Are you rushing your spiritual growth?
Why is it that we’re always in a rush?
We live in an instantaneous world where everything we could ever want is at the tip of our fingers. Society tells us that we can have it all, at any time. No wonder we’re all so impatient.
It’s impatience that also feeds into our spiritual growth. It seems like many of us on the so-called ‘spiritual path’ want to reach a certain goal, whatever it looks like to us individually, and are deeply impatient to get there.
Like everything else in this world, ‘spiritual’ is just a label that people use to define themselves. The thing is, when we try to live up to the label we’ve self-anointed, we’re not living authentically. Rather, we’re forcing ourselves to arrive at a place that we’re not ready for.
All good things take time and our spiritual growth is no exception.
Allowing ourselves to listen to our ego’s desires
We’re told the ego is bad, that it needs to be ascended and ruled over so the soul can lead us forwards in our lives. Yet, sometimes we have more lessons to learn, across many lifetimes, until we can even begin to start working on this ambitious goal.
Before we reach a point in our evolution where we live a soul-led life, we first need to attend to our baser needs, learning many lessons along the way. As they say, you can’t build the penthouse on a multi-story building without having even laid the foundations.
Sometimes, we need to live in our ego, just for the experience of it. If we don’t live and learn, then all the concepts we’re reading about and wishing to embody, will always remain at an arm’s length.
The whole point of this life is to make mistakes, get it wrong, go backwards, then forwards, and to be learning the whole time. We need to be humble in our willingness to see our faults.
The true essence of spirituality for me is being in absolute awareness, non-resistance and non-judgement, realising our oneness and infinite connection to all around us. It is understanding that compassion is the bedrock upon which we can start to evolve.
Our ego’s desires aren’t bad or wrong, they are merely part of who we are. So, when we judge ourselves, feeling guilty, shameful or wrong for wanting something, we are moving in the opposite direction.
What we need to do is listen to our ego’s needs with conscious awareness, and feel into whether we want to fulfil them, with radical honesty and non-judgement.
Allow Divine timing to flow
When we wish away who we are now in our impatience to reach a certain level of spiritual growth, we fall into a familiar trap. We believe life will be easier and more rewarding over there, without understanding that how important the work is that we’re doing right here.
When we rush our progress, not only do we bypass important lessons along the way, but we forget that time isn’t relative. Our evolution is continuous and never-ending. Some call this ‘spiritual bypassing’.
Sometimes we need to fall naturally into something, it just can’t be forced. There is such a thing as Divine timing, and often we can’t push our way into a different experience, we have to wait to be invited in.
When we push for growth, we aren’t allowing it to unfold in Divine timing. When we force ourselves into a role that we want to play, we are only living in the shadow of it. We aren’t properly assimilated into it because we’re not fully embodying it.
The embodying process takes time. It isn’t instantaneous, quick or easy. Yet, we live in a world that makes us think that it is so. We also live in a world that enables us to so easily compare our growth to others and conclude that we lacking and falling behind.
This doesn’t mean that we turn away from the opportunity for our soul’s growth and evolution, rather that we gently wade into it, rather than attempting a high-stakes dive.
Finding the balance of pleasure
The most important thing about this life is to live it. To balance the fine line between bettering ourselves, and allowing our souls to continually evolve, without pushing and punishing ourselves in the process.
So many of us on the spiritual path are stuck in the cycle of self-punishment without even being conscious of it. We have forgotten that we are allowed pleasure, desires, joy and anything else that makes us grateful to be alive.
If we’re trying to fit into a persona of what we think a spiritual person does or embodies, then we are too focused on how people perceive us on the outside than truly embodying the values that matter on the inside.
As someone wise once told me, there’s nothing worse than an unhappy vegan or resentful non-drinker, denying themselves pleasure because they think it’s more spiritual. Maybe, just maybe, in this place of judgement and resentment, they are further from true spirituality than they realise.
If you want to eat meat, eat meat. If you want to drink, drink. If you hate meditating, don’t meditate. If you don’t like yoga, go do something else. If you want to fulfil some deeper desires that you think are ‘unspiritual’, you’ve already fallen into the trap of judgement and resistance.
If we choose a way of living because we think it’s better, rather than learning for ourselves that it feels better to live that way, then we’re not fully embodying it. It’s good to try new things and want to better ourselves but we have to stop rushing to get there.
Perhaps, the biggest lesson we all need to learn this life, is not to become more spiritual but to just be ourselves, with awareness and understanding that we are just part of a larger whole.
Allowing our progress to naturally unfold
We rush our progress all the time but all good things take time and our spiritual growth is no exception. The universe doesn’t want us to chase it, it wants us to realise that we are already it.
Rather than rushing our soul’s evolution and ignoring our ego’s needs and desires, why not take our time? We learn through experience, so if we believe certain experiences aren’t ‘spiritual’, thereby avoiding them, how do we ever learn?
The human journey is both incredibly simple and deeply complex, that is just the nature of this world of opposites, and our soul’s expansion is no exception.
Rather than impatiently longing for a different version of ourselves that exists nowhere but in our minds as a shadow that we try and fall into step with, why not just embrace our current selves now?
We need to trust that the divine unfolding our growth will take place when we least expect it, in those moments when we are truly living in full acceptance of our beautiful and unique selves.
So, don’t rush your spiritual growth, it will come in its own good time.
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