Leveling Up Spiritually
When you’re at the beginning of your spiritual journey, you might feel like you’re a tiny Lilliputian from Gulliver’s Travels trying to climb a staircase made for giants. If you’re not familiar with the tale, Lilliputians are about six inches tall. If your path has felt intimidating so far, making you feel about that big some days, I want you to know that you’re not alone. When we’re first stepping onto this path, the road ahead seems perilous and larger than life. You might be feeling a bit awestruck at the magnitude of this mountain you’re scaling until you begin to find your footing and realize that you have the ability to consciously expand yourself through deep inner work. You were meant to find yourself here, and you have everything in your satchel that you need for this part of the journey. When it’s time to move on to the next step, everything you need will be available to you.
Faith, trust, and courage are your biggest assets along the way, and connecting with your own deep inner knowing is essential to continue. This connection to your deeper inner knowing allows you to see yourself through the eyes of unconditional acceptance and love, which expands your consciousness. This expansion allows you to grow spiritually, and eventually instead of scaling each step like you’re climbing a rock wall, you’ll find that you’ve grown to fit the stairs and you can climb them with greater ease. Finding patience and love for yourself during this process is vital because you will encounter challenges that test your resolve at each juncture. If you look out into the universe and proclaim that you want something, the response will initially be, how much? What are you willing to let go of to make room for this thing that you want?
Once you’ve decided that you’re choosing to go all in and let go of everything that’s no longer serving you, you’ll have the opportunity to receive deeper truths and new resources to aid you. If you let go of the people in your life who often criticize you and your own self-criticism, you’ll be rewarded with people who see your light and offer loving encouragement instead. If you eliminate the external criticism, but fail to remove self-criticism, you’ll attract new people who engage in this same behavior. You must audit your self-image and behaviors along the way to create lasting change in your life. There are no shortcuts on this journey. If your goal is to manifest a new life in 30-days, you might not enjoy this new life as much as you might think. It takes time and slow incremental effort to create the kind of change that facilitates the life you actually want. There is no substitute for hard work, but it has a lasting reward.
Once you settle into this work for the long haul, for better or worse, you lock in and begin the true work of embodiment. Sometimes this comes after a lengthy battle with your own stubbornness and desire to stay bundled up in your comfort zone for the rest of your life. Your old life will fight for you at this point, and you will be offered endless distractions and dangling carrots that seem incredibly enticing. This is the most critical point where you must choose to look at the parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding. This is when you dive deeply into wells of pain and suffering that feel endless at first. Allow yourself to be comforted by this truth, the well is not endless. You are fully capable of diving in and eventually reaching the bottom. You’ll get through this experience and discover your truest self along the way. You’ll grow through feeling this pain slowly until you are big enough to hold all of it.
Once you can hold your pain fully, I want you to remember your capacity to feel great joy. Allow yourself to feel the pain and the joy simultaneously, and this will lead you to the point where you can hold yourself in your completeness without judgment or self-hatred. You’ll be able to hold your light and your shadow entirely, realizing that you’ve been whole all along. You might feel incomplete at the beginning of the journey, but by the end you’ll be brave enough to see all parts of yourself, and you’ll realize that you only felt incomplete because you were intentionally looking away from the parts you didn’t love and appreciate. When you begin to see yourself this way and release the shame that you feel around certain parts of yourself, you set yourself free from the criticisms and expectations of others and measuring up to these external demands.
You’ll stop caring so much about what other people think about you because you’ll know yourself so well that their opinion no longer matters to you. You’ll stop trying to convince the world of who you are, and you’ll just start living as the fullest expression of your authentic self. Some people will misunderstand you, either unconsciously or willfully, and you’ll have to witness that and move forward anyway. You aren’t here to convince everyone to like you or to fit in with the rest of society. You’re here to heal yourself and close the gap of separation that exists within you. This separation is created by self-doubt, self-criticism, shame, guilt, fear, and pain that you’re holding in your body. Accepting yourself fully allows you to abandon these heavy emotions and see yourself with kinder eyes. This is how self-love transforms your life experience and allows you to level up spiritually. This is how you come back to yourself and let go of the falseness and everything that isn’t in alignment with your truest expression. Give yourself this gift, and I promise that your life will shift to reflect it.