#10. Giving is a gift you give yourself.
Many people laugh at spirituality.
They think that highly spiritual people have the house reeking of incense and see signs from the universe everywhere, like people who think they see their dog’s face in the clouds.
But spirituality is not all healing candles, silent retreats, meditations, and palo santo. Spirituality is also facing demons, jumping into the void of one’s inner abysses, practicing detachment, and fighting one’s ego.
Spirituality is the big brother of self-help.
If spirituality were a musical genre, it wouldn’t be chill out; it would be heavy metal, bro.
That’s why I want to share with you ten things that only people highly committed to their spirituality can understand so that you can understand them before you judge them.
(Who knows, maybe you are a highly spiritual person, and you feel identified 🙂
- Spiritual awakening is not as beautiful as they tell you. It is as if a seed is suddenly aware of being a seed. It is buried in the ground with no air or light when it looks around. It wants to burst out of the darkness surrounding it and breathe fresh air after being buried in dung.
- The spiritual lessons that highly spiritual people discover are highly disturbing. For example, Michael Singer shared this in his book The Surrender Experiment: “To line up the will with the forces that direct the course of things produces surprisingly powerful results.” But to do that, you must take a leap of faith, throw yourself into the void, and flow with life, understanding that everything that happens to you (good and bad) has a higher purpose that you don’t yet understand. And that’s scary as shit. Because you stop living in the comfort zone and start living in the disturbing zone 🙂
- Spiritual people are often broken and are putting their pieces back together. As Jelly Roll sings in Save Me, “Something inside me is broken, so I cling to everything that sets me free.”
- Detachment is not a hippie-dippie thing. It’s serious and honest. It’s a skill you have to master to get rid of relationships, substances, and all the self-destruction you’ve filled your life with over the years. And it’s not easy. It’s not easy to look in the mirror, and instead of seeing yourself as a lost cause (which is what everyone else sees when they look at you), choose yourself, become your hero, and pull yourself out of the shit, often without the help of family and friends.
- Loneliness is part of the process. Many spiritual people live in community, but even within their social groups, they embrace solitude, as do cloistered monks. The spiritual process involves turning around and facing all your demons alone.
- Forgiving from the heart is more complicated than people think. Listening to that voice inside you that screams the same shit Job’s wife called at Job in the Bible, “Curse your God and die,” and not only ignoring it but forgiving every person that brought you to the brink of wasting away is not exactly easy. Because resentment and hatred are like pimples that fester and infect and can only be healed by exploding them and pouring 96º alcohol on them. In other words, all the hate and resentment towards the people who hurt you only comes out of you through a process of catharsis that, if not experienced, you cannot understand; it is as if your whole body is crying.
- When you think you are done, you discover that the spiritual game has just begun. When you finish dealing with all your shit and your emotional wounds heal, a new level of the videogame of life is unlocked, and it is your turn to transcend the emotional wounds and phobias that your ancestors did not have the time or the courage to transcend and that they left imprinted in your DNA.
- If spirituality were a race, it would not be a 100-meter race but an Ultraman race. And only some people are prepared for it. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in her famous letters to her spiritual director, Michael Van Der Peet, acknowledged doubting her faith in God most of her life in sentences like this, “Jesus extraordinarily loves you. In my case, the silence and emptiness are so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear”. In the spiritual world, after brief periods of what is known as “consolation” in the Christian tradition, there are extended periods of “desert.” It is easy to be spiritual when one sees progress, feels consolation, and recovers his life. But human beings adapt to the environment and ultimately can end up ignoring even the miracles because they come to see them as something familiar.
- Meditating, praying, or walking alone is the spiritual equivalent of brushing one’s teeth. Highly spiritual people know that the brain is the mouth through which the soul eats. And in the same way that not brushing your teeth causes your mouth to rot, not doing something to quiet your mind drives your mind to become corrupted.
- Giving is a gift you give to yourself. Highly spiritual people have discovered that happiness is the by-product of feeling like a tool of blessing for others. Feeling useful is the key to life. Spiritual people are happier giving than receiving. And they know that sharing is healing. When you stop living for yourself and start living for others, the universe conspires in your favor and tries to make things go well for you so that you continue to be a channel of blessing.
If you have identified three or more points, you are indeed a highly spiritual person, even if you don’t know it 😉
A virtual hug
AG
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