Spiritual but not religious. It’s something many people say about themselves today — and it’s where my own journey started. But what does it really mean?

For me, the answer came in grief. When my dog Sadie died, I found myself looking for her — in signs, in symbols, in moments that felt like more than coincidence. I decided she was the blue butterfly. She became the symbol of the store — and the beginning of everything Spirited is.

To me, being spiritual means paying attention to what connects you to something larger than yourself — and trusting your own direct experience of it.

What I have come to understand — and what seems more obvious the deeper you go — is that this reaching is not new. Cultures across history have done it. The crystals, the rituals, the symbols — what we sometimes call “new age” are almost always ancient practices. Burning incense appears in the Bible, in Buddhist temples, in ancient Egyptian ceremony. Crystals have been carried as sacred objects across Indigenous, Vedic, and early Christian traditions. Candles lit with intention appear in traditions across the world.

And the evidence goes back further than any of those. Among the oldest human artifacts we have are not just tools for survival, but carved symbols, burial offerings, and figures that appear to represent something beyond the physical world. A 70,000-year-old cave in Botswana holds a carved python surrounded by ritual objects. We can’t know exactly what our ancestors believed. But we can see that they believed in something beyond what could be touched or explained.

Which brings me to what I believe is foundational about spirituality: the experience is yours. There are teachers and tools that can help — and I’ve been grateful for both — but no one else’s path is your path. What matters is what you feel. What resonates. What opens something in you.

That’s what Spirited is here for. Not to tell you what to believe, but to offer the tools, the objects, and the space to find out for yourself.