Why talking about your Spiritual development may be slowing it down!
One of the joys, and I would say the purpose of walking the Spiritual Ascension or personal growth path, is experiencing your own progress being made!
Your progress is proof of real tangible results and could be likened to internal gold - but what if the following habit is causing you to dance the old ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’ jig?
If you are one of those people that just loves to talk about your personal growth progress with others, you then might also be prone to experiencing the following draw back that sharing regular progress reports can cause!
I once had a client who every time she talked about her success with her equally progressive partner, observed that her forward momentum slowed down or completely stopped! Aaaaaargh!!!
She admitted that she frequently craved to share her positive results with others but straight after mentioning it would experience laziness. It was as if her brain had decided that success had been achieved and she now no longer needed to practice.
She also admitted that she really wanted her partner to validate her efforts and that once she got the validation she was after, she felt the craving had been satisfied [albeit temporarily!] and could just go lax with all her efforts.
There are a few things at play here and all of them are found in the minds naughty bag of tricks! And when these tricks are observed for the illusion that they are, you will instantly recognize that this is just more of that endless flow of mental narrative that can either be a} cultivated or b} released.
Some of these tricks are:
- Impatience
- Laziness
- Craving instant gratification
- Aversion
- Desire for external validation
- Greed
Boil it down to two things and you have: craving and aversion are it!
Tethering ourselves to aversion and craving is the cause of all suffering and the only way to decrease suffering lies in our ability to release ourselves from these two reactive states.
Releasing ourselves takes practice….lots-of-practice…. and dedication…. and sincerity and….will power….and more practice!
So what can you do to stop this cycle of Self sabotage?
It is time to change your perspective and what better way to do this than to question your motives!
Honestly ask yourself - Why am I practicing my spiritual practices?
Is it to:
- Show off to others?
- Simply talk and intellectualize my Spiritual experiences?
- Stop at a certain point and go no further?
- Get high off emotional states that I crave?
- Strengthen my tethers to craving and aversion?
- OR Cultivate an awareness that is flexible enough to move through narratives [such as all of the above] – enabling you to progressively un-tether yourself from all experiences including your well deserved success?
Only one of these perspectives allows you to experience a Spiritual path that can withstand the seduction for instant gratification through external validation.
And this same perspective is the only path that will allow you to let go of either progress or regression.
When you truly seek to ascend, your desire to do so must outweigh the desire to feed the need for anything else. Instead you become focused on developing a flexible awareness that is able to soften through the seductive desire to speak about your progress too soon [if at all].
Instead what happens is something very rewarding [another success so to speak].
You objectively observe the internal story that tries to justify why sharing your success is such an innocent and useful action to take, and instead simply observe that story for what it is - phenomena that is continually changing…and press ‘repeat’!
What happens when you take the above actions as an antidote to ‘spilling over’, is not to ‘hold’ everything within, but rather ‘move through’ everything within and the result is release!
So next time you feel the need to share and spill forth your experiences [knowing full well that this is going to be to your own detriment]:
- observe and follow the flow of internal dialogue
- observe it changing
Coming out the other side of this craving intact, it will become obvious that all that craving has gone...until next time! Hence hitting the ‘repeat’ button!
Perhaps in time you can share your progress report, but in the mean time you can enjoy the internal strength cultivated by the simple art of moving through the continually changing states of craving and aversion!
Feel free to let me know if you have experienced this yourself!