One Mistake That Ruins All Your Efforts On The Spiritual Path

We all want to know how to accelerate our spiritual growth.

There are obviously some good principles to work with. Doing one’s best to remain present. Observing one’s thoughts and feelings. Remaining humble in front of life. Feeling grateful and accepting of whatever life shows us. And so on.

While working with those different principles that may accelerate our spiritual growth is helpful — understanding what slows down our progress, or even blocks it completely is of greater importance.

A better question to ask therefore is not how to progress faster on the spiritual path but rather, what is the greatest obstacle to one’s spiritual growth — what could cancel one’s efforts completely?

Why does a soul take a body? To learn about itself, what it is and what it is capable of. To grow in awareness. A soul is awareness.

By experiencing life from different angles, which means playing different roles — the aggressor, the victim, the tyrant, the abused and so on — souls are able to sense, feel and live whatever these specific environments create.

We can’t learn much if we’re always in isolation.

There is a time for isolation, and it’s normal to take a break from time to time to process our experiences. This is how we learn. Life is cyclic. There is a time for being out there, and a time for being at home.

We’re all going through different experiences in order to learn different lessons. We’re given bodies, a certain environment and the right conditions to fulfill our tasks.

If everything goes according to our initial plan, we fulfill our different tasks, learn our life lessons and that’s it. We move to the next step on our evolutionary path.

This is our ‘destiny’.

Ideally, we would all select our life lessons, find the best tool (body) and environment to work it all out. But, we all know that ideals are still just ideals in the world as we know it today.

For most of us unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

We all inherit a body that has walked the Earth for more years than we can count.

This body’s main concern is its survival, and Nature makes it very clear if we pay attention to how we behave daily, what our needs are, what drives us, and so on.

Because of the fact that our body’s programming is strong, most of us can’t hear clearly.

Our soul (awareness) is constantly being distracted by the body’s inclinations towards pleasures, and its avoidance of pain.

Another distracting factor in our earthly journey is that of our relationships.

If we stayed focused on our soul’s mission — to fulfill our different tasks and learn our life-lessons — we would perceive the people in our lives as “role players”, creating the right conditions for us to learn our specific lessons.

Does it work that way? Well, not always.

Of those people, we love some, we want to hit others, we think about the hurt others did, we’re constantly preoccupied with the future and whether or not we’ll make it. And so on.

So here we are, souls that are ready to jump into embodiment — excited to learn different lessons.

But damn, those bodies are fun. It’s so good to eat, to be with people. And before we realize it, we’re hypnotized by the experience.

Some people are nice to us, others are unpleasant. We form stories, we host different emotions, especially ‘negative’ ones. Each day of our life is spent worrying, reminiscing, being angry or feeling hurt.

We forgot that we are awareness. And awareness is just that, observation of what we’re living in order to learn life lessons as planned.

And before we remember any of it, we’ve aged and we must leave, and come back.

Obviously, enjoying life and everything it has to offer is part of our journey.

Unfortunately. Becoming attached to certain foods or beverages, being tied to certain people whether through love or hate, filling ourselves with too much lower vibrational emotions — it all makes us ‘dense’.

The more identified we are to our lives, meaning the more we believe that we’re just Anna, a doctor that loves yoga and wine — the heavier we’ll be.

As an example. When meeting other people for instance, we’ll keep walking with those that ‘love’ us while ‘hating’ those that don’t go in accordance with us.

We’ll do everything we can to reinforce our beliefs, and the more reinforced they’ll be — the more identified with them we will be.

At that point, we’re just playing the same thoughts in our mind, which trigger the same feelings, and obviously — which push us to act in the same ways and create a life of repetition.

This is how most people live today. Is it bad? Absolutely not. Each and everyone is on their own journey, and each and everyone has the free will to move at their own pace.

Now comes the practical part. What’s the greatest obstacle to your spiritual growth?

The simple answer: identification.

If you’re already on a spiritual journey, which would be obvious because you’re reading this — you’ve probably loosened your identification with some thoughts and feelings within yourself.

It’s not always easy to remain aware, especially when we meet certain people or go through certain dynamics that have a lot of emotional charge.

Life’s not easy. No one said any of it would be. But. No one said that it shouldn’t be fun too.

We should always keep in mind that whatever we’re experiencing on a daily basis is just that, an experience.

When people do unpleasant things, it’s natural to feel some tension about it. When something is so pleasant that it brings us to heaven, it’s natural to want to experience it again.

What’s not helpful is to attach ourselves to whatever people do and turn it into a reason to be bitter, or to become a slave to pleasant experiences.

Attachment does just that. It attaches us. It binds us. It distracts us.

As long as we’re able to remain aware about our internal state, we can go through life without reinforcing our identifications. The simple rule of thumb is to pay attention to our thoughts, feelings and patterns.

The more watchful we are about whatever is happening within us, the more awareness we bring into ourselves and just like light dispels darkness — awareness dissolves the strong ties of identification.