Why spiritual practice is meaningful
I can’t recommend meditation or any kind of regular spiritual practice enough. I find that if we don’t take the time and put in the effort of developing a way to regularly communicate with our soul, we miss out on so much. If we don’t learn how to listen to ourselves, turn inwards and rest in our inner sanctuary, chances are the beauty and the mystery of life are lost on us entirely. We become objects in a storyline that is being written by other people instead of living our life with purpose, direction and consciousness. Spiritual practice helps us build still points into life, sand grain by sand grain we build our island, giving us a place to come back to and a foundation to build on. Instead of being tossed around like a piece of driftwood, as an eternal victim of life’s ebb and flow, washing up the shore of life from time to time in such a dishevelled state that we only barely start to recuperate before the ocean starts dragging us back out to open sea again.
We build our inner temple and by doing so we build strength, like an inner tower reaching up to the stars, strengthening our vision, broadening our view and increasing our possibilities with every step we take. Regular spiritual practice is like learning how to swim or building a boat, allowing us to master our direction and become explorers of life. It makes us grow, become more conscious, more alive. The goal of spiritual practice is to become as alive as possible, to participate actively in the co-creation of reality, to assume the role of main character in the storyline we write for ourselves.
Different spiritual practices are like different paths leading to the same source: our own source, our essence. Our practice helps us become ourselves, express our essence in everything we do with the intention of becoming this essence in each and every moment. We start being instead of doing. We integrate and become the journey, our journey becomes us, a reflexion of who we are and we are no longer going back and forth between a state of connection and a state of disconnection. Spiritual practice helps us make bolder choices, live courageously, choose ourselves, choose life.
When spiritual practice becomes counter-productive
There is however one instance in which spiritual practice can become counterproductive and slow down our growth process and that is when instead of using it as a tool for spiritual growth, it becomes a band aid. When our practice becomes the crutch we lean on and it helps us maintain an unhealthy situation, a way of life that doesn’t suit us, that doesn’t correspond to our inner state of being anymore. When spiritual practice keeps us from seeing the truth, facing reality, facing ourselves.
Instead of being a launching platform for our soul and spirit to dive even deeper into life, deeper into our experiences, our emotions, our life and the universe, our little island can become a hide-out, a place we retreat to more and more often to cut ourselves off from the world, to numb our feelings, flee our reality or retreat into a place where we can ignore what is going on around us. This is when our spiritual practice becomes a coping mechanism, a life raft helping us deal sufficiently with an issue to stay afloat and actually preventing us from dealing with the root cause of our anxiety, stress or unhappiness. We get just enough oxygen to continue our life in the city that we dislike, to stay with the partner we no longer feel any connection with, to continue the job that makes no sense to us.
Our practice can support us and helps us through difficult times, but in no way should it become a life raft, a way to cover up and gloss over our incoherence, our pain, our longing. A way to be a little more content in our discontentment. Meditation can become a means of not listening to our emotions and our spiritual practice can become our daily energy shot, giving us just enough energy to continue and not go under, like a shot of energetic Redbull.
But life is not about coping, it is about thriving and making the necessary changes in life that allow us to align with our highest purpose and incarnate our spiritual self into the material world.
Our emotions and our physical health are the language of our soul in this material world, they are like a sign language letting us know if something suits us or not, if something is good for us or not, if it nourishes our body, feeds our soul, or if it drains us. The words that are being spoken by our tears, our cramps, our shivers, our laughter, our expanding or contracting heart exist to help us touch our core, they are like morse code continually being sent out by our heart, signalling which way to go, like a lighthouse of feelings and emotions steering us away from the cliffs of an unconscious, passionless and meaningless life.
