Spirituality: Not Really Earth School
In our contemporary age, we often refer to spirituality as earth school, however, this is a bit misleading. Spirituality is not so much about learning life lessons as it is about embodying love and light. With each new challenge, the ultimate goal is to rise above it in love and light. When we can do this, the by-product is knowledge and wisdom and thus we’ve attained the life lesson.
Let’s take a common problem that many people struggle with—finding that romantic relationship with the fairy tale ending. Few people have love like this in their lives and if I told you that the secret to having this fairy tale ending is to become love, would this knowledge instantly fix your current problem? Of course not. However, if you practiced embodying love until you felt like your cup was spilling over with it, you’d be so filled with joy that nothing other than savouring the present moment would matter. While inadvertently forgetting about your desire for a fairy tale relationship, you’d probably attract it in about 5 minutes but even if you didn’t, you wouldn’t really care anyway because you’d be too busy feeling joyful.
To say that the spiritual journey is earth school is indeed misleading. Spirituality is not about accumulating knowledge or being able to regurgitate the wisdom in a book. We don’t, “figure it all out,” because it’s not a mental process. It’s a process of the heart where we learn to love. It’s about raising our energetic vibration and bringing love and light to life’s challenging situations—which isn’t an easy task! Rather than referring to spirituality as earth school, it’s more like going to the spiritual gym and working out so that we embody enough love and light to overcome whatever flavour of darkness or challenge we have going on.
Our challenges and adversity are like lifting the heavy weights at the spirit gym. It takes training, practice and consistency to get strong enough to lift them. When we are able to conquer our adversities, pain, insecurities and chaos with love, the joy and freedom we feel is well worth our time and effort.
Practices such as yoga, mediation, prayer and holistic healing methods like Reiki and EFT are tools to help us on our spiritual path but they are not the spiritual path. They help us release pain, fear and the insecurities that hinder us from embodying more love and light. They can also help us strengthen our connection to the Divine, which is essentially love and light. Even when we excel at getting to our yoga class, meditating every day, eating well, talking the talk and understanding the theory of it all, it’s meaningless if we can’t walk the walk of love and light. True spirituality is the application of love and light.
We aren’t really in earth school so to speak but rather, we’re at the spirit gym, training to embody more love and light. The love and light we embody becomes our gift to ourselves and our planet and there is no higher calling or greater purpose than that.
If you’re interested in learning more, consider the 2 hour class on Wednesday, November 28, From Darkness to Light: Making Sense of Healing, Spirituality & Our Quest for Wholeness.