My Spirituality Drives Me

When I was smaller, I just thought it meant helping people.  And that drove me for a long time.  As I’ve gotten older, I still don’t exactly know how to define this energy that lives inside, and I’m still trying to understand it, but that’s a huge part of what defines me.

I’ve been stealing pieces from things that I hear, discarding parts that I don’t agree with, and creating my own new thing.  I still don’t know what it will look like in the end, and I don’t even know if it will ever even be done, but this thing that I’m constructing is my code for life.  My code and my decoder.

The books that have influenced me the most are:

• The Seat of The Soul
• Dying to Be Me: My Journey From Cancer, To Near Death, To True Healing
• Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
• Spirit Junkie: A Radical Road To Self Love and Miracles
• Spiritual Partnership: The Journey to Authentic Power
• The Places That Scare You: A Guide To Fearlessness in Difficult Times
• Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves From Old Habits
• The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover The Mystery Within
• Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It
• A Return To Love:  Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

YouTube has a lot of great content as well.  The meditations I like are:

• The 6 Phase Meditation
• Tantric Heart Meditation

Meditation apps that I like (I haven’t paid for it yet but I still enjoy doing the free stuff): Headspace

If I had to distill it down, this is what I have so far:

• Listen well, to yourself and everyone and everything around you.  We all need to find our purpose on this planet and the universe speaks to us in millions of ways.
• We have to engage with life, not just think about it.  We also can’t just engage with life and not think about it at all either.  It’s about balancing both.
• We can’t avoid pain.  Pain is how we grow, and is almost a necessity given the existence of it’s opposite: joy.  We need both in life to be whole.
• Meditate to clear away all the crap, so you can make room for the good stuff to come in
• Judgements are useless, especially judging yourself and other people
• Your mind weaves stories that are also quite useless.  Entertaining and emotionally draining, but ultimately useless.
• Feelings are important and you shouldn’t ignore them.  You should also not let them control you because they aren’t really you.  Feel them and let them pass through.
• Altered states of consciousness aren’t helpful (unless you reached them on your own)
• Compassion and empathy are key.  And if you aren’t compassionate to yourself, it’s really hard to be truly compassionate to everyone around you.

I think it’s a continually evolving process, but it’s what keeps me sane most of the time and what gets me through most days.  I’m just at the initial phases of attempting to put these into practice, but I’m hopeful that it will lead…somewhere good.

To be Continued.