‘I didn’t lose my faith’: Gwen Juvenal on singing, leaving religion and learning to channel

By Anthony Larkin

Content note: This article includes a childhood experience of severe distress and suicidal feelings.

Gwen remembers walking into the yard, crying and asking for help. There was turmoil around her family that she did not understand, and the grief she felt had become overwhelming. She thinks she was about six.

Her parents had taught her that she could call on God. So she did.

‘I need help. I don’t want to be here. Please help me.’

She describes what happened next as though the clouds had parted and light had come in. She says she felt a presence and heard one word: ‘Sing.’

And she sang.

When she told me this, I wanted to know which song. Could she remember, after all that time? She could. It was a song she knew through the Carpenters, about singing itself, which her aunt had shared with the family. They had practised it and performed it at a concert a few months earlier, as she remembered it.

Even in that moment, she found herself smiling at the fact that she was singing a song about singing. She says the heaviness lifted and she could feel some joy again.

‘There was this confirmation inside of me that I could reach out for help that I would receive,’ she told me. ‘It helped me be brave enough to keep on walking forward.’

Gwen Juvenal is based in Utah. She is an author and channeler, and the founder of a practice she calls Soul Play. Before inviting her onto the Anthony Larkin Podcast, I had watched some of her episodes online. I liked her energy. I was chuckling along and thought this would be a conversation I would enjoy.

But I wanted to understand how she had arrived here, too: from a childhood in the Mormon faith to a spiritual life in which she says she communicates with guides. Singing was one of the first things we talked about. By the time we finished, she had also become the first guest to channel during one of my interviews.

Singing felt like home

Gwen speaks warmly about the comfort her religion gave her as a child. Her parents were devout and had met on missions. They taught her about a father in heaven, about being loved and about belonging. For a child trying to make sense of a confusing world, she says that mattered.

‘It was really a beautiful beginning.’

It also gave her music. There were hymns at church, her father teaching her to sing, and family Christmas carolling in four-part harmony. She remembers practising with them and suddenly feeling that her body was allowing the music and its spirit to move through her.

‘I was the flute that was being played, I guess you could say.’

I tried to connect that with something I knew. I attend spiritualist churches, and I feel uplifted when we sing. I also do musical theatre. When the harmonies come together, or you really put feeling into the lyrics, there is something there that I recognise.

I told her I thought her experience sounded more deeply connected than mine.

‘Well, perhaps. And perhaps you just have to stretch that little half inch more, Anthony.’

‘Probably.’

As a child, she says, these feelings did not usually arrive as specific messages. They were more like love or a sense of confirmation. The experience in the yard was different because she remembers hearing a clear instruction.

I wondered aloud whether that might have been an early experience of what she now calls channeling. I also said I might be wrong. I was trying to understand it from what she had told me.

Walking out of church

At around thirty, Gwen left the religion she had grown up in. By then, she was a mother and, in her family, one of the people least expected to leave.

‘I was the golden star girl, I guess you could say, as far as it goes and faith was concerned.’

She remembers sitting with her children in a church class and becoming uncomfortable with what she was hearing. In her description, she could feel fear in the teaching and felt that her children were being conditioned in a way she could no longer accept. She took them and walked out.

She does not describe this with anger towards everyone who remains in that faith. She recognises what it provides for people. But she knew she no longer belonged there.

‘I didn’t lose my faith or my connection with Christ in any way.’

Her family struggled with her decision. Her mother thought she would come back. Gwen says she never did, and leaving had consequences beyond a change in beliefs.

‘My support system suddenly was just gone.’

It took years to find other ways of building that support and connection. When I asked what it was like to leave something she had known and followed all her life, that loss was part of her answer. Feeling certain about the decision did not make the aftermath easy.

Around the same period, she was having an experience she describes as a spiritual awakening. One conversation that contributed to it happened on MySpace, with someone who had previously lived in Utah.

The statement that caught her attention was ‘I am God’. Her first response was not uncomplicated agreement. She worried about people becoming egotistical, declaring themselves God and using that to command others. Yet she also felt drawn to a different possibility within those words.

She describes opening to non-duality: in her experience, a sense that she was not separate from the divine. Ideas she had previously lived by began to feel less convincing.

I wanted an example. What actually stopped making sense?

She had recently divorced, and some neighbourhood women came to visit. They meant to be supportive. They talked about how she would meet a man and marry again, and how to go about it. Gwen found herself wondering why that had to be the next step at all.

‘Why would I do that?’

She was beginning to notice expectations she had absorbed without necessarily choosing them. Meanwhile, she still had children to care for and eventually work to return to. She describes the years since as a process of integrating those experiences into ordinary life.

I recognised that feeling of moving between parts of your life. I can feel connected and guided in my own space, then go to work and feel as though I am wearing a different hat. I am still Anthony, but the role changes.

Gwen said she thinks of those roles as masks. They can be useful, provided we remember that the role is not the whole of who we are.

‘Is Gwen aware?’

Her explorations took her into Buddhism, Reiki and massage therapy, as well as experiences she associates with indigenous traditions. Massage offered something practical and grounding. Meditation helped her learn to sit with emotions without immediately reacting to them.

When I asked how she had come to trust what she experienced, she spoke about years of practice. She also described supporting her twin sister through family difficulties around the time COVID began. Her sister asked her to move in, and Gwen says being needed helped her recognise and trust what she felt able to offer. She kept the family details private.

For readers unfamiliar with channeling, the basic idea is that someone experiences themselves as receiving or expressing communication from a spiritual source. I wanted Gwen to explain what that meant for her.

She said her guides wanted to answer.

‘You would be my first guest that has channelled,’ I told her. ‘So it would be a privilege, Gwen.’

She explained that she would take a few breaths and settle into it. When she began speaking again, she used ‘we’, presenting the words as coming from the spiritual guides she experiences as supporting her at a soul level.

I started with a fairly ordinary question: how would someone recognise a channeled message? What might the first indication be?

The answer Gwen gave in that state described intuitive nudges: an unexpected thought, a feeling, curiosity that prompts you to take another path or say hello to someone. In that explanation, channeling did not have to begin with a dramatic event. It could develop gradually.

‘Channeling is simply the process of connection of the inner world and the outer world.’

That was the explanation offered through Gwen. It describes her spiritual understanding of those experiences; it does not establish where an individual thought or nudge comes from.

My next question was about Gwen herself. Was she aware of the conversation? Was she interpreting information, or did she experience something taking over?

‘This is not someone taking over,’ came the response. ‘All is done in free will and choice.’

The answer described her as remaining aware, setting parameters and participating in what was called a ‘cooperative loving communion experience’.

Afterwards, I put the question directly to Gwen again. What did it feel like from her perspective?

She said she remained partly engaged, even while allowing the words to come. During this particular exchange, she had felt she could hear my questions without processing them in quite her usual way. She described it as an energetic exchange, held within her intention to share wisdom and love.

I also brought up something from my Reiki sessions. Sometimes words arrive that do not feel like my usual terminology. I had not worked out where they came from, but I wanted to know whether she would understand that as channeling.

The answer, given while she was channeling, was yes. That was the interpretation offered to me, rather than something we could independently confirm in the interview.

What I could describe was my own reaction. I had watched people channel on YouTube, but this was the first time I had been in a live conversation with someone doing it. I told her I felt the energy and had become quite emotional.

‘I’m feeling something I can’t describe at the moment,’ I said. ‘It’s a positivity that’s so beautiful.’

A playbook, not a workbook

When Gwen held up her book, Our New Story, I interrupted her.

‘Show me that book again. You wrote this book? Could you show me how thick it is?’

I have written books myself. I wanted a better look.

She says she wrote it by sitting at her computer and typing the words she experienced as coming through from her guides. At first, she simply called them ‘guides in the garden’. She still rereads the book and finds things in it that surprise her.

We had a laugh about an author recommending her own writing. I admitted that I have read chapters of my own fiction back and wondered where some of it came from, too — although I also admitted to using a thesaurus.

Soul Play developed from Gwen’s wish to share what she was experiencing without making spiritual exploration feel frightening. It uses imagination, story and different perspectives to help people explore their own questions.

Her theatre example was right up my street. Imagine yourself on a stage. What role are you playing? Can you step into the audience and look at it differently? Could someone else take your role? Is this a conventional stage or theatre in the round?

With my background in amateur dramatics and musical theatre, I could relate to that. I also recognised a similar stage image from my training with Dolores Cannon’s hypnosis approach.

I asked Gwen for an example of what happened when someone actually used Soul Play. She told me about working with a cousin who was trying to decide what to do with her business.

Gwen was careful here. She said you cannot simply claim someone would never have reached a decision without your involvement. People have inspiration and make changes throughout their lives.

But she remembers her cousin emerging from their sessions with a clearer sense of what she wanted to do. They had explored possibilities, and her cousin realised she did not have to follow the approach other people expected of her.

‘It wasn’t like we were sitting there and we were forcing the issue,’ Gwen said. ‘We were playing with possibility.’

Her other book, introduced in our conversation as The Seed: Journeys of Joy and Freedom, develops that experiential approach. She wanted activities and ways of journalling that readers could take part in, rather than only ideas to think about.

‘I didn’t want it to be a workbook. I wanted it to be a playbook.’

She offers group and individual work, but her description of her role was clear: ‘I’m not here to tell them what the answer is. I’m here to help support that opening for themselves.’

That also connected with something I had liked in her story from the outset: her view that spiritual connection is not reserved for a chosen few with a special title. I asked whether people sometimes expect it to be dramatic when it might begin quietly.

The word she chose was ‘subtle’. She spoke about listening differently, noticing more and being willing to ask a question without already deciding what the answer must be.

At the end, I asked the question I put to every guest: ‘If you could leave one message with the world, from everything you’ve experienced spiritually, what would that message be?’

Gwen said the answer had started coming as I was speaking.

‘You are love. You are love.’

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my interview with Gwen Juvenal on the Anthony Larkin Podcast. Watch the full conversation for more about her experiences, her approach to Soul Play and the channeling she shared during our interview.