Learn from my old immaturity and not be like I was 🙂
I have been immature for most of my adulthood. Both emotionally and spiritually.
I’m not kidding. I’ve been more immature than trying to face Gozila with a squirt gun.
And as a result of such immaturity, I’ve learned to recognize my old behavior patterns in people who have started or have been in the spiritual world for a while.
Here are the four main ones.
1. You seek external recognition of your internal growth.
“One day you’ll reach so deep inside yourself that you’ll realize that’s where you’ve always really been.” — Michael A. Singer.
The universe is not interested in applauding you but in seeing you grow.
And that’s why the universe doesn’t stop challenging you and getting you into embarrassing situations.
The universe does it to confront you with your feeling of shame.
Because shame, according to Dr. Hawking’s scale, is the lowest vibrational feeling (20 points), and according to Hawkings, you don’t get real change until you vibrate in courage (200 points).
So it would be best if you were courageous to make progress, not hide in the comfort zone of complacency and the constant search for validation.
2. Believing that if you behave well, good things will happen to you.
“The moment we make a definite commitment, Providence steps in as well. All sorts of things happen to help us that otherwise would never have happened.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Spirituality is not Santa Claus. He won’t bring you a gift for being good.
Believing that you deserve good things to happen to you just because you start behaving well is very naive and one of the main signs of spiritual immaturity.
Spoiler: you have a lot of bad karma to purge before that happens 🙂
What does happen is that providence starts to act, but providence has a dark sense of humor and usually disguises itself as tragedy, misfortune, or adversity.
It’s as if it likes to see you complaining about something that, in the end, will get you where you need to be.
3. You use spirituality to avoid pain instead of facing it.
“The way you experience pain changes depending on how you react to it. When you get closer to it, the pain gets smaller. When you move away from it, the pain grows.” — Barry Michels.
There comes a point in life when living hurts so much that you need some peace, and that’s why many people start the spiritual process. This was my case.
But after that first initial intuition, continuing on the spiritual path to run away from the pain instead of facing it only shows that you are still an immature person who is not doing his homework.
Instead of embracing the process, the resistance, and the pain to transcend it, people like this usually abandon spiritual practices if they don’t get immediate results.
And that’s not the way to move forward.
You have to be consistent. Results usually come after years of dedication.
The fruits of spirituality are like bamboo that are thrown away without growing for five years and then rise to a height of 12 to 15 meters in a few months.
I went through the night of the soul at 33 years old and am harvesting those fruits at almost 42.
Just as you don’t expect to learn fencing in the first class, you can’t expect to reach Nirvana after a week of meditating.
Trust and embrace the process; the fruits will come. I tell you from experience.
4. Getting angry that things are not getting better.
“Don’t get upset, lose heart or become impatient. Once you have overcome that initial setback try again with renewed strength and be satisfied if your actions and your goals have become more humane.” — Marcus Aurelius.
When you train at the gym to get as buff as Arnold Schwarzenegger, you understand that you must lift weights (resistance) to make your muscles grow, right?
Spiritually immature people don’t assume they need adversity, frustration, and discomfort (resistance) to grow spiritually.
When I first started meditating, I argued with everyone because they always made noise when I tried to concentrate without realizing that losing focus and redirecting my attention over and over again to my breath was like doing bicep sets at the Gym.
I needed adversity to progress, but everything had to be perfect since I was immature.
I didn’t understand that a big part of spirituality is to be OK with the imperfect, with what doesn’t go your way, with what you can’t control.
So stop obsessing: with having the perfect clothes to do yoga, with the incense being the patchouli you like the most, with not even a fly bothering you, and focus on what matters: embracing uncomfortable situations and being an agent of change in the lives of others.
A virtual hug
AG
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