S2E1: Your Sacred Space: How God Prepares You Before You Know You Need It

Episode Summary

In this season opener, Megan sets the stage for a deeply personal season by sharing the spiritual foundation that shaped everything to come. She opens with her roots in a structured Christian upbringing — one that emphasized prayer, personal revelation, and the love of God through Jesus Christ — before describing how adult hardships pushed her to seek answers beyond religious institutions and directly from the source herself.

The heart of the episode centers on a simple but significant prompt: during years of chronic insomnia (2019–2020), Megan felt spiritually nudged to move from paper journals to a digital one on her phone — a shift that seemed small at the time. That habit became a sacred, private space for late-night prayer, scripture study, and recording spiritual insights during the 2–5 AM hours when she couldn't sleep.

The episode takes a striking turn when Megan reveals that during her divorce, her ex-husband submitted her physical journals to the court with a twisted narrative, attempting to use them as evidence that she was mentally unfit for custody. In that devastating moment, she recognized the divine foresight behind that early nudge — her digital journal had remained protected and private. She closes by inviting listeners to find their own "prayer closet": a sacred, secure space to hear from God, record what they receive, and show up ready to act on it.

Power Back Here exists for the individual or couple ready to stop living in survival mode — and start choosing something entirely different.

This is the work of recognizing your trauma patterns, reclaiming your nervous system, and rebuilding the capacity to trust and develop intimacy in the relationships that matter most — with the Divine, with yourself, and with others.

So many of us have learned to white-knuckle it alone — that people aren't safe — while desperately longing for connection, meaning, and the power to bring something uniquely ours into the world.

Jesus Christ is the center of this work — a living, relational anchor who makes it possible to face all of human reality, receive unconditional love, and then offer that love to others. Sovereign love isn't something we manufacture. It's something we choose to receive — and live from.

If this is resonating and you're ready to go deeper with an experienced guide — for yourself or your marriage — reach out at www.meganconradanaya.com and let's talk next steps. 

We have the power to choose love, always. Power back here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I was raised in a very structured Christian religion. And by Christian I mean I was taught about Jesus Christ. I was taught to honor canonized scripture as the recognized source for where to learn about um God and Jesus Christ. And and I was also really, really encouraged to pray. And personal revelation was emphasized, at least as far as like what was spoken about. And um was always very fascinated with examples and stories of people having supernatural experiences. And even I think I would say came with experiences that were passed down through the generations of stories of ancestors, parents making important decisions through a lot of prayer and a lot of fasting and then hearing the voice of God direct them, answer them. And I also was really taught, you know, that God is love, love is manifest through Jesus Christ and his life and his example and even his crucifixion and resurrection. So those were all parts of my upbringing that I believed, you know, we're all kind of cultured and acculturated into our beliefs. And then as we grow and we have more experiences, we get the opportunity to deconstruct or decide for ourselves like, do we really believe that or not? So um as I um was getting older and having more and more challenging experiences in my adult life that didn't seem to match or didn't seem to be able to be remedied or answered through the religious leadership or kind of doctrine of the churches I was with, I turned deeper and deeper into looking straight to the source for my answers and for my guidance and really deepened my journey in developing those spiritual um sensitivities and gifts. And that's that's a whole journey. So um maybe another episode or another season, I'll get more into those kinds of experiences. But what I want to really focus on this season is that personal and very direct experiences that I've had over the last I'm gonna focus mostly on the last like five, six years of my life with Jesus Christ Himself specifically. Those are experiences that they're mine, and I know what I saw, and I know what I experienced, and I know what the fruit are of those experiences, and I feel most confident in sharing those. They're not coming from a religious context as far as like a denomination or a doctrine. I just know here's what I experienced, and here's how it landed, and here's the fruit of what I experienced, and then this is also how I work with my clients as well. So this whole kind of like deeper, deeper, deeper journey for me personally into coming into greater relationship with the savior. Um, kind of all like there was a lot, a lot of layers of foundation before that I can look back and see. But one started with just a really simple prompt to take an action that didn't really make sense at the time. And in hindsight, I was like, whoa, that's totally mind-blowing. So let me tell you what I mean. So it was right around 2019, 2020, I would say. I was really struggling with some health challenges. And part of that meant I was having horrible insomnia, had for several years. And what I felt prompted to do was um when uh when I would not be able to sleep, typically from like 2 to 4 a.m. Uh, if I were to get up, I would wake everybody up in household. So I kind of felt trapped in bed. And um in the dark, right? And at this point in time, like all of my journals and for the most part, all of like my scriptures or other like devotional books and things like that, they were all paper, like hard copies. So the opportunity to like journal or read or study or something in the middle of the night wasn't there because they were paper-based, as I couldn't turn on the light and disrupt everybody in the household. So um I had this prompt to start using my phone and like a digital app for scriptures and to find a way to start keeping track of my answers and questions and prayers, even because I I was somebody who was very consistent about journaling, but like in notebooks and hard copied journals. Um, and I would write my prayers very often. I started that probably from the time I was like 19. I remember in my college dorm room writing like and questions and things I had forgotten, like putting little like actual like bubbles into the next of each next to each question, uh, so that later, like when I got my answer, I could go back and like check it off. And um, so I was a very avid journaler, but um, having this impression to find a way to do a digital journal, which I know it sounds strange, but by this point, like I was like, why did I never think of that before? Like, I use this phone all the time. So I started that. I started using a digital journal. And um, I just started with Notes app on my phone, had an iPhone. Eventually I heard about another app called Day One, and I switched over to that. It was a little bit um of an easier like journal tracking format as far as organizing my thoughts um by different subjects and topics. So uh it was something where I could easily do in bed during this like two to four, two to five a.m. period where I wasn't able to sleep every single night and feel like I was using my time productively without waking anybody up or having to disturb anybody. So that habit began and started to like deepen, and I started even to like look forward to those times of insomnia where I couldn't sleep. Because before that, I get super frustrated and very annoyed that I couldn't sleep, and I was like, I'm gonna be tired all day tomorrow, and I have so much I need to do and all these things. So maybe you've been in that same cycle. Um, so that was really the foundation place as um things in my my, it's so interesting, like the both went together. As things in my outside life would start to really escalate, it would drive me deeper into these spiritual um study and prayer and pursuit efforts. And I would begin to not just record my thoughts or questions that is having as I was studying scriptures, but also start to feel spirit like flow and illuminate what I was reading and teach me things and give me new insights and give me new language and start to kind of straighten out my thinking, honestly, and start to help me understand more like how God thought about things. And the more I did that, the more I started to understand that the way he thought about things and the way that people in my immediate life thought about things were very at odds. And so the more I started to kind of push back or speak up or make decisions based on like the new kind of frameworks of understanding of how how God thought about things were that was becoming part of me, the more things started to like, as you can maybe imagine, fall apart and escalate. And then we went into COVID. And um, that became even more critical. And I I will get I will come back, I will circle back, but I just want to share like fast forward several years, and I'm going through a really, really ugly divorce. And um one of the court filings that my ex-husband um filed were old physical journals of mine that he had taken that I didn't know that he had set aside and he had scanned them and had submitted them, um, but with like a twist and a very ugly, like narrative uh what's the word? Twisted narrative about them. And he was using them as proof to say that I was mentally ill. And he was using it as leverage to make the argument that I did not deserve to have any custody of my children. And I remember seeing those or so many things that went through my mind and body and heart at that moment, not the least of which was like complete, complete devastation and shock, feeling betrayal, all kinds of things, but also was like that. Do you remember how it's kind of like the spirit was like, do you remember how I prompted you to start using a digital journal? Yeah, we already knew this was going on, kind of a thing. And I was just like, I never even had crossed my mind that that could be something that he would do. And um, that was really that was really shocking, but also just another testament to me of the fact that that actually was like spirit um guiding that to keep me safe and give me a very protected private place to work out some of these spiritual experiences that we were gonna build to, and I will dive into some of those that I feel like are important to share in the coming episodes. But if you are in a place in your life where you're wanting to have some really um personal and poignant spiritual experiences for yourself, then I would recommend that you give some thought about how you can find a sacred and protected place to start to have those. You can record them, however, makes sense for you. But also, is there like basically like a prayer closet for me? It was 2 to 5 a.m. when everyone was dead asleep, and I was in the same room with people, but they were not awake. But maybe there's a commute that you take every day where you can just talk out loud to God. Um, and the years that followed, I would definitely do that a lot. That was my sacred place where I could talk to him and hear back from him all the time, and um maybe find a secure way to start recording your experiences and let God know you're really serious to hear from him and that you're ready to act on whatever he might teach you about, and um, that you have a way to preserve a record of what he's gonna share with you because you take it seriously. Certainly was the case for me. And oh my goodness, I came and I still go back to things that I recorded, things I was shown, things I was taught so many times over and over again. So definitely for me it was very important to record all those. So um that's kind of where we want to start, and I can't wait to start sharing some of these really specific experiences with you.