People confuse being awake with belonging to a soccer team. And they criticize those not awakened as if they were of the opposing team. Nowadays, it is common to hear a supposedly spiritual person judging others as worldly. And this attitude is born of inadequate spiritual nourishment.

If you don’t eat well, your body doesn’t function well.

Well, it’s the same with your mind and spirit.

It would help if you fed your mind and spirit correctly in order not to be a spiritual anemic 🙂

How do you achieve this? By understanding the spiritual path as a staircase.

The first step of the ladder: the egotrip

The first step is very ego-driven. Because to make any change you have to want.

And to want is to desire.

Without desire, you cannot start your ascension.

In this first step is when we do weird things like believing we are Reiki masters, practicing Yoga at dawn, and doing shamanic rituals that we find on the internet 😉

We have started a new path, and we believe we are the last coke in the desert or the stopper in the sea: indispensable.

Nothing happens. The ego is there, making us feel special.

The second step of the ladder: stillness and surrender

The desire to change motivates the first step, but failure initiates the second.

People say they come to the spiritual path looking for answers, but that is a lie.

People come to the spiritual world looking for help.

Something is not working in their life: it can be something obvious like a health problem or something subtle like daily dissatisfaction that slowly drives them into depression.

At this stage, you give up. You stop pretending to become a Shaman or a Yogi able to levitate and settle for finding some peace.

And this is when the magic happens because you discover stillness.

The third step of the ladder: the awakening

Finally, you begin to understand what the game is about.

It is about discovering the wisdom that silence holds, the gaps between the bars of that daily prison we call routine.

Thanks to the stillness, you begin to sense the way.

You stop pretending to be Jesus of Nazareth, and you accept that you have not developed enough spiritual muscle to save the whole world, that you still have a long way to go, and you are satisfied with saving yourself one day at a time.

Your function here is to keep people from entering your life and leaving you with their emotional garbage.

On the other hand, you try not to play the victim and stop being a Drama Queen or King.

In the end, by accumulating stillness and peace of mind, you start to rediscover the small daily miracles: the sunrises, the sunsets, the starry sky, the taste of food, the feeling of well-being after doing sports, you name it.

Finally, you are present, and you stop living in automatic.

The fourth step of the ladder: the principle

When you wake up, you discover that it is not the end but the beginning.

You start living in the here and now, where the magic happens.

You focus on being less reactive every time because you discover that when something or someone makes you angry every day in a recurrent way, the problem is not outside but inside you.

Those recurring annoyances are like an emotional wound that is stinging you. It warns you that you are reacting on autopilot and need to create space to not respond as usual.

It is then that everything finally changes because by making different decisions about the things that irritate you, you alter your destiny and move towards a distant future.

New ideas and thoughts emerge in your head by creating space between the things that displease you and your reactions.

These reflections make you grow spiritually, and then you understand that the road has only just begun: it is here that you start to grow.

The rest of the steps of the staircase

The spiritual ladder is infinite, and that’s good because you never get bored 🙂

As you climb the steps, the real hard lessons will come.

Lessons like,

• The power of forgiveness.
• The transforming magic of love.
• The acceptance of the change.
• The detachment.
• The gift of giving.

But don’t worry. By then, you will have developed emotional muscle and will overcome the trials the universe sends your way.

In addition, you will begin to use spiritual tools correctly, such as Yoga, the path of Zen, the Bible, or whatever you choose.

These tools invite you to reflect and produce different effects in each person.

I use the Bible and Yoga.

The Bible reads you when you read it.

That is, you read a passage, and this passage mixes inside you with your past experiences, and upon reflection, a lesson or moral comes out that you can apply in your life.

Practicing Yoga makes me reconnect with the present moment and be less reactive when something makes me angry; also, after my practice, new ideas that help me achieve my goals appear in my mind.

It will be the same for you, whatever tool you choose.

Good luck, my friend. See you on the road.

A virtual hug

AG