What does it mean to FEEL the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit is the third member of the Godhead. His role is to testify of God and Christ and to share with us messages of love and comfort from them. Feeling the Spirit is a spiritual feeling not a physical one.

Have you ever had a stomach ache from the flu or food poisoning? That is a physical feeling. Have you ever felt “sick” in someone’s presence or “sick” of doing something hard or unsettled about a future event or butterflies in your stomach when you’re afraid of going on stage.  These are various “spiritual” feelings. Feeling the Spirit is a feeling that comes to you when you are quiet, introspective and open to ideas.

Ideas are thoughts inside your head. If an idea is your own, it will be loud. If an idea is from the Holy Spirit it will be quiet. Since neither are audible physically, this may be hard for you to comprehend. The Holy Spirit can suggest ideas to you and you can “hear” them if you choose. If this is not something you have experienced, go to the Bible and read it. In between the words or maybe in spite of the words on the page, you may “hear” or understand a message that is not explicitly there. That is the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit conveys God’s love to us and through us. Interacting with people is bound to cause some pain as we bumble through life. Our natural response is to defend ourselves from injury and attack when threatened. With the Holy Spirit’s help we can feel empathy for someone who is hurtful. With the Holy Spirit’s help we can forgive ourselves for hurting others and messing up in life. We love like children: today I love you, tomorrow I don’t. God loves us unconditionally. His Spirit conveys that love and teaches us to love in a way that does not come naturally.

It is important to write down the spiritual experiences that we have so that we don’t forget them. They are so quiet that it is easy to look back on them after time has passed and question their validity. Even I cannot think of the most recent time I felt the Holy Spirit so to write this post I had to go back and look at what I had written down. A recent spiritual idea that I had was to write blog posts based on the sermons prepared for General Conference by my church leaders. If you have read any of my posts from October or November, they are all inspired by their counsel to Church members.

Spirituality is a feeling. If you can’t feel right now for whatever reason, obedience precedes the feeling of faith. Obedience is doing the ten commandments. It is following the counsel of prophets and apostles. It is reading the words of Christ in the Bible and taking him literally. A deeper spiritual understanding that isn’t based on the letter of the law comes later.

You might like another of my posts on this topic: The Holy Spirit of God

For further study:

Rasband, Ronald. Lest thou Forget. Oct 2016

Hales, Robert D. The Holy Ghost. April 2016