Part of the Explore Sedona Series

We almost didn’t stop at that metaphysical bookstore.
It was our first Valentine’s Day trip to Sedona—just a quick two-hour drive from home in Arizona, but it felt like stepping into another world. My husband and I had spent the morning hiking around Bell Rock, those iconic red rocks glowing like embers against the impossibly blue sky. We’d already established what would become our sacred rituals: breakfast at the Coffee Pot Restaurant (where the portions are generous and the pancakes are legendary), dinners at the Cowboy Club (because nothing says romance like elk medallions with a view of the crimson cliffs).
But that afternoon, driving through town with our cameras full of sunset photos and our legs pleasantly tired from the trails, we passed a row of shops that made us slow down. Among the galleries and boutiques sat a small metaphysical bookstore, its windows promising crystals and incense and mysteries I’d never let myself explore.
“Want to go in?” my husband asked.
I did. More than I realized.

The Photograph That Saw Right Through Me

Inside, the shop smelled like sage and possibility. Shelves lined with books about chakras and meditation and things my Catholic school education had never mentioned. At the register, a flyer caught my eye: aura photography available. I’d never heard of it—the idea that the energy field surrounding your body could be captured on film seemed equal parts fascinating and absurd.
But Sedona has a way of making you say yes to things.
The process was simple. We sat, we posed, a special camera clicked. When the photographs developed, my husband’s aura blazed with orange and red—bold, grounded, exactly what you’d expect from him. Mine swirled with orange and yellow, threaded through with purple and blue. Pretty, I thought. Colorful.
Then the woman reading our auras paused.
“This is unusual,” she said, pointing to the center of my chest. Right where my heart would be, there was a white haze—bright, almost glowing. “I’ve never seen this before.”
She didn’t elaborate much, but something in her tone suggested I should pay attention. So I did.

What I Found When I Started Looking

That evening, while my husband showered before dinner, I fell down an internet rabbit hole about aura colors. Orange meant creativity. Yellow suggested optimism. Purple indicated intuition. But white? White was rare. White meant spiritual awakening, a connection to something beyond the everyday, a door beginning to open.
I sat there in our hotel room, the Sedona sunset painting the walls pink and gold, and felt something shift inside me.
I grew up with religion—the kind that came with rules and guilt and a God who seemed more interested in judgment than joy. Catholic school from kindergarten through high school had given me prayers I still remembered and a wariness I couldn’t shake. I’d never been religious, not really, but I’d always been searching. I couldn’t accept that life was random, that we were just here without purpose or connection to something greater.
But organized religion felt like trying to wear someone else’s shoes. They never quite fit.
That aura photograph, though—that strange white glow over my heart—it woke something up. A curiosity. A permission to explore spirituality on my own terms, without the weight of doctrine or the fear of doing it wrong.

The Sedona Effect

The rest of that trip was magic. We hiked Airport Mesa at sunrise, feeling the famous vortex energy hum beneath our feet (or maybe it was just the altitude and the awe). We browsed shops selling turquoise jewelry and art that captured the desert’s wild beauty. We ate too much, laughed constantly, took a thousand photos that still don’t quite capture how it felt to be there.
But something had fundamentally changed. I’d arrived in Sedona as a tourist. I left as a seeker.
In the years since, I’ve returned every Valentine’s Day. It’s our tradition now—the Coffee Pot breakfasts, the Cowboy Club dinners, the hikes that leave us breathless in the best way. But I also come back different each time. More grounded in my spirituality. More connected to that greater purpose I always sensed but couldn’t name.
Sedona’s energy hasn’t changed. I have.

What I Know Now

My spiritual practice doesn’t look like the religion of my childhood. There’s no pew, no prescribed prayers, no intermediary between me and the divine. Instead, there’s meditation and intuition. There’s gratitude and presence. There’s a deep, bone-level knowing that I’m part of something vast and loving and purposeful.
It’s changed everything—how I see the world, how I move through challenges, how I love myself and others. I feel whole in a way I never did before. Not perfect, not enlightened, but whole. Connected. Awake.
And every year, when we drive those two hours north and watch the red rocks rise up from the desert floor, I feel it again. That sense of homecoming. That reminder that sometimes the most important journeys begin with a single curious step into an unfamiliar shop.
Sedona cracked me open that Valentine’s Day. I’m still grateful it did.

That white glow in my aura photograph? I still have it framed. A reminder that the universe sometimes sends us exactly what we need, even when we didn’t know we were looking for it.

In the next week or so, I’m going to be posting my Explore Sedona Series that features some of my favorite Sedona landmarks and our experiences there. Please follow along and join the adventure.