My Testimony
4/27/2026 · Warren Vogel · Testimony
How God led me to Him through meditation.
In 2019, a new father at the peak of my career, physical fitness, and general capabilities in my life, I woke up in my bed at 4 am with my heart pounding, sweating, and a dull ache in my right side. In the moment I felt afraid and confused, but not afraid or confused enough to do anything besides get back in bed. In a classic act of masculine denial, I slept on my left side, because it hurt too much to sleep when I laid on my right.
A few hours later, when I found myself in the emergency room of Gritman listening to a doctor tell me that my lungs were full of blood clots and that I was lucky to be alive, I felt, for the first time in my life, the undeniable knowledge that I was going to die, and that I had no power over when that moment would come. My father died when I was 11 years old, and sitting alone in the ER, my mind hurtled through all the moments of my 9-month-old daughter’s life that she would live without me. I relived through my daughter’s eyes all the unbearable pain, confusion, and abandonment I felt as a boy whose father disappeared from his life overnight.
In the months that followed, I found myself spiraling deeper and deeper into paralyzing anxiety and dread, unable to look away from the excruciating terror of my inevitable death and the gulf of agony I would leave in my wake. It started to affect my work and my relationships, and I began desperately to seek help.
Meditation found me
Aside from seeing a counselor, one of the main things I did was open a book of Thich Nhat Hanh’s, The Miracle of Mindfulness, that I had started years ago and never finished. I knew that meditation was supposed to help with stress and anxiety. I began to meditate daily as the book taught—at first 5 minutes a day, then 10, then 15, then 30. To my shock and delight, it helped a lot. That sparked my curiosity. All of this mindfulness-based stress-reduction was rooted in the teachings of the Buddha, I came to learn, so I turned to his teachings and devoured them. I found them infinitely interesting and shockingly novel—in no small part because of their exoticism and my interest in Eastern culture and philosophy, but also because I had opened a door in my mind that had always been closed: I began for the first time in my life to witness my spiritual self and the spiritual world. And, better yet, I could tangibly see improvements in myself because of it.
Although I never would have called myself a Buddhist, for about two years, meditation and the teachings of the Buddha were absolutely central for me. I read nothing but the Nikayas and the foundational Theravada texts, the directly-transmitted teachings, daily, and as my concentration and discipline built, my practice grew alongside the reading—from 30 minutes a day, to an hour, to often 60 to 90 minutes spread across several sessions. I noticed a corresponding improvement in the quality of my life across the board. I was more patient with my family. I was unperturbed by things that normally annoyed me. My mind was unbelievably sharp. I was at peace with myself and with whatever might come of my condition. I began to gain a tremendous amount of insight into my behavior and into why I so relentlessly pursued self-destructive and addictive habits. I dove headlong, because everything was pointing me there, pushing me further and deeper.
Somewhere along the line, though, my spiritual progress stalled. I had begun settling into a kind of relativism about a lot of my behavior and addictions, which I now believe is one of the risks of the teachings of the Buddha, and I began to find doubts with particular ideas in the teachings that didn’t ring true—which, in my characteristic way, became a central focus and a distraction. The Buddha teaches that we have no soul, no self—that these are an illusion, a story we tell ourselves, an accretion of belief we invest in until it becomes everything. I continually had the opposite experience. The more I meditated, the more deeply I encountered and revealed my essential self and the nature of my soul. The more deeply I understood myself in that contemplative space, the more I realized I wasn’t reaching downward into an empty, soulless void—I was reaching outward, to God. I was praying. I had no recognition of this at the time, but looking back on it now, I see that what I wanted, what I was seeking and coming back for over and over, and what I was getting, was the assurance and comfort of God’s loving presence. He was answering, again and again, when I returned to the practice in a posture of humility and need.
The retreat
The turning point came when I decided to do a 7-day self-retreat, alone, in a cabin in the hills of Idaho. I had it perfectly structured: every meal prepped, instant coffee ready, no phone or books or screens, so that I could spend every waking moment in concentration and walking meditation, 16 hours a day for 7 days. The first two days were promising. My mind was clearing, the worldly worries dropping away, and I was entering states of effortless concentration that surpassed anything I had reached before. I had visions of unspeakable beauty, halls of light forming and reforming in geometric patterns, and—surprisingly, confusingly—I kept seeing the face of a man who was, unmistakably, Jesus, and a golden, throbbing cross drawing me into its loving warmth. I thought it was curious. I didn’t think much of it at the time.
Then on the evening of the third day, the visions stopped waiting for me to close my eyes. I had just stood up from a two-hour concentration meditation, and when I looked out at the sunset on the hills, the tops of the rolling hills were actually rolling, moving, like waves in the ocean. It surprised me and gave me an instant shock of fear, and I closed my eyes, turned to the room around me to stabilize myself, and as I looked at the checkered rug on the floor, the black and white squares started to wiggle and dance back and forth. I turned to look outside again, at a nearby tree—something firm and simple and calm to stabilize myself—and in an instant the cottonwood just outside my window swirled into a column of smoke, undulating and vibrating and rising up as though there were a furious fire burning inside of it. The fear intensified. That night, when I laid my head down and closed my eyes, I was met almost immediately with the most horrifying images I have seen in my life: boiling, pulsating visions of gore and viscera, mountains of corpses and skeletal pursuers, looking through me, holding my soul captive. The more fearful I became, the more gruesome and shocking the visions became, in a kind of dance of feedback I could not stop.
I tried again the next day, and the day after, and could not get through a session without the visions returning and the fear feeding them. It was on the fourth day, on a walk while I was at one of my lowest points, that I realized the folly and nonsensical nature of the Buddha’s directives for non-attachment. I freaking love my life. I love my wife. I love my daughter. Striving for non-attachment seemed like such a hilarious joke in that moment. It was a powerfully affirming moment, but it also struck a deathblow to what had been a clear conviction in my mind before then: I didn’t believe the teachings I had been trying to embody and live out for the last two years. I called my wife and left the retreat on the fifth day. (I am saving the longer reckoning with what happened on that retreat, and what I now think about Eastern meditation traditions in general, for a later piece.)
The doubts grow
After that point, my doubt in the teachings deepened and intensified. The soul/self thing was something I absolutely couldn’t move beyond. No soul?! Are you kidding?! As much as I tried to make myself believe it, the more deeply I explored my spiritual life the more deeply I knew I had a soul. By what other means is this body of flesh contacting the spiritual world? My soul is my connection to God. Even then, I knew this.
I also couldn’t abide the doctrine of determinism, or the idea that I lack free will. Even as a baby student of the Buddha, I could never get past this one. Determinism has always seemed like an easy way to unburden oneself of the consequences of choices and behavior, and I never managed to come around to “the infinite series of causalities that extends infinitely into the past is what controls every single thing you do.” So somewhere along the line, I realized I didn’t believe a lot of the core, required ideas of Buddhism, and I turned away. I kept meditating every day, and I realized very quickly that I wasn’t finished with my spiritual journey.
The other thing that had become increasingly obvious to me was that Buddhism wasn’t helping me deal with the nagging, endless guilt I had carried around inside myself for as long as I could remember. In an ironic twist of the teachings, rather than finding acceptance of my poor behavior I was rebuking and flagellating myself ever more viciously for not being able to control myself—for failing to master myself, I was beginning to hate myself. In short, Buddhism wasn’t helping me deal with my sin, although I wouldn’t have put it into those terms at the time. The slowly-dawning realization that I was sliding into relativism about my self-destructive, addictive habits (I was, at this point, still an alcoholic and a drug abuser—despite the years of meditation, those habits had not improved), that I didn’t believe in core, fundamental parts of the Buddha’s teachings, and the doubts that had deepened since the retreat, led me to start seeking again. Yet I never gave up the meditation habit.
I knew before I knew
I had Christian friends in town who had come beside me during the pulmonary embolism, and I reached out to a few of them to ask how they managed their spiritual lives. They engaged me in deep philosophical and theological conversations and pointed me to a few books. The big one, of course, being the Bible. I had read Genesis, Exodus, Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalm, and other things people who read the Bible for its historic and literary value read, but I had never opened the New Testament, and was only loosely familiar with the story of Jesus. So I started reading the Gospels, and some books on theology, and some devotional books. A lot of CS Lewis. Some Timothy Keller.
What happened next was strange. The more I read and understood, the more it was as though I was simply revealing what I already knew as truth. Scripture so deeply undergirds the fabric of everything in our culture and our world that it was a continual, relentless affirmation of everything I already believed. I think I was so deeply primed for this because of my lifelong love of literature. It was as though all of the literature and writing I had read my entire life were the flesh and bones, and I was finally reading and understanding the spine that held the whole beast up. I wasn’t instantly converted. I had a long period of just trying to really understand these things—the gospels, salvation, the Trinity, grace, faith—the absolutely core things. And all the while, I was meditating, every day, for at least 30 minutes, often more. The more I read, the more it all resonated with what I already believed but had never had the words to explicate. As Paul says in Romans, the law was written on my heart. I knew before I knew. He had been speaking to me my whole life.
The cross
I was saved one night, sitting in my living room as I read, for the first time, the Gospel of Matthew. When Christ cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He became real for me. In that moment, I knew some small shred of the unfathomable, horrible agony He felt, having His Father torn away from Him. I had this spiritual experience where I was with Him at the cross, and He was somehow with me, right then, and I was a boy in the backseat of the car, driving to the hospital, to see my father’s dead body, and He was weeping with me there. All of it at once, this experience of simultaneity in my spirit, in my mind’s eye. I saw in that terrible instant, as He drank his cup of wrath, as He felt His Father torn away from Him, as He felt in that moment the crushing, immeasurable agony of losing His Father—I knew some small shred of that pain, and I was that 11-year-old boy again, and I wept like a fatherless child. When Christ became human for me in that moment, when He became real and living, everything changed. But in that moment, I didn’t realize that that was when I believed. It took me a while to realize that was the moment.
As Paul says in Philippians 4:7, “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” When I released myself from the burden of self-mastery, when I let myself, my lowly, sinful self be bought and paid for by the perfect, sinless Son, when I saw that I am a worm and not a man, scorned and despised, and yet, yet I am loved, and forgiven, and bestowed this holy and undeserved gift of grace—when I saw all I had to do was accept it, nothing has been easier than glorifying Him every minute of this gifted life.
What He did with the wreckage
Looking back now, it’s easy to see all the ways God had been pursuing me my entire life. I see all the ways He used the terrible anguish and suffering I lived through for good. I marvel that somehow (I know how now) He gave me a spirit and a strength strong enough not to be crushed under the burden of a father dying at 11 and a mother who succumbed to alcoholism.
A big part of the regeneration the Spirit has worked in my life since my conversion has been around healing the wound of losing my father. I entered into addictive behaviors and patterns almost immediately after his death—first video games and pornography as a teenager to escape the reality of my broken home and a neglectful mother, then drinking and partying in high school and college, and then drugs, psychedelics, and THC through my 20s and 30s. I knew I had difficulty with self-control, but my behavior was normalized and acceptable to me because my friends and pretty much everyone I knew was the same way: broken, dealing with hangups and pain, relying on substances and the camaraderie of fellows stumbling down the same dark path of self-destruction and thirst for annihilation.
Even years into being a believer, I still struggled with substances. I knew I had a problem, because I would repeat the same binge-purity cycles on repeat and had for years. A stressful trigger at work or in my family life would lead me to start drinking or using THC again to cope with the pain for a couple of days, which would turn into weeks of gradually increasing intensity until I would be full-on binging again, catch myself in the conviction of sin, and then quit cold turkey—only to repeat the cycle two or three months down the line. I told myself the Spirit was working in me, that I was slowly getting better, that I was using less and less often. I would even tell myself the lie familiar to every addict: you don’t have to totally quit—you can have a little, you won’t binge this time.
The conviction for sobriety
That changed about two years ago. I was back in the ER with night sweats and a swelling on my neck I worried might be an infection in my head or neck. Coincidentally, the scans they ran turned up nodules in my thyroid. The follow-up ultrasound flagged several of them as high-risk, and the biopsy came back inconclusive. (The longer story is that subsequent imaging and a specialist eventually identified Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and I’m still in surveillance, but I’ve been told not to be concerned. At the time, I had no such reassurance.) The night I got those test results, I immediately found myself, thoughtlessly, falling into the same old pattern, driving myself to the dispensary. I didn’t come out of the binge for two or three weeks, but when I did, I had the most powerful conviction of my life. If I was really following Jesus, as I professed, then the only comfort I wanted in my life was Jesus, and here I was doing the same old numbing, escapist thing I had been doing since I was a child.
I knew, that night, I needed to become sober. I found a Christian counselor who immediately recommended I engage in Celebrate Recovery, which I did. For the first time in my life—at least since I was a teenager—I was living through a prolonged period of sobriety and freedom from my addictive behaviors and patterns, and it set me on the most profound healing and regeneration I have experienced yet in my life. In the 18 months since I’ve been sober, I have found freedom from my addictions in a way I never knew was possible, all of it through Jesus and the healing power of the Spirit. I have been able to forgive my mother and to make amends to the many people I hurt through my years of substance abuse and addiction, not least my wife. I have reconciled with my father in ways I never thought were possible, and I have given over mountains of resentment and pain to Jesus, who lifted them from me with the same perfect grace He shows every sinner willing to accept His sacrifice.
Why I am writing
Now, in the last several months of my life, I have realized I need to share this with others. I need to share that meditation can be a reasonable on-ramp to finding Christ, and I need to share the stunning power that building a true spiritual discipline into your life can have. My hope and prayer is that this becomes my purpose and ministry: to use my testimony and what I have learned to help others find Jesus, to help believers deepen their faith, and to help Christians who feel like fakes and failures and aren’t really able to live their professed walk find a discipline and a path that will lead them into the kind of freedom and joy I have found in Him.
He is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.