You don’t believe in God. Or gods. Or the universe as a conscious entity. Or manifesting. Or astrology, chakras, crystal healing, or any of the things that typically fall under the umbrella of “spirituality.” You’ve left religion behind—if you were ever part of one—and you’re comfortable with that. You don’t need supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. You trust science, reason, evidence. The measurable over the mystical.

And yet. There’s something. A pull you can’t quite name. A sense that there’s more to being alive than just the mechanics of existing. A longing for meaning that materialism doesn’t quite satisfy. A feeling—irrational, perhaps, but persistent—that reverence and wonder aren’t the exclusive domain of believers.

You’re suspicious of anything that sounds too woo. But you’re also starting to suspect that dismissing everything spiritual as delusional might be throwing out something essential along with the supernatural bathwater.

This is for you. The sceptic who still seeks. The atheist who sometimes feels awe. The rationalist who suspects there might be value in what religion was pointing at, even if the theology doesn’t hold up.

The Problem With “Spiritual But Not Religious”

Let’s start by acknowledging why “spiritual but not religious” often makes sceptics cringe. Because in practice, it frequently means: I like the aesthetic of spirituality without any of the rigour, accountability, or difficult theology. I want cosmic meaning without organised religion’s baggage, so I’ll cherry-pick from various traditions, add some crystals and manifestation, and call it personal truth.

This version of spirituality often lacks intellectual honesty. It makes unfalsifiable claims (“everything happens for a reason”). It uses spiritual language to bypass difficult emotions (“I’m just raising my vibration”). It mistakes individual preference for universal truth. And it can be just as dogmatic as any religion, just without the structure or community to challenge it.

So if that’s what spirituality means, you’re right to be sceptical.

But what if there’s another way? What if spirituality, stripped of supernatural claims and wishful thinking, is actually pointing at something real? Something that doesn’t require you to believe in anything you don’t, but that might enrich your entirely material existence?

What Spirituality Actually Is (Without the Woo)

At its most basic, spirituality is the recognition that there are dimensions to human experience that go beyond the purely material, transactional, or utilitarian—without necessarily being supernatural.

It’s the part of you that stops to watch the sunset even though there’s no practical benefit to doing so. The part that feels moved by music or art or the first warm day of spring. The part that looks at the night sky and feels something—awe, insignificance, connection, wonder—that has nothing to do with productivity or survival.

Spirituality, in this sense, is just paying attention to the layers of meaning and experience that exist beyond “this helps me survive and reproduce.” It’s the recognition that consciousness itself is strange and worth exploring. That being alive, being aware, being part of this improbable universe is inherently significant, whether or not there’s a god watching.

You don’t need to believe in souls or afterlives or cosmic purpose to recognise this. You just need to notice that some experiences feel qualitatively different from others. Some moments feel sacred, even if you can’t explain why or to what.

The Secular Sacred

Here’s what’s fascinating: many of the practices and experiences that religious traditions call “spiritual” have measurable, material benefits. And they don’t require supernatural belief to work.

Meditation isn’t about accessing higher realms. It’s about training attention, regulating your nervous system, and observing your thought patterns. Brain scans show structural changes in regular meditators. The benefits are real, regardless of whether you believe in chakras or enlightenment.

Ritual isn’t about appeasing deities. It’s about creating meaning through repeated actions, marking transitions, and giving structure to significant moments. Lighting a candle when you sit down to write. Always having tea in the same mug. Walking the same route when you need to think. These are rituals. They’re sacred to you because you’ve made them so, not because they tap into cosmic forces.

Contemplative practice isn’t about communing with God. It’s about creating space for reflection, for sitting with questions without demanding immediate answers, for tolerating uncertainty. Philosophy does this. Long walks do this. Journaling does this. The practice is spiritual even if your framework is secular.

Community and connection aren’t about shared doctrine. They’re about the fundamental human need to belong, to be witnessed, to participate in something larger than yourself. You can find this in book clubs, activism, creative projects, or simply in deep conversation with people who see you. The transcendence of self through connection is real, whether or not you attribute it to the divine.

Awe isn’t about the supernatural. It’s a documented psychological state that occurs when you encounter something vast that challenges your understanding of the world. The Grand Canyon. The birth of your child. The fact that you’re made of atoms that were forged in dying stars. Awe rewires your brain, reduces your ego, connects you to something larger. And it’s completely material.

Agnostic Theism: Belief Without Certainty

There’s a middle ground between atheism and religion that often gets overlooked: agnostic theism. The position of believing in something greater whilst acknowledging you don’t and can’t know what that something is.

This isn’t fence-sitting. It’s intellectual honesty. It’s saying: the universe exists, consciousness exists, meaning exists—and I don’t know why. I don’t know if there’s intention behind it. I don’t know if there’s something we might call God or if it’s all just matter and energy following physical laws. But I’m open to the possibility of something more, even as I recognise I have no way to verify it.

You can hold this position and still be deeply sceptical of specific claims. You can reject astrology, manifestation, and miracle cures whilst still acknowledging that reality is stranger and more complex than pure materialism suggests. You can dismiss most of what passes for spirituality on Instagram whilst still feeling that there’s something worth seeking in the territory spirituality tries to map.

Agnostic theism is spirituality for the intellectually honest. It’s the refusal to make claims beyond what you can know, combined with the refusal to close off all possibility of transcendence, meaning, or the sacred.

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” —Richard Feynman

What You’re Actually Longing For

When sceptics feel drawn to spirituality, they’re often not longing for supernatural explanations. They’re longing for:

Meaning. Not cosmic purpose handed down from on high, but the ability to create significance in your own life. To live in alignment with your values. To participate in something that matters to you, even if it doesn’t matter cosmically.

Transcendence. Not literal escape from material reality, but moments when you feel connected to something larger than your individual concerns. Music that moves you to tears. Work that absorbs you completely. Love that expands your sense of self. These are transcendent experiences available to atheists.

Wonder. Not miracles, but the recognition that existence itself is extraordinary. That you’re a temporary arrangement of atoms that became conscious enough to contemplate its own existence. That’s inherently wonder-inducing, with or without a creator.

Depth. Not mystical profundity, but the sense that life contains layers worth exploring. That rushing through existence focused only on productivity and survival is missing something essential. That there are questions worth sitting with even if they don’t have answers.

Connection. Not to the divine, necessarily, but to yourself, to others, to the natural world, to the fact of being alive. The opposite of the alienation and fragmentation that characterises much of modern life.

All of this is available without supernatural belief. All of this is, in a sense, spiritual. And all of this is compatible with scepticism, science, and reason.

Practices for the Spiritually Sceptical

If you’re drawn to spirituality but resistant to the woo, here are practices that don’t require you to believe in anything you don’t:

Secular meditation: Approach it as attention training, not enlightenment seeking. Apps like Waking Up (by Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and philosopher) teach meditation without the mysticism. The benefits—reduced reactivity, increased awareness, better emotional regulation—are well-documented and don’t require belief in chakras.

Nature immersion: Time in nature reduces cortisol, improves mood, and creates awe. You don’t need to believe nature has consciousness to recognise that humans are part of an ecosystem and that disconnection from it has psychological costs. Walk in forests. Swim in oceans. Notice the fact of being one small part of something incomprehensibly vast.

Contemplative reading: Philosophy, poetry, science writing that grapples with big questions. Read Marcus Aurelius, Mary Oliver, Carl Sagan. Engage with ideas that don’t provide answers but that deepen your questions. This is spiritual practice disguised as reading.

Creative practice: Making things—writing, painting, music, cooking—purely for the sake of making them. Not for productivity or outcome, but for the experience of bringing something into existence that didn’t exist before. This is as close to divinity as atheists get: the act of creation.

Ritual without religion: Create your own. Light a candle when you write. Play specific music when you need to think. Always drink your morning coffee from the same mug. These aren’t supernatural—they’re psychological anchors. But they create space for reflection, mark transitions, and make ordinary moments feel significant.

Existential journaling: Write about the big questions without demanding answers. What does it mean that I exist? What do I want my life to be about? What actually matters to me? This is contemplative practice. It’s spiritual even if your conclusions are entirely secular.

Practising attention: Simply noticing things. The quality of light. The taste of food. The feeling of being in your body. This is mindfulness stripped of Buddhism. It’s just paying attention on purpose. And attention, sustained, can feel sacred all on its own.

When Scepticism Becomes Its Own Dogma

Here’s something sceptics sometimes miss: rigid materialism can be just as closed-minded as religious fundamentalism. If you’ve decided in advance that nothing beyond the purely material exists, that consciousness is “just” neurons, that meaning is “just” an evolutionary adaptation, that there’s nothing worth exploring in subjective experience—you’ve closed yourself off to dimensions of reality you might actually benefit from investigating.

You don’t have to believe in souls to recognise that consciousness is genuinely mysterious. Neuroscience can map brain activity, but it still can’t fully explain why there’s something it’s like to be you. Why subjective experience exists at all. This is called the hard problem of consciousness, and it remains unsolved.

You don’t have to believe in cosmic purpose to recognise that humans create meaning, and that this meaning-making is essential to wellbeing. Dismissing all spirituality as delusion because it doesn’t conform to strict materialism is intellectually lazy. It’s refusing to engage with the territory because you don’t like the maps other people have drawn.

The question isn’t “is there a god?” The question is: “are there ways of relating to existence that enrich life, create meaning, and foster wellbeing—regardless of supernatural truth claims?” And the answer is clearly yes.

The Spirituality You’re Already Practising

If you’ve ever:

• Stood in front of a piece of art and felt something shift inside you
• Looked at the stars and felt simultaneously insignificant and connected
• Been moved to tears by music
• Experienced flow state—complete absorption in an activity
• Felt gratitude not for anything specific but just for being alive
• Had a moment of clarity where everything suddenly made sense
• Connected so deeply with another person that boundaries dissolved
• Witnessed birth, death, or any other threshold moment
• Felt awe at the complexity of nature, the universe, or your own existence

You’ve already had spiritual experiences. You just might not have called them that. You might have dismissed them as “just” emotional responses, “just” brain chemistry, “just” evolved reactions to certain stimuli.

But what if the “just” is doing too much work there? What if these experiences, however explainable mechanistically, are still worth paying attention to? Still worth cultivating? Still worth recognising as different from ordinary consciousness?

That’s spirituality. Not the belief in anything supernatural, but the recognition that some experiences matter differently. Some moments feel sacred. Some states of consciousness are worth seeking, not because they’re useful, but because they’re meaningful.

Building Your Own Framework

The beauty of secular spirituality is that you get to build your own framework. You’re not constrained by doctrine or tradition. You can take what works from various sources—Stoic philosophy, Buddhist meditation techniques, scientific awe, artistic transcendence—and leave what doesn’t resonate.

Your spirituality might look like:

Weekly forest walks where you deliberately put your phone away and just notice. Reading philosophy before bed. Making art without expectation of outcome. Having deep conversations about meaning and existence. Sitting with grief instead of rushing through it. Practising gratitude not because the universe will reward you but because it shifts your attention toward what’s present rather than what’s lacking.

None of this requires you to believe in anything you don’t. None of this asks you to abandon reason or embrace woo. It just asks you to recognise that human consciousness is capable of experiences that go beyond the purely functional, and that cultivating these experiences might make your finite existence richer.

The Honest Middle Ground

You don’t have to choose between dismissing all spirituality as nonsense or embracing beliefs that contradict your rationalism. There’s a middle path: taking spirituality seriously as a domain of human experience whilst remaining sceptical of supernatural claims.

You can meditate without believing in enlightenment. You can experience awe without attributing it to God. You can create ritual without thinking it affects cosmic forces. You can seek meaning without needing the universe to provide it. You can feel reverence without requiring an object of worship.

This is spirituality for sceptics. It’s the recognition that being alive, being conscious, being part of this improbable universe is inherently significant—whether or not there’s anything watching. That some questions are worth sitting with even if they’re unanswerable. That attention itself, sustained and intentional, can be a form of prayer.

You don’t need to believe. You just need to be willing to seek.