Starting Your Spiritual Journey – Step 1

The first post that you will find in this blog is about restarting MY spiritual journey.  Now that I have done so, I thought I would write about some important things to consider when you are beginning your  own spiritual journey.  I will write a series of blog posts starting with this one.

First of all, I applaud you for beginning a spiritual journey.  This decision is not one you took lightly, I am sure.  Many people begin a spiritual journey for various reasons.  Some have had an epiphany that brought them to an instantaneous realization that there is something greater than themselves out there.  Others got to this point after doing a great deal of study.  Many have hit rock bottom and are just in need of something different from what they were already doing.

1. Start Small; Start Slow

One of the biggest mistakes people make when starting a spiritual journey is jumping in with both feet full bore without thinking about what their schedule already looks like.  Deciding to start a spiritual journey is a big step.  In many ways it is like a seed “deciding” it is time to start growing.  This is the analogy I will use for starting a spiritual journey.

Imagine that you are the seed.  You are sitting in a bag with a bunch of other seeds.  You don’t start to grow.  Why not?  Because you know there are certain things you need to nourish yourself.  There is no point in starting to grow now because if you do, you will quickly die without appropriate nourishment.  So you wait for those things that you need to nourish you.  You get dumped out of the bag (let’s say you are one that was accidentally dropped in an area you can’t grow – let’s say the sidewalk)  You sit there on the sidewalk and you still do not grow.  Then a wind comes along and blows you into the dirt by the side of the sidewalk.  Yea! Dirt!

Now you are pretty happy to be in the dirt, but unfortunately, you are in a place that doesn’t get watered regularly.  Yes, you need dirt because of the nutrients it provides, but just the nutrients is not enough.  One day, I big rainstorm comes along.  The water gushes around in the dirt causing it to get all muddy, and you are buried a bit.  Finally, you have all the nourishment you need to start growing.  So all of a sudden you pop up as a flower, right?  Wrong!  You have the nourishment you need to start growing from your shell, yes, but that doesn’t mean that you instantaneously blossom.  (assuming you are the flowering type!)  All it means is that you have burst forth from your seed.

Here is the thing, we have it easier than the seed.  We are already surrounded by the nourishment we need in order to grow spiritually.  All we need to do is accept and honor it.  We are about as ready to grow spiritually as a seed planted in the richest, blackest, most perfectly damp soil.  A seed, under those circumstances, doesn’t wait – it just says – “Cowabunga!  Here I come!” However, like the seed, we do not blossom immediately. A period of spiritual growth still needs to occur before we blossom into our grandest glory – in a physical sense. You see, we are already perfect as we are. We just don’t realize it yet.

As humans, we are surrounded by all of the nourishment we need, but we have something added – we have free will.  We don’t grow spiritually because God told us to, or because God provided us with all the nourishment we need.  We grow spiritually because we have decided to.

Once we make that decision, we now need to take the nourishment when needed.  What happens if we take a seed and throw it in glass of water?  Does it start to grow?  It certainly does.  Does it continue to grow?  No.  Why not?  Because it has too much of one kind of nourishment.  It actually drowns.  This is what happens at the beginning of most spiritual journeys – we over-nourish ourselves to the point of drowning.  Because we over-nourish ourselves, we have taken on too much. We burn out. Now, here is a bit of good news.  Just because you over-nourish yourself on your first spiritual journey doesn’t mean that you die.  Your spirit cannot die.  No matter how hard you try, you can never kill your spirit.  It merely goes back to seed form.

Now that you have decided to start your spiritual journey, should you go out and buy as many books on religion, study all the different religions, spend lots of money on personal growth seminars and meditation programs and such?  Well, you could do that, but doesn’t that sound like a perfect set-up for a spiritual drowning?

What’s the rush?

My recommendation is baby steps.  It has worked for me.  Here is what I recommend as you begin your spiritual:

Find A Spiritual Home

With the advent of the Internet, it is not very difficult to find a spiritual place where you feel most comfortable.  I used to spend a lot of time in a now relatively defunct Internet group centered around Conversations with God.  This was a group that strongly resonated with me.  It was also especially important for me because I lived in a town with less than 7,500 people at the time, and I’d been to every church in town without feeling any spiritual resonance whatsoever.  But I did have the Internet.  And I did start growing spiritually. Twitter can also be a great source of spiritual growth. I know that seems strange, but if you follow the right people, you can always have spiritual quotes coming to you throughout the day. You can now create groups that you would like to follow on Twitter. For example, if you have 100 friends, and you don’t like everything that you read from those friends, you could start a group and called it “spirituality.” That way, when you open that group, you can just receive their tweets. I like to follow people who don’t tweet more than a handful of times a day. Over-tweeters tend to be under-selective about what they share. You can also follow channels on Twitter. For example, if you want to see what others are saying about ACIM (or A Course In Miracles) you can type in the search box for those and see what others have to say about it. You can do the same with a variety of words and phrases. Personally, I follow people like @marwilliamson, @marbethmentor, @miracle_virus, @Quotationer, @ChrisCade, @Depak_Chopra, @PassionPower, @SchoolroomEarth, @Miraclez, @ACIM_Speaks, @goodhappens, and @Theta_Miracles (in no particular order). These tweeters tend to be selective about what they share and don’t clog the twittersphere. Now, I see this is a helpful beginning rather than a permanent path.

At some point, you will need to get beyond Twitter and do some reading that is really going to move you on a more streamlined growth path. Personally, I believe that path should include reading A Course in Miracles daily, but I know that there are people who have a great deal of difficulty with the perceived verbosity of the it. All I can say is find a group that can help you with understanding. Just make sure that what you hear in the group resonates from within.

Now, if you can find a physical spiritual home, that can be helpful because you feel most comfortable, at this point anyway, in your physical form.  Once you develop the understanding of the energy force that surrounds us, you will realize that you can feel this same energy force “through” the Internet.  The reason why I quote the word through there is because it doesn’t actually happen through the Internet, it happens through the energy field that surrounds all of us of which we are all a part of.  It is like water surrounding fish – except that we are all part of it.  Imagine this, a fish off the coast of China is in the same body of water that a fish off the coast of Maryland is, right?  We, here in Arizona, breathe from the same atmosphere as those in Pakistan, yes?  Well, we are also part of a collective energy that surrounds the cosmos.

I am a member of the non-denominational church of Religious Science. My personal physical spiritual home is Creative Living Fellowship. I have also spent time in Unity churches. Both of these churches are considered New Thought churches. While both the New Age movement and the New Thought movement have had significant impact on my own personal growth, I think it is only fair that I point out that New Thought is different from New Age. I will leave it to you to explore the differences.

So, it is with this in mind that I recommend that you start slowly.  There are all kinds of programs out there that say they can send you to the promised land of spirituality.  In some cases this is true.  However, all too often, it is simply a case of being a seed thrown in the water.  You will obtain an instant boost of nourishment at a weekend retreat, but then you will slowly die because you received too much, or, unfortunately, you didn’t have any means to continue receiving the right kind of nourishment.

Here is my last point, usually, starting a spiritual journey also means that you have to give something up.  Since you are now making time for your spiritual journey, you can’t squeeze it into an already crowded schedule.  For me, it was pretty easy because I was giving up 4-8 hours of poker playing a night to make time for my journey.  If you have something destructive going on in your life that can help you turn this tide, you get a bit of a headstart.  For others, it means cutting back on TV, or video games, or sports.  Sports-watching, that is.  Don’t give up exercise to nourish your spirit, more on that in a later post.

Seven Hours a Week

When it comes right down to it, what is more important than your own spiritual growth.  Remember, you have 168 hours in your week.  I am suggesting that you use seven of them for spiritual growth – to begin with. One hour per day.  If you can do that, you are ready for Step 2 of your spiritual journey.

Namaste