Spiritual Development 101

Over the next few months the plan is to you lead you on a journey, not a spiritual one, rather, a human journey.

Let’s get the basics sorted out. I am sure you have heard many people saying “I am on a spiritual journey, I am becoming more spiritual”. On the contrary, you are already a spiritual being who is on a human journey to experience what it is like to be a human and to live in a human form on the earth plane.

So rather than a spiritual journey, we are learning to experience the myriad of emotions that make us human; to live in a physical form that has limitations and frustrations as a vehicle for our human existence.

We at Yugen Wisdom have spent over 25 years with individuals and groups, dealing with the simple yet complex issues of human existence: our human need to find wholeness or completion, to be loved and to be part of a group rather than be alone.

There is such a wide variety of emotions that we can or indeed have chosen to experience, those good, and others less than positive.

Naturally, our lives are great when we are experiencing the pleasant states of being human, such as happiness, laughter, being in love, being fulfilled, and feeling content. That is just half of our lesson. We are here to understand, through our own decisions, the cause and effect on our lives, in the short term or indeed in years to come. In the short term, shouting in anger at a police officer for giving us a ticket may have an immediate emotional impact. The long-term effect of going against our intuition like marrying a person who turns out to be an abusive partner, may have a long-term effect on us.

Psychologist Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions theory says that the eight core emotions are:

• Fear

• Anger

• Sadness

• Joy

• Disgust

• Surprise

• Trust

• Anticipation

The theory is that we experience these emotions once - correct? Well actually, we often find that we encounter these feeling multiple times throughout our lives. Have you asked yourself why you experience pain and suffering again and again?

According to Eckhart Tolle in his book the ‘Power of Now’, he describes how inside of each and every one of us, there is a ‘pain body’. This is fuelled by emotional pain expressed through the ego and will continue to grow and cause us undue suffering until we identify this pain body and cut off its fuel supply.

These emotions are not pleasant to experience, and they do cause us to suffer. So rather than expose ourselves to the emotional pain, we detach or distract ourselves from such emotions. This might take the form of drugs, either recreational or pharmaceutical such as antidepressants. Or perhaps we seek solace in the bottom of a glass filled with alcohol to anaesthetise us from the situation. It might be food, where we over eat to ‘stuff’ down the emotions. We might seek comfort in a short-term sexual relationship which helps us temporarily forget our troubles, only to find when this type of relationship ends, it merely adds to our pain. When we sober up to find that the heartache is still there, or we wean ourselves off the drugs, we realize eventually that we are repeating the same or very similar patterns again and again.

Well the solution to stopping such patterns is amazingly simple:
Stop what you are doing: being a victim.

Start paying attention to yourself, the ways in which you are feeding the ego and sabotaging yourself. Look around you at those who are happy and ask yourself or indeed ask them what makes them happy.

Continue believing in a world of possibilities, let go of the past and patterns that no longer serve you.

Our human life is simply a school, one where we are presented with a series of lessons, the answers to all of which lie within us. We must first learn to respond rather than react to life; to understand that we, at some level, create the circumstances for our learning and that the people we encounter are here to help us learn those lessons. We are indeed spiritual beings living a human life.

We will look later on in this series about the ego, suffice to say for now that it is certainly not our amigo!

If you want to understand more about what it is to be human and to get an insight into helping break negative patterns, replacing them with positive ones, then contact me