Accepting and exploring our ever changing spiritual path

Nine years ago, I was sitting in a café, catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. We had once been close, but as we spoke, I felt an invisible wall between us. It wasn’t just time that had changed things; our lives had taken different paths. A quiet grief settled in as I realised the friendship we once had was no longer the same.

As she talked, my attention drifted to the background music. At first, it was just a sound, but then something shifted. The music seeped into me in a way I had never experienced before. The melody was unlike anything I knew, yet the words felt like they had always belonged to me: Om Namah Shivaya. The phrase repeated over and over, woven into a mix of mantra and DJ-style beats.

A wave of shivers ran through me. The sadness I felt about the disconnection with my friend softened. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like something to grieve. We were simply walking different roads, yet still connected; we breathed the same air, after all.

I grabbed my phone and typed out the words: Om Namah Shivaya. I had no idea what they meant, where they came from, or why they felt so significant. At that point in my life, I had never practiced yoga. I had no connection to spirituality. But something in those words comforted me in a way I couldn’t explain.

For two years, I did nothing with the experience other than occasionally looking up the mantra, still wondering why it felt so familiar. My mind wasn’t open to the idea that it could have been a spiritual experience. I wasn’t just agnostic; I was a staunch atheist, convinced that religion and spirituality were tools of oppression.

As a teenager, I had been fascinated by devotion, dipping my toes into different religious traditions. But my experiences had been largely negative, only reinforcing my belief that spirituality and religion made the world a worse place. And yet, this one moment, a song in a café, had planted a seed. One I wasn’t ready to acknowledge just yet.

Finding a practice that suits your personality

Fast-forward a few years, and I had finally started practicing yoga. At first, I saw it as just a nice bit of exercise; some stretching, some movement, nothing more. I wasn’t open to the spiritual side of it at all. Anytime someone mentioned chakras or prana energy, I tuned out (or inwardly rolled my eyes). But I found that I enjoyed meditation.

Meditation had always come naturally to me. As a kid, I was often overwhelmed by the chaotic energy of other children. I never really connected with kids my own age; I found them too noisy, too childish. Books were my refuge, writing my escape. Whenever I was forced into social situations (school, sleepovers, summer camps) I’d find a way out. I’d slip away into nature, hide behind a tree, close my eyes, and breathe. I didn’t have the words for it then, but looking back, I was already meditating. I was instinctively letting my energy settle, shaking off the noise and emotions I had absorbed from others.

So, when meditation reappeared in my life through yoga, it felt like slipping into something familiar. I started practicing at home, deepening my connection to stillness. Then, one day, everything changed, I had a deeply spiritual experience in a meditation (right after a very traumatic event). It shattered some of my skepticism of spirituality. I had felt a bliss that wasn’t tied to the material world, that existed beyond my body; an energy so vast and permanent that it didn’t depend on whether I was alive or not. It was undeniable.

In the wake of that experience, I reshaped my life, and the experience became my main driving force to pursue a spiritual practice. I moved back to my home country after 10 years, and as I settled in, I realised I wanted to practice meditation in a group setting. That’s when I discovered, quite by chance, that I was living near one of the very few Zen Buddhist centers in Holland.

Zen turned out to be the perfect bridge for me. It offered meditation without the mysticism, a structured practice that didn’t require me to believe in anything supernatural. No incense rituals, no chanting in languages I didn’t understand; just sitting, breathing, being. It fit me at that time in my life.

I often see people forcing themselves into spiritual practices that don’t actually suit them. They push through gruelling disciplines, not out of love for the practice, but from a place of self-rejection; wanting to be someone else rather than deepening who they already are. And because the practice isn’t truly theirs, they get stuck in a cycle of disappointment. They struggle with themselves, torn between who they are and who they think they should be. Instead of growth, they experience an inner battle; one that drains them rather than nourishes them.

But real transformation doesn’t come from forcing yourself into a mould. It comes from finding a practice that resonates with who you truly are. A practice that doesn’t make you feel like you’re constantly failing, but instead reminds you of your own nature, your own rhythm. For me, that practice was yoga and zen meditation at that stage in my life. 

Letting the practice find you

Two years into my Zen Buddhist practice, something unexpected started happening. Subtle at first; just little moments here and there. During my prayers, as I bowed to honour the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, my mind would quietly whisper, Om Namah Shivaya. In yoga nidra, images of Lord Shiva seated in deep meditation would flicker through my consciousness, like dreams sneaking in while I was still awake.

I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I never tried to force an answer, never felt the need to draw conclusions about things we can’t fully understand. Was it just my imagination? A subconscious yearning for a new spiritual path? Or was it something else entirely; something outside of me, calling me toward it? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was there, undeniable.

But I was afraid to step outside my comfort zone. Zen Buddhism made sense to me. It was structured, disciplined, and, most importantly, familiar. I had no one in my life to ask about Shiva or Shaivism, only Buddhist teachers and practitioners. And, to be honest, I felt embarrassed. What if I was just making all of this up?

Then, during my 300-hour yoga teacher training, we studied Shaivism in more depth. Some parts of it resonated with me, enough to pique my curiosity. But the non-dual Tantra we were learning? Parts of it terrified me. The philosophy and practices felt too fluid, too open, too scary. I liked the idea of renunciation, of stepping away from life to devote myself entirely to practice, much more than living in the world with all its pitfalls. In fact, I was seriously considering becoming a Zen Buddhist monk.

But before committing to that path, I gave myself one last chance to try living in the world while maintaining a spiritual practice. I moved to Thailand with the intention to set up a yoga retreat. And then, almost by accident, I went to Cambodia. That trip changed everything.

From the moment I arrived, I felt it; like something rising from the earth itself, pulling me in. A knowing, deep in my bones, that this place was going to play a part in my journey. Three months later, I moved to Siem Reap.

Fast-forward a few more months, to a night that took me completely by surprise. I was at a party, dancing (something I had rarely done up until moving here). I had partied in my teenage years, but my introverted nature eventually kept me away from those spaces. Being around too many people had always been overwhelming. I absorbed too much; people’s emotions, their hidden pain behind forced smiles, their sense of being lost or lonely. And yet here I was dancing, and actually enjoying myself more than I was used to.

As I moved to the music, I started seeing people in a way I never had before. Their movements spoke louder than words, revealing their stories, their emotions, their past. And then, from deep within, a realisation surfaced; not a thought, not an emotion, but something far more profound. I could move just like him, just like her, just like them, because we are all the same. Different expressions of the exact same thing.

In that moment, it was as if I remembered something I had always known but somehow forgotten; I wasn’t Malou. I was Shiva. And so was everyone else, playing out their individual roles. A phrase I had read that very morning in the Shiva Sutras echoed in my mind: Nasiva vidyate kvacit.
There is nothing that is not Shiva.

I stood there, stunned. Of all places, I had a life-altering spiritual realisation on a dance floor. Me—having an epiphany in the middle of bass drops and questionable dance moves. And yet… maybe it made perfect sense. I wasn’t just there to enjoy myself (because, let’s be real, I rarely do at parties). I was there to unlock some cosmic truth; which, in hindsight, is probably the most on-brand reason for me to go out. Even in a room full of people losing themselves to the music, I somehow managed to stay true to my inner party-pooper and I was ready to leave early. 

I cycled home, feeling the night air against my skin, my mind was buzzing; wide awake, electrified. I didn’t sleep that night, or the following night, but I wasn’t tired. I knew (without a doubt) that this was a turning point. And I realised: the lessons don’t just come in deep meditation or solitude. They find us right in the middle of life.

For years, I had been resisting this path. Pushing it away out of fear, out of uncertainty. Ever since I first heard that mantra nine years ago, something had been pulling me toward this moment. And now, finally, I was listening.

I had explored the concepts, toyed with the ideas, but until that night, they had remained just that; concepts. Now, something had shifted. This wasn’t just philosophy or curiosity anymore; it had become my reality. A deep, undeniable knowing. A shift in my paradigm, pulling me away from Buddhism and toward something new.

I still don’t know exactly what it means or where it will lead me, but I feel an unshakable commitment to it. I’m ready to step deeper into Shiva-based traditions; to explore, to surrender, to see where this path takes me.

Why Shiva? 

Alongside my struggle with my atheist identity, I also wrestled with another question; why him? Of all the deities, of all the incredible possibilities, why was it Lord Shiva who kept showing up in my practice, in my meditations, in my dreams?

As a feminist and queer woman, I had always been drawn to the stories of goddesses. I admired their strength, their power. If I was going to have visions of a deity, why couldn’t it be Kali, fierce and untamed? Why not Durga, riding into battle? Even though I understood these figures as representations rather than literal beings, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. Why was it the image of a muscular man that kept appearing to me?

Given my history, it made sense. I had spent my childhood and much of my twenties surviving abuse at the hands of men. By the time I reached my thirties, I made a conscious decision: I would focus on my relationships with women. As a bisexual woman, it was an easy shift; I chose to date only women, to nurture female friendships, to distance myself from men who didn’t feel safe. I knew, of course, that not all men were the same. I still had male friends I cherished deeply. But I no longer wanted to center men in my life.

And then on my trip in Cambodia, I fell in love with a man. Not just any man, but someone whose kindness and gentleness seemed to transcend gender itself. He embodied something beyond the binary, beyond the constraints of identity. And through Shaivism, I am starting to see the same thing; Shakti is not less than Shiva. One cannot exist without the other. They are two forces of the same divine energy, inseparable, intertwined.

The mantra Om Namah Shivaya and the image of Shiva go beyond the categories we create, beyond the labels we attach so much meaning to. More than anything, they remind me of what is true at the core of all existence: we are all expressions of the same divine energy. And maybe the labels we hold onto so tightly are the very things that keep us from seeing that reality.