Reflections On A Spiritual Journey
What is spirituality? And what is the real spiritual journey?
I will borrow from my own experience to answer this question. A family crisis, my fathers' ill health, brought me to learning Reiki. This beautiful energy opened the door to many other modalities, therapies and tools. For over a decade I cruised along, teaching, practising and healing with them. Working with energy, breath, movement, stillness, many “issues” got resolved, the past faded into a blur and the future no longer evoked anxiety or fear. Workshops, retreats and healing sessions were fulfilling and transformative. It was a blissful time; one that I had imagined as the culmination of a spiritual journey.
And yet, from somewhere emerged a voice questioning, ‘ Is this the real spiritual journey? Is it about perfecting the psyche, manifesting, improving the personality or controlling the future?’
And from a deep knowing came the answer, “No!”
It was Grace that caused the restlessness to question. It was Grace that answered.
The true spiritual journey is not about becoming, perfecting, fixing or healing. They all have their place in the evolution of the plan but it is not the goal is what I was guided to understand.
The true spiritual journey is about being. About discovering who you are. And abiding as that. It may sound strange to say, but it is about realizing that some things are quite upside down. That to which you give so much importance, and consider real, may not be so. You may be much more than the person you consider yourself to be.
It’s a mysterious story. Once upon a time, from wholeness, sprung a thought of individuality. As consciousness took birth as a body in an earthly incarnation, it identified totally with it. It received a name. One that was special to it; another that connected it to a family. It received values and beliefs and rules and structures by which to live. As it grew, it experiences further defined it. It developed an identity. The identity was based on a story that kept growing, solidifying, being embellished. To add to it became the sole purpose of life. It began to get a very definitive sense of self. A self that was separate from others and needed to be protected, and kept safe. That had its own agenda and needed to control life and circumstances. The agendas often caused suffering, if they were not fulfilled. The person became separate from Life.
The story is so amazing, however, because it is the suffering that often becomes the catalyst for the start of the spiritual journey. The one that triggers the separate self to seek the wholeness it once was. Disappointment with unfulfilled plans, challenges, illness, other traumas force you to pause, reflect and often, realign. It happens when things don’t happen as you wish or the opposite. Often, all your plans work out just the way you want, and yet there is a sense of loneliness, alienation, something missing. There is a realization that it will not be eased by still more achievements, accomplishments, the amassing of material wealth, relationships, or the seeking of love and approval from others. One day, you tire of the endlessness of the journey and the pursuit of one goal after another. You look elsewhere.
When you turn your gaze from looking outwards for fulfilment to inward, you are taking the first steps on your spiritual journey. You look not there, but here. As the journey progresses, you realize that there is really nowhere to go and nothing to become. You have always been Home. What you are looking for, is where you are looking from. The peace, love and joy that you have been seeking, are your intrinsic nature. The only way out is within. Recognizing this, and abiding in it, is the reason for your incarnation in this and every lifetime.
What is the purpose, then, of this whole drama? It is indeed a divine play, a leela, a mystical unfolding of forgetting and remembering; a game of hide and seek in which you forget that you are playing a game. The true spiritual journey takes you back to your source; a full circle from freedom and wholeness to separation and contraction and then back to conscious freedom and wholeness again. To a joyousness that is not dependent on external circumstances. A peace that is unshakeable. A Love that is the core of your being.
Your life and it’s circumstances are the props; the set up that will help you decode this mystery. Each one's life is perfectly customized to help them to awaken from the dream of the game. Every single thing is divinely ordained to help you reach your destination. To come back to where you started from. To wake up.
Don’t mistake any other distractions as this journey. Drop the whys, the hows and what. The true spiritual seeker asks only, “Who am I?” This question is the compass that will take you from person to Presence and accurately guide you Home. To sat- chit-anand. The bliss that is You.
Seek nothing less.
