Step 2 – 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 (@Dave_Hatton) 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.