How I balance spirituality and agency

Today, I woke up with a plan and a specific, rare certainty that the day was going to be great. Across the span of my life, I have realized how precious it is for me to be operating with conviction. So when that sensation arrives without prompting, I listen to it.

The plan was simple: go to a cafe to write, then meet my husband for a coffee. I floated downstairs, loaded with the excitement and certainty that nothing could go wrong.

Naturally, the plan broke immediately. My computer was dead.

So, I waited and went with my husband instead. When we arrived, we met a rare scene: the place was nearly empty. I giddily grabbed my coffee—a surefire sign I needed more caffeine—and practically skipped to the table. When I looked up, I saw a lovely face staring back at me. I paused. "Do I know you?"

I was convinced, down to a cellular level, that I did. She began to speak, and I heard an accent familiar to mine. There is something about hearing a voice from home that softens your defenses. We started chatting (we did not, in fact, know each other), and as my husband later described it, we kept hitting these "Ding!" moments of alignment.

She was North American. Ding.

She is a psychodynamic therapist. Ding.

She specializes in neurodiversity. Ding.

The conversation felt effortless, energized, and deeply connected. We were immersed, letting the café melt away around us. It was the kind of interaction that makes you question "meant to be."

The Agency Trap

Even as I write that, a part of me deep down cringed a little. As someone whose brain makes a thousand connections a minute, I am wary of getting lost in the "woo." To hand over this experience to the universe feels like writing off years of hard work I’ve done to inhabit who I am. It feels like the erasure of my agency.

I can feel the literal wrestling in my brain.

When stars are in my eyes, I can feel myself centering the magic.

• We never sit in that café. It was our first time there in ten months.
• If my computer had been charged, I would have gone earlier and missed her entirely.
• If I hadn't woken up with that specific burst of energy, I never would have spoken to a stranger. It feels like kismet… right?

But my brain, wary of getting lost in the "woo," reads the data differently:

• I avoid crowded places due to sensory processing; an empty cafe was the only place I would sit.
• My executive dysfunction means my computer is rarely charged; the delay was a statistical inevitability, not divine intervention.
• I am hyper-vigilant to familiar accents; I didn't "magically" find her, my reticular activating system filtered for safety.

I resist the idea that a higher power is writing my script because I have fought hard to hold the pen myself. But still, it’s hard not to see the magic in these moments. And why would I want to deny myself awe?

To reconcile this, I’ve had to rethink my relationship with spirituality. I had to stop viewing it as a surrender to the cosmos, and start viewing it as a reunion with the self. I had to bring the definition down from the abstract and into the physical.

WTF is "Spirit" Anyway

For a long time, I treated "spirituality" like a dirty word.

My rejection of it came down to the narrative surrounding it. It conjured images of gurus and internet shamans insisting they held the answers I lacked. It felt like a pressure campaign to trust sources outside of myself more than I trusted my own gut. It felt like a demand for submission.

Because I was so afraid of losing my agency to the "woo," I swung hard in the opposite direction: control.

I became very "mind over matter." I treated my body like a vehicle that my brain was driving—often recklessly. Was energy available to me then? Yes, but it was a forceful, performative beast. I ignored my body’s signals in favor of my mind’s ambition, and it ended up taking me for everything I had.

Acting from that disconnected place cost me. It is only since reintegrating my mind and body that I’ve seen what being truly spirited looks like.

To me, the spirit isn't about abandonment of the self; it is the embodiment of the self. The spirit emerges when the mind and body are connected. When I think of "spirited" people, I don't envision people with their heads in the clouds; I envision folks who are alive in themselves. They know their wants and needs and live into them courageously.

It’s not magic; it’s flow. But to maintain that flow without burning out, I needed a way to handle the unknown.

Faith as Energy Conservation

Part of my brain—the "control" part—desperately wants to calculate the exact ratio to the cafe meeting. It wants the percentage of kismet versus statistics.

But trying to resolve 100% of the unknown is a recipe for burnout. It requires an immense amount of capacity—capacity I would rather spend on problems I actually want to solve. This is why I reclaimed a specific tool: faith.

But wait—don't leave yet! I know this term is loaded. It was for me, too.

For a long time, I struggled with faith because it is often framed as surrender. You are told to "trust the universe," which, to a mind that relies on pattern recognition for safety, feels like negligence. I couldn't accept a spirituality that asked me to amputate my intellect or ignore data.

For me, faith isn't about blind trust. It is a tool for energy preservation.

Faith allows me to stop trying to map the entire universe and just focus on my own path. It allows me to look at a serendipitous event and say, "That was wild," without needing to dissect the math. It allows me to bridge the gap of the unknown so I can reroute my precious energy toward the things I can control. Which, ironically, often means I need faith less. Acting leads to evidence, and that evidence is something more concrete that I can use to trust.

Once I used faith to stop worrying about the "why," I could finally focus on the "what now."

The Fishbowl of Free Will

If faith handles the things we can't control, we need a framework for the things we can. This is where I find the conversation about free will helpful rather than paralyzing.

I often think about neuroscientist Dr. Rachel Barr’s explanation of agency. She suggests that most neuroscientists will tell you that very few choices are fully "our own." We are constrained by predetermined factors: genetics, cognition, resources, and past experiences. This can feel bleak—determinism usually does.

But Dr. Barr proposes a concept I love: free will in a fishbowl.

We don’t have a wide ocean to swim in. We cannot control the size of the bowl, the water quality we started with, or the glass walls of our genetics. But, every time you make a choice, you are upgrading that fishbowl. You can’t change the bowl, but you can make it a more desirable place to live.

This framing is enough for me. When I look at the meeting in the cafe—this extraordinary coming together of shared vision—I don't have to choose between "destiny" and "luck."

I can use Faith to accept that I didn't build the bowl or the cafe. I can use the Fishbowl to recognize the constraints of my own genetics and environment and refocus on what I can influence inside the bowl.

But that still leaves one question: How do we fill the bowl?

Intentional Magnetism

Discussing this with my husband later, he offered a metaphor that bridges the gap between the spiritual "law of attraction" and the scientific "fishbowl." He views life as collecting magnets.

Collecting magnets is the act of developing a skill, a belief, a habit, or a behavior. The magnets we collect through our choices and values actively attract compatible people and experiences. This isn't the wishful thinking manifestation that pervades social media, but rather a deliberate creation of alignment.

By intentionally cultivating specific qualities, we increase the likelihood of drawing similar energies toward us. The "magic" happens not because the universe conspires on our behalf as we wait with open palms, but because we've engineered ourselves to recognize and connect with what resonates.

I don’t believe the universe sent the woman in the cafe to me. I believe that I have engineered myself to be magnetic toward people who share my values. Even the venue played a part. Noddy, the cafe owner, designed a space that is clean, quiet, and nurturing. The probability of me and another neurodivergent practitioner being in that specific space was mathematically higher because of the "magnets" Noddy placed in his environment.

We signal who we are before we even speak.

The Tote Bag

This became undeniably clear at the very end of our interaction. After 45 minutes of talking about neurodivergence and therapy, she stood up to leave. As she did, her tote bag fell over, revealing the text printed on the side:

It’s not hoarding if it’s books.

I guffawed. If you could see my home, you would see walls lined with bookcases. We hadn't spoken about books. We hadn't discussed our reading habits. And yet, there was the overlap, printed on canvas.

It wasn't magic. It was a magnet. But it sure felt magical. We had both polished our fishbowls with specific interests, values, and aesthetics. When those fishbowls collided, even the things we didn't say were in alignment.

Society often presents a false choice: either surrender to fate or reject meaning entirely. But agency doesn't require dismissing the magic of synchronicity. My agency isn't diminished by appreciating serendipity; it's enhanced when I recognize how my choices create the conditions for meaningful encounters.

I’m not giving up my agency to the universe. I’m just focusing on my zone of influence, so that when luck does strike, I recognize the writing on the bag.

Tools & Strategies

If my awareness journey here resonated with you, here are some of the tools that can help you to apply it to your own life (with examples!).

The Fishbowl Method

The Fishbowl Method

Written Guide

Madeline

The Faith Protocol

Map & Pack

Written Guide

Madeline

The Magnet Method

Engineering Luck

Written Guide

Madeline