of spiritual things. that's the dividing line between "being spiritual" and "being religious": if you're content with simply perceiving these things and reflecting upon them and so forth, then you're "spiritual"; but if you decide upon some course of ritual action, regular prayer, or any other sort of organized activity (even if it's strictly private and personal), then you're "religious". the word religio, in Latin, has the sense of duty, of feeling bound ("religion" is cognate with words like "ligature" and "ligament") so...did we feel bound to act upon our spiritual experiences?
"yes," was the answer to that. in earlier, more desolate years of our lives, we'd sought meaning and purpose and community in religious communities. first we'd tried neo-paganism and the Seattle pagan community of 1999-2001, but we found these things wanting. then we strayed towards Christianity and churchgoing, and went so far as to seek adult conversion to Catholicism in 2004. going to Mass was more satisfying in some ways than the loosey-goosey and mostly unserious activities of Seattle-area Wiccans &c., but the Catholic Church proved unsatisfying as well. (and then there was the fact we'd voluntarily joined a Church that was stinking with corruption.)
our habits were against us. we'd been brought up in an abusive and irreligious family, raised by a cynical burned-out atheistic scientist and a Chilean exile who was a live wire of incandescent hatred for Christianity and Catholicism, which (unknown to us during those 200x years of experimenting with Catholic church) had been particularly vicious to our RL mother during her Chilean years. we had no childhood habits of prayer or churchgoing or anything of that sort. we grew up into the shape of a "skeptical", "rationalist", worldly science nerd, and kept that shape until Caltech chewed us up and spat us out; only then did spirituality and religiosity start seeming like things we'd been fools to dismiss. all the same, neither our early dabbling in neo-paganism nor our later dabbling in Catholicism "stuck". we readily drifted away from both when they came to feel like disappointments.
hence, when we began seriously thinking about building ourselves a private religious practice in 2016 and afterward, we were fighting up a steep hill: our habits were still dead against us, and we had a lot of painful memories of previous failures. but we were very different; we had a newfound sense of determination. and slowly, bit by bit, over long months and years, we built up a pattern of regular religious ritual in our lives. it wasn't complicated or deep; there's been a lot of backsliding and blundering.
but now I can look back upon the last several years and realize that we've come a long way from our irreligious days. we've established daily rituals and keep them up even when we're feeling at our worst; they're not much, but they're something, and that's a lot more than we used to think we'd ever manage. we've established a foundation, and now it's time to build upon it.
~Chara of Pnictogen