This is a surprisingly difficult question that I would have (5-10 years ago) totally brushed away to the side as irrelevant and meaningless, thinking that there is only rational physical stuff and that is all we are supposed to think about.

Now, I still don't believe in anything literally supernatural. I don't think any quantum woo or mysterious psychic connection or literal sky daddies exist.

The point is, our mind at its core operates in terms that can be best spoken to in such metaphor. Just like we don't "see" wavelengths or spectra, we see color. If I told you that red is high frequency and blue is lower frequency light, you'd probably believe it, if you hadn't learned the opposite in physics class.

We see color and not light frequency, we see objects, we see tools, we see potential paths to walk on, we see handles to grab, we use tools as extensions of the body (with the brain actually mapping out some tools as if they were limbs).

In the same way much of what we experience in terms of emotional/spiritual life (if you don't suppress it and are mature enough) is very religious sounding old-fashioned terms like good and evil, temptation, redemption, salvation, revenge, punishment and forgiveness, wisdom and contemplation, sin and penance, suffering and attainment, grace and humbleness.

10 years ago all the above words meant jack shit to me, just some mumbo jumbo that bigoted old people use to condemn the youthful because they are too old and impotent and envious of the youth.

The thing is, the more you look into philosophy with a more open mind, you see that it actually has content behind it. To put it in more rational terms, you become aware of and able to discuss things that happen in the more animalistic part of the brain, that makes you excited, anxious, sad, joyful. It's easy to believe that all this is just straightforward "bad events -> sadness", "good events -> joy".

If you meditate, if you wind down in the evening and are mature and have some life stories of both success and disappointment, you will see that a lot of that stuff is best processed in spiritual terms and by relating it to archetypal stories. I've been reading Jordan Peterson on this matter, and while I don't agree with his conclusions in many cases, I do find it to be a good bridge between the rational scientific endeavor (you need to know the frequency of blue light to create lcd screens etc.), and the personal/spiritual manifestation of it (the blue handle of a hammer that I'm already preparing to grab in my mind).

It's not that the magic sky daddy gives us the stuff we ask for in prayer, like a vending machine. But for one reason or another, pretending to act out a sacrifice story or "asking god" why something happened can be useful.

You can substitute other words if you have an aversion to Christian terminology, you can say you're connecting to yourself, your higher self, the consciousness of the universe.

The thing is, ideas and insight doesn't come from forcing. Just like you don't pull on a plant forcefully to make it grow, you nourish it from below and with sunlight and air.

Nobody can make themselves have a great idea. In our experience, ideas just present themselves. Obviously they are not magically handed to us, but it looks "as if". Of course it's a complex brain process that involves long term memory, hormones, interactions of various brain parts, etc. Knowing the details of this can be beneficial, but just because you understand the brain chemistry of alcohol intoxication doesn't mean you won't get black out drunk if you drink a lot. Similarly somehow it is deeply ingrained in us to see things in terms of agents and purposeful patterns. One way to deal with this is to label this as a thinking error, an erroneous heuristic making too many false positives, a mistaken overdrive of the empathic part of the brain, something to eradicate. That's how I used to think.

Once you understand all this, you can be capable of discussing, untangling and managing your emotions and the archetypal/spiritual language can be a way to formulate this.

However when things get intense, I like to freshen it all up a bit with reading Zen koans. Zen koans are somewhat like "serious jokes" and confront your overly analytical mind with freezing shocks. They are playful, non-literal, but sometimes literal, or hanging in the air in between.