The Kingdom Is Within: Remembering the Divinity That Was Never Lost

There is something I keep bumping up against in my own relationship with spirituality: the idea that the Divine is somewhere outside of us and that there are certain steps we must take to gain access. Say the right words. Follow the right practice. Believe the right thing. Become healed enough, pure enough or spiritual enough, and then perhaps God will come closer.

But what if there is no distance to close?

The kingdom is within.

Those words feel enormous when I really allow myself to sit with them. If the kingdom is within, where exactly am I trying to get to? If God, Source, Holy Spirit, I AM—whatever name we use for something ultimately bigger than language—is within me, then perhaps spiritual practice isn't about calling the Divine into my life. Maybe it is about remembering the Divine was never absent.

What I keep hearing is, I am within you always.

That changes so much for me because dogma can create distance. It can give us the belief that there are steps between human and Divine and that someone else holds the instructions. Someone else knows the correct doorway. Someone else gets to determine whether we have believed correctly, behaved correctly or done enough to enter.

But if the kingdom is within, no one else gets to be the gatekeeper.

When I say we get to choose our own divinity over and over again, I don't mean that our choosing somehow creates the Divine within us. I mean that we get to choose whether we are willing to remember it, trust it and live from our own relationship with it. No one else can make that choice for us, and no one else gets to take that choice away.

And when I look back over everything I've been sitting with, I can see this beautiful spiral beginning to form. We meet one another and relationship creates a mirror. The mirror reveals something within us, so we turn inward. Eventually we encounter something we have hidden in shadow, and something may need to die there—a belief, identity, attachment, pattern or understanding that can no longer come with us. We walk through the valley, surrender what is ready to be released, and something new begins to emerge.

Then we remember.

For me, the movement looks something like ego awareness → shadow → death → surrender → rebirth → remembrance. But I don't see it as a checklist where we complete all the steps and graduate into some permanently enlightened version of ourselves. I see a spiral. Life gives us another mirror, something else is revealed, and around we go again at a different depth and from a different place within ourselves.

Not because we failed the first time. Because we're alive.

We are created and creating this life at the same time. We have choice. We have agency. We have the extraordinary gift of deciding, moment after moment, how we're going to meet what life places before us. Maybe free will is one of our greatest gifts precisely because no teacher, guru, institution, partner or belief system gets to make that choice for us. They may point toward something. They may mirror something back to us. They may walk beside us for part of the journey, but they cannot enter our own hearts and choose for us.

Eventually, the invitation brings us back to the same place: turn within.

The truth lies within every heart.

The more I sit with these teachings in this way, the more hopeful they become to me. The spiritual journey stops feeling like an attempt to somehow become good enough to reach the Divine and begins feeling much more like remembrance. The mirror, the shadow, the valley, the deaths and the rebirths aren't evidence that we've become separated from God. They may be some of the very places where we remember that separation was never the truth.

Maybe we aren't trying to find our way back to the Divine after all.

Maybe we're remembering there was never anywhere else we needed to go.

Huge hugs & divine love,
Morgan