Do we have to give up our material work in order to be spiritual?

Question:
‘Hello Serge. I am just starting out on my spiritual journey but I haven’t yet found something that works for me, that honours what is true for me as a human being. Perhaps, to do so, I need to give up the work I am currently doing. I am not sure. Can you advise me?

Serge
I think that very few of us find our true ‘soul path’ or a path that honours our heart ( I see both as the same thing) to start off with. It may take time and often it emerges as a result of our discovering what does or does not work for us or what is true or not true for us. What can be important at the start is that we find something that gives us some kind of initial entrée into the world of soul. It may not be our true path but it can act as a starter and get us going.

For example, in my case, after I left university and felt a spiritual calling, I had a friend who was a student of yoga and who brought me into her world. I practiced Kriya Yoga. This subsequently turned out not to be my way, but doing this yoga brought about certain temporary openings, which in turn gave me a wider panorama into the spiritual world as a whole, and from that I gradually discovered what worked for me.

It may be that your path will be very specific, that is, that you alight, say, upon Buddhism or Sufism early on, or you meet a particular Shaman, whom you feel drawn to, and, hey presto, the rest of your spiritual life is mapped out for you. Or it may be, as is the case with more and more people today, that your way is to be more eclectic and that you feel attracted by many different paths or approaches to the sacred. That has certainly been my way, and it has both its advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages of being eclectic is that it makes for a certain freedom of spirit - you are not tied down by a particular tradition which can sometimes be limiting ( a lot of traditions. I think, look back too much into the past and not sufficiently forward into the future) . Also, you can ‘find something’ that corresponds to what you feel you need in your life at any time.

You can do ‘your thing’ in ‘your own time’. The disadvantages of this is that you risk delving superficially into a lot of things and not deeply into any one thing, mistaking, say, quantity of gurus visited for quality of wisdom derived from them. The eclectic way, therefore, requires a lot of discernment and inner discipline. Sometimes it can be tough. One can feel lonely. Where do I go now? What do I need? Here, we are challenged to be both our own teacher and student ; we need to evaluate our requirements and also try to assess our progress!

So if the latter is your way, and I suspect, from what you say, that it might be, then your key guide will be your heart, for it is only in our hearts that we can access the wisdom to tell us what we need at any time. This is why so many teachers tell us to follow our hearts. They really are our best friend as inside them lie many awesome capacities such as tenderness, kindness, love, compassion, courage, the ability to be peaceful, feel awe, see beauty and experience joy, in short, to honour and respect all of life.

The more we learn to live with heart, the more quality we have in our lives, the less we feel separate from ourselves and our world. With heart, we can let others in more deeply and reach out towards them more tenderly. Our capacity to heal ourselves, for example, or to transform indifference into love, or anxiety into compassionate concern, lies in our hearts.

It is only in their transforming fire that our conflicts can be reconciled and we can learn to metabolise our pain and gobble up our shadow side. Through attuning to the essence contained within them, we come more and more into the presence of our true nature.And this for me is what ‘being spiritual’ is all about.

However, just because heart contains all these riches, is no indication that we know how to open to them and so embody them at any depth. That may take time and is essentially ‘the work’. Thus your task is to find a way that works for you to support you opening your heart to yourself and to life, learning not to judge yourself or others, for it is so much through kindness and self-acceptance that we grow and evolve. As such, the more you allow you to be you, the more you tread a path of heart. Put another way, finding that mysterious ‘path of heart’ is not ‘out there’ but within you right now.

Anything and everything that you come across, be it painful or joyful, constricting or expanding, and that you learn to relate to with your heart , will take your deeper into your spirituality. This in turn will bring you closer to yourself. As David Spangler, who used to be the mouthpiece for the Findhorn community, once put it: ‘ We must learn to sprout where we are planted.’

It may be that there is no need for you to go to the Himalayas or give up your job as a Bank manager (or whatever you do) to find your calling.

Why is it easier for some people to deal with crisis than others?

Question:  Serge, why does it seem to be  so much easier for some people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, than for others and  naturally to  feel more alive and joyful, all of which things always seem so hard for me? In other articles, you have written that crisis can act as an evolutionary trigger to get the best out of us. Well, it never seems  to do that  for me!  I feel down a lot of the time. Perhaps I am just a weak character. Can you advise me?
 
Serge. I would be pleased to.  First, let me say that I am sorry about how you describe  you feel, as it sounds as if you may be going through the old ringers a bit and I appreciate how tough that can be.  Secondly, I am sure you are not a weak character. Weak characters don't examine themselves, and you seem to  have a lot of awareness around your vulnerabilities. And here I  also remind you  that we all have vulnerabilities, and it doesn't mean we are weak, just that there are parts of us  that are less good at withstanding  certain kinds of stormy weather.

And  we need to be kind and loving to these parts of ourselves, and not be so hard on ourselves and compare ourselves with others. ( I mean if , looks wise,  I compared myself to Brad Pitt , I would never dare to venture outside my house !) So while not knowing anything about you, I imagine that you may  have some unresolved emotional wounds,  and that your heart has  perhaps been injured in some way and may be bleeding a bit. Perhaps it also has one or two locks and chains around it  too! Here, I am just guessing.

But if this is the case, then  bleeding, chained hearts slow us down at all levels of life.  I know a bit about this in terms of my own life, where, when I was younger, and before I did plenty of things to try to heal myself, I felt a lot of the things you have described. And more. My experience is that what  unhealed emotions can do, is that they make us less able to accomplish things that people whose hearts are more healed and less enchained, are capable of. Indeed, they  can plunge us down into what I will call a 'twilight world' or domain of being, where, to continue my metaphor, there ain't a  whole lot of sunlight available.  And we can stay trapped there. In my own situation, at that stage of my life, I needed others to pull me out, as my own boot straps were too soft for me to grab hold of! 

In other words, I needed help from outside  of myself, because I didn't yet  possess a  strong enough  sense of self or inhabit a domain that contained enough strength for me to assist myself on my own.  I always think that the main differences between us are not our skin colour, race or religion, but the kind of inner world we live in. Some worlds that people live in, are very beautiful. They are full of  colour and creativity and radiant joy and love. If one lives in them, one has the power to initiate things, to complete projects, to feel inspired and  to go with the flow,  to feel that the force is with us,  to deal with tragedy much more transformationally.

However, all these things are simply not possible for someone who does not  yet live under the laws of these 'sacred domains'. I have encountered people who live in  these 'higher worlds' and they always strike me as very empowered. Yet it is not that these people are better or cleverer or stronger than us ;  it is just , as I said, that they live in a domain of being where there are less restrictions, less rules, less constraints and more  freedom and power.  And in these domains, we are much more able to be   causal, to initiate things from within ourselves and  not be as much  at the effect of what is going on in our outer environment.

Unfortunately, many of us have not  yet learned to live  in these  more expanded realities. The psychologist Jean Huston once said that 'We are all born Stradivariuses and raised to believe we are plastic fiddles.' This was certainly true for me. And if  our inner world conspires to restrict us, our outer one will do so as well, for we will project our limitations upon it. For example, some of the 'rules' governing  our existing 'Consensus reality' that most of us live in most of the time and believe there is nothing else beyond it, include the idea that poverty cannot be alleviated or that war is something that cannot be done away with. And these, I maintain, are beliefs that pertain to a particular world of consciousness, which, if we are to have any kind of future world for our children, needs to be moved out of pretty fast!

Today, when  a client comes to see me for psychotherapy, I don't only look at what their issues are; I also try to evaluate   how much inner capacity they have to deal with them. Sometimes, a person  does not have serious problems but  because they are very vulnerable ,  may need a huge amount of help from me, and until such a time as they are able to move out of their twilight zones, I may need to do much of their work for them. Other people can have gone through huge  traumas, but because they live out of the laws and values of a higher world, they are much more able to deal  constructively with them. Do you sense what I am getting at?

So how do we move into these 'higher worlds', which, by the way, I believe are beckoning to all of us to ascend into, at this time in our evolutionary history? Well, lots of things. Above all, we need to want to evolve. We can ask spirit for help and spirit might be very obliging.  Then we can pray and we can meditate.  Very powerful for accelerating consciousness. But first, we need to heal our wounds. Body work. Psychotherapy. Shamanic work. 

If we try to bypass or transcend our  emotional problems and go all ' goo-ily pseudo-spiritual', we may get into a lot of difficulty as we may well draw down energies from higher states of consciousness that we are simply unable to integrate, and  the result may be that we are destabilised  even more. So go gradually. Some people feel called to  apprentice themselves to a Spiritual Master and live in his ashram and so partake of his refined energy field. There is no one way.

Each of us need to follow our own inclination.Where there's a will, there's a way. I healed myself because I got so fed up of feeling so down for so much of the time.  I am still healing myself!  I try to let my heart guide me.