Revised and updated by Celeste Smucker
Never forget that you are here to learn how to love. — Master Charles Cannon
Most spiritual journeys follow a winding path from which it's easy to stray.
Commitment to a daily practice that includes activities such as yoga, meditation, breathwork, journaling, walking in the woods or chanting helps you stay on track.
The key is commitment.
Even with the best intentions it's easy to lose focus, especially if you don't get the results you want as quickly as you think you should.
Let's take a look at four main ways that contribute to a loss of spiritual focus, and then consider four heartfelt ways to find it again.
Expectations Are The Key
Losing your way on your spiritual path is common and can feel frustrating.
When this occurs, you may consider making changes in your practice or even decide to let it go if you aren't experiencing the benefits you expect.
Maybe, though, it's not your practice, but your expectations that are the source of your frustration.
Consider meditation, which is at the core of most people's spiritual practices.
You will find a vast amount of helpful information about why and how to meditate.
You may also explore articles on the many science based benefits of meditation and how a daily practice can help relieve your stress, reduce your anxiety and depression, and lower your blood pressure.
Reading about people's personal experiences with meditation and how it changed their lives can motivate you to give meditation a try, or resume a practice you left behind.
You may also learn from others on the path that daily meditation can help you find, experience and express more of your authentic self.
While all of this input can be helpful, everyone's path is different.
Further, overthinking can create expectations that interfere with your practice by reducing your openness and receptivity to what is authentically you.
So listen to your mind and explore the options. But when deciding how and why you want to meditate (or engage in meditation enhancing practices such as yoga, chanting, or breathwork that can deepen your experience), always check in with your heart.
What does your heart tell you about which practices would serve you best?
Then let go of expectations based on other people's experiences and choose practices that are the most heartfelt for you.
Adopting them and giving them a chance to work can be life-changing.
How Goal Setting Can Lead You Astray & What to Do About It
Expectations may lead you to set goals for your daily practice.
An overemphasis on goals, though, can be a distraction if it causes you to overthink or even judge your experience instead of enjoying it.
For example, maybe you set a goal to enjoy a still mind. When your experience doesn't match up with this expectation you get caught up in judging it and judging yourself.
Or perhaps you yearn to see a vision about your future after hearing someone else's description of a life-changing one that appeared to them during a meditation.
Enjoying a life in which you are less invested in life's daily ups and downs is another common daily practice goal.
Yet, how will you feel if, after a few weeks, you lose patience because for you at the moment, this goal seems unattainable.
Goals like these can set you up for failure if, when they aren't met, you believe your daily practice "doesn't work," or that you did something "wrong."
Rather than setting goals about how you should feel in the future, focus on observing what is happening in the moment.
When negative thoughts arise, take a breath, wish them well and visualize them drifting away. Or try loading them into a hot air balloon and waving goodbye as it lifts into the air.
Shifting your focus to your breath or to a mantra (if you have a favorite one) is another approach. Or consider the many wonders you experience daily and flow gratitude for all of them.
Over time, as your awareness expands and you begin to feel calmer and more peaceful, your mind might convince you you've finally arrived at enlightenment.
Unfortunately, a judgement like this can also put the brakes on your experience.
Your heart will tell you that enlightenment isn't a state you arrive at. Instead the more you commit to your practice, the more you will learn to enjoy the present moment, causing your awareness to expand.
Then embrace the many positive changes that follow with no expectations about what comes next.
How to Release Self Judgement
If you are on a spiritual path you have undoubtedly heard advice about avoiding judgement whether it is of yourself or others.
You are taught instead to love and respect yourself and others just as you (and they) are.
Great advice, unless it leads you to judge yourself even more harshly because you don't feel you are as accepting of yourself or others as you would like to be.
Slipping into judgement is a sign your mind is at work telling you how you should be rather than being OK with whatever is happening in the moment.
The solution is to open your heart, take a breath and accept that you are human, a condition often associated with self judgement.
Instead of pushing the judgement away, though, sit quietly with it and watch it float through your mind without engaging it. Then recognize you are only human and wave goodbye to it as it moves on out.
When you do so you may even begin to see humor in how you judge yourself for being human. You may even relax a little and give yourself a smile.
How to Let Go of Blaming Others
Life is Divine…You are alive. You are Divine… All and everything is Divine. Honor the Divinity of Life. — Master Charles Cannon
What does it mean that all and everything is divine? What about all the negative things that happen in our world every day. Fires, earthquakes, floods, hate? How could they be divine?
And what about all the experiences you may have had that you believe were someone else's fault?
Ancient scriptures, and their contemporary updates agree, there is only one consciousness, one energy that creates and sustains the entire universe.
In this non-dual view of the universe everyone and everything must be divine because they all come from the same source, which is divine.
To function in the world, however, we act as though we live in a relative field. One in which pairs of opposites let us communicate with each other and better understand our world.
For example, how could we understand and describe dark if we haven't experienced light? Or how can we describe hot without understanding its opposite, cold.
Consider too, if we never experience fear or anger, how can we appreciate love?
The relative field in which we operate causes us to view each other as separate beings, even though at a subtle level we are all one.
And it is this feeling of separation that opens the door to blaming each other when something happens that we might define as "someone else's fault."
Let's explore a little further.
Much of what we think and do is directed by what is stored in our unconscious minds. If we want to make changes in our experience of and reactions to the world, we must clear out the negativity that resides there, purifying our view.
If we don't we will project our negativity outward onto other people. And a common outcome of this projection is blaming others for something that actually comes from the experiences that unconsciously create our view of the world.
So pay attention. When something happens and you want to blame someone else, step back and view this as evidence you have something buried in your subconscious that needs clearing out.
Acknowledge that what you are blaming in another is something you need to accept about yourself. Then, relax, take a deep breath, and imagine the blame floating away, making space for a new, more authentic view of yourself and others.
Your Daily Practice: Key to Staying on Your Spiritual Path
Find the authenticity of your Being, and true love will fill you. — Master Charles Cannon
Committing to a daily spiritual practice is essential if you want to enjoy all of its many benefits.
Doing so helps you be more accepting of yourself while you release the need to blame others for your projections.
WIth persistence your life will become calmer, more peaceful and more joyful. And you will be better able to recognize, act and speak from your authentic self.
Start small and gradually add more practices if they are in tune with the messages from your heart.
Support is also available from workshops and retreats.
Our upcoming Ceremony of the Heart Retreat is a heartfelt immersion in meditation, nature and sacred ritual. Register now to join us.