Embracing Your Spirituality and Gifts

When common challenges arise in my spiritual practice, and others — the people I teach and help heal also report common pitfalls, I write about it here. Mostly what’s been covered so far has been about the roadblocks to regular spiritual practice.

How to Fit Spiritual Practices into Daily Life Routines

7 Reasons Why We Neglect Spiritual Practices

Another area that’s fairly common and doesn’t announce itself is truly embracing our spirituality and gifts.

The challenge is there for all of us really, but more acutely for some. Often it’s the reason for other discouraging signs that one may observe. These can be shying away from practice, feeling unsure or confused, energy depletion and stagnation.

There’s either resistance to one’s spirituality and inner gifts, or fear of it, perhaps uncertainty about how to implement it in useful ways.

On the other hand your spirituality and inner gifts are such a natural part of who you are.

If that wasn’t the case, there would be no access to what you know and feel as your spiritual nature and the gifts therein.

But there is access and a search, a dissatisfaction with the status quo.

If you want to understand how the search begins, read:
The Call to Awaken.

It’s a universal call to seek. When it comes, it’s easy to recognize. It’s also ‘easy’ to push it away or aside. Yet, this call is persistent.

Some will avoid it for an entire lifetime.

For those who let it emerge, stay open with it and begin to receive suitable teachings, there can still be a clinging to material and finite reality, disbelief about the reality that’s becoming available and fear about it.

If this is the case, then it’s only a phase of your growth. It’s actually a part of your spiritual journey, and not a permanent state of affairs.

Still, leaving it the way it is wouldn’t be optimal. Recognizing your spirituality in the everyday and within yourself as well. Validating whenever light appears in a situation. Noticing your responses in different settings.

When you feel peace in meditation at home, where else does peace show up that same day?

Don’t complicate it. Spirituality is naturally simple.

Whenever your awakening happens, it takes some time to become familiar with your new reality. A big part of you becomes more and more available to you. It’s normal to have a period of being acquainted and accustomed.

This new reality needs space to fill out into in your life. You must allow room for it. This is a previously uncovered piece of you, an essential piece.

All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.

— Adyashanti

Spirituality is a broad term. People access it in a variety of ways. Most people find a suitable teaching and put it into practice. This deepens the process and solidifies integration of new experiences that evolve you.

Some growth involves resistance or friction. It’s fine and safe to let yourself be stretched out a little. Mind expands. Heart opens. Again, the shifts created by embracing your innate spiritual nature need spaces to fan out into.

True spiritual teachings come in a container. What that means is there’s a support system and mentoring. The teachings also have safeguards and ways to address much of the twists and turns. Having a resource, especially your teacher to turn to is invaluable.

You’re not expected to solve all of it on your own. The spiritual journey is a discovery of being human. Many have taken the journey before you got to it, many are on it with you.

The journey is individual. But the footprints are there, signposts are up, resources are placed by fellow seekers.

Ironically, in some respects, modern science has become our collective religion. We tend to believe what science tells us about our physical reality without much thought. On the other hand, when we’re told about the true nature of mind, we don’t easily believe it. Why do we believe in black holes, something we can’t readily experience, but doubt that our mind is awakened?

— Ponlop Rinpoche

Related:

At the top it says the inner aspect of being on a spiritual path hasn’t been covered here. That’s not exactly true. These posts will get you started:

The Call to Awaken

Are You a Path Walker or Toe-Dipper?

Gapless Awareness

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