Deepening Your Spiritual Path

With your awakened senses and soul, Spiritual Guidance here deepens your understanding of your direction of life. You’ll realise that growth in your personal spirituality would be circular, and not necessarily linear. You’ll evolve to strengthen your inner peace and also cultivate spirituality by adapting your daily life.

Lost in the wilderness?

You have taken the first steps on your spiritual path, opened the door, opened your heart and mind and discovered a new and vibrant connection to your ‘self’. With that, over time, you have felt touched by the sensations of a more fulfilled and peaceful life and you have experienced the strengthening benefits of exploring and sustaining your chosen spiritual practices. But, suddenly, you feel a lull, a flatness, a sinking feeling in your belly. The positive results don’t seem to be as intensely flowing to you, perhaps they aren’t happening as quickly. Have you plateaued? Or worse, you somehow feel yourself ‘back at the beginning’, wondering what’s actually changed for real and why you ever started this journey. Perhaps something happened in your life which was traumatic and overwhelming. Amidst that anxiety you have been unable to keep up your practices or stay connected.

How can you reconnect when you’re feeling lost?

Nourish and deepen your spiritual connection

Take a moment to visualise a garden. Picture it in your minds eye. Now watch the garden as the seasons change, spring to summer, summer to autumn, autumn to winter. When you watch this garden transforming through the seasons you trust and know that this process is part of the natural cycle of life. No one season in the garden is better than another. You may prefer spring or autumn but, ultimately, this natural process is all necessary and co-reliant in order to exist, one season intricately weaving in and out of the others.

Now think of your spiritual journey, your spiritual self … the same natural processes apply as you ebb and flow throughout each moment.

The human brain has a need to box, identify and tie up beginnings, middles and ends. It’s designed to be logical, set against a manmade time line, constructed for economy to operate within. As humans we are conditioned to expect to have arrived at certain points at a certain time. We task ourselves to achieve and reach goals which we set ourselves, often useful and necessary to the flow of everyday life. Nature, and the path to deep spiritual connection, doesn’t work like this. These ‘exist’ in each moment, gently falling away and re-emerging into the next moment according to universal energetic patterns and shifts.

Now let’s take a moment to consider your own personal spiritual garden. You have planted what you wish to see grow and started this garden through your own choice in order to come to know what the true meaning and purpose of existence is for YOU.

Your spiritual garden has the same needs and goes through the same seasonal changes as a physical garden.

It needs seeds to be planted, watering, feeding, weeding…

Amidst this consistency of care (a form of ‘self-care’), sometimes it will be autumn, with you shedding leaves, letting go of what no longer serves you or needs to be released, accepting the changing of time, fading of colour. Or winter, quiet, still, it might seem like not much is happening, but under the surface a deep process of restoration, settlement and realignment may be occurring.

Remember, the spiritual journey is a natural human process. Strong roots, new shoots and luscious plant life take time to grow. Sometimes there will be winds which shake your branches. This is all part of the journey!

What can you do on a practical level to help you reconnect to your spiritual path?

• Take 5 minutes each morning to write down, or to remember, what is important to you. Acknowledge what you are grateful for. Keep it simple.
• Take a look at your spiritual support network. Do you have like minded people around you who you feel you can trust and who understand the journey you’re on? Joining regular spiritually inclined groups, led by a spiritual guide you resonate with, can really help you keep connected and feel less alone. Find your tribe.
• Try some new spiritual practices. If you have been focussing on Meditation, perhaps try a movement based practice group like Tai Chi or Yoga. Perhaps dust off your journal and start writing again, private reflective notes written just for your eyes. Reignite your exploration!
• Revisit your expectations, look again at the simple joy you felt when you first started to feel a deeper connection to yourself. Notice when you are falling into the mindset of ‘achievement’ based spiritual development. Just let yourself ‘be’ for a while. AND, always, be very kind to yourself.

Most of all remember, winter passes and spring arrives with its new shoots, new ways of thinking and feeling and new experiences. It’s always a surprise when spring arrives, even though we know it’s coming, and with it comes fresh possibility and renewed hope.

Take pleasure again from evolving on your spiritual path. Think of this as a ‘safe space’ inside of yourself, your growing garden, for you to attend to with joy, self compassion and acceptance.

And, amidst your chosen sustaining disciplines and practices, never forget to make some time to do what you love.