Then My Life Blew Up
With a whispered prayer I asked Spirit to guide me in all things
It is hard to recommend the spiritual life for those who have not yet begun the path. When I made a deep and life changing commitment to follow the ways of Spirit my life was going OK. I can’t say I was happy because of the cyclical emotional dysfunction I carried in my relationships and I felt like I was never good enough to get what I wanted. I would say I was on the miserable side of the happiness scale. I knew there were spiritual practices and ways I could overcome my emotional pain and intuitively I felt certain that connecting with Spirit and getting help from them could solve all my problems.
So, I prayed and cried and longed for connection. I read books on spiritual practices and sought community and teachers. I dedicated my life to my spiritual path, to Spirit, and to service through a desire to ease my mental and emotional patterns of pain. With a whispered prayer I asked Spirit to guide me in all things.
That is when things got very bad.
Career, marriage, health, all destabilized. I have had four careers in four separate industries since that time. I had cancer and all the surgeries and complications that go with it. My marriage ended and relationships shifted. It is what some call the ‘dark night of the soul’. It is devastating and can last years.
For me life was the opposite of easy for about a decade after I decided to follow the spiritual path. Seriously, a decade.
It’s been twenty years now. I see why these shifts, losses and devastating experiences had to happen in order to follow the path of Spirit, but if I knew about them ahead of time, I’m not sure I would have done it. I’m not that brave.
Almost every spiritual person I know has had similar experiences when they follow the spiritual path. They face death, have financial loss, health loss, relationship loss or career instability and so on. For some people it starts just before they begin to work with Spirit. For some life falls apart after they make a conscious choice to be on the path.
Why does this happen?
Shifting from following your ego’s desires to the ways of Spirit requires that all the things of the ego need to be released. Everything you have and did that was based on the ego’s wants have to go. For most of us that is our whole life, our status profession, and our possessions. These things must go in order to rebuild our lives following the way of Spirit. Spirit has no need for status, for recognition, for bragging rights of anything. Anything we take a superior attitude to will go whether it is our good looks or our shiny new car. Anything of ours we think of as better than someone else’s has to go. We may get good things again when we no longer need them to feel better about ourselves. But we must release the attachment to have them for status or any other egoic need.
For one to be happy on the spiritual path humility is the way. The ego loves hubris and hates humility. But humility must be in place for Spirit to be active in our lives. There is a reason that people climb stairs on their knees praying for miracles. It is to be in humility. There is a reason monks give up worldly possessions when joining the order. Ego attachment to possessions stops our access to the Grace of Spirit. It is not because Spirit likes to see us suffer before we are rewarded, but because things of the ego are in the way of faith.
When I bring this up to my students, they are not happy about it. But faith requires humility and faith is required to walk with Spirit. We cannot have a spiritual life by feeding the ego in any way. If we have a prideful attitude about our beautiful body, our great marriage or our big house and decide to get on the spiritual path, we need to rethink how we view those things in our lives.
We can easily move into humility and not have to have our entire lives blow up to do it. We can have those things we love in our lives with gratitude. We can kneel and pray with tears of gratitude in the most humble way for all we have received. We can view them as miraculous gifts from divinity and not something we are entitled to because we earned them. When we give our lives over to Spirit we can see how the gifts they have given us have all been miracles. In the presence of a miracle, humble gratitude flows effortlessly.
