Do you want to look ravishing, land a leading actress role in Hollywood, snag your own reality TV show and sport a Mercedes?
Getting spiritual won’t help you achieve any of those things.
HOLD ON there paisano! Before you flip the channel, hear me out…
What CAN spirituality do for you? (let me make you an offer you can’t refuse on getting spiritual – in addition to the free makeup kit and hairbrush, of course)
Hustling spirituality in your life will have you to start asking some deeper questions about meaning and purpose. It might question your desire for the fancy car and reality TV show in the first place. Living from a spiritual place will bring about a re-examination of your desires and intentions.
Getting spiritual will also help enhance your life in these 6 ways:
1) Reduce suffering from indigestion, anxiety, stress or jet lag.
Ok, I don’t know about jet lag which you mostly get from flying across time zones but connecting with your inner self can help you dramatically reduce or alleviate some of your life’s stresses. Seizing a spiritual practice can make you less anxious, reduce your blood pressure and lead to a calmer and more balanced life.
2) Control your mind like a lion tamer.
By the time you’ve devoured this post or glanced at this sentence, probably a hundred thoughts have gone through your head. Your mind is like a rabbit in search of a carrot . Or a lion about to eat it’s tamer:) It’s frantic and wild (and is jaw-crushingly strong) – how do you tame your mind?
Start a mindfulness practice to calm your mind. If you calm your mind like a lion tamer tames his cat, you will achieve more awareness, clarity and can become more effective in life’s daily activities. I’ve found having a tame mind helps stop procrastination, increases focus and helps you achieve goals. My friend Sandra has provided you with 10 essential tips to tame a wild mind here.
3) Open your heart.
Spirituality has been known to put you in sync you with the world. If you start thinking the world around you is a part of you, you’ll be acting from a place of connectedness, abundance and love. And when you operate from such a divine place, all positive things and infinite possibilities start opening up in your life.
Spirituality can open the heart of the most rushed Mom, stressed professional or entrepreneur. Once you start operating from an open heart, you’ll find love, kindness, empathy and compassion pour forth.
4) Clarity in your life.
Oh, yeah – you’ll start having profound life revelations. Material and trivial things begin to fall away from what actually matters. Prada purses and fancy sports cars lose their meaning in and of themselves. You may have thought your purpose in life was to be the divine Goddess to all men but you might realize that the purpose for your life is to be simply divine.
With clarity, you’ll find purpose.
You’ll bail out of professions that don’t suit your soul or fulfill your purpose, and start tackling work that does. You’ll stop wasting time and procrastinating because you’ll become inspired with your life. Clarity is a beautiful thing!
5) Being content.
You might be living a life of lack and unhappiness because you don’t have the perfect mate, house or car. You’re running frantically trying to achieve a dream, goal or fulfill an expectation of you.
Getting spiritual will help you realize that you don’t need to fulfill a single damn goal or dream to be happy. You’ll also realize contentment in the place you are in life for the the things you do have. If you’re content with what you have and grateful for it, you’ll be rocking a life filled with abundance. Spiritual teachers of new and old also teach us that being in alignment with abundance will bring forth everything that you’ve ever needed or wanted.
6) Having the universal laws work with you, instead of against you.
Does everything feel like it’s working against you? You want bullet it home and find yourself in a hellish LA rush hour! You pain-stakingly sign up to take that horrendous architectural exam to find out it’s being offered in a different city. On a different %(&#%@$* continent! You want to marry Giovanni but find out he already is!!
Whenever I’ve noticed that things go bonkers in my life, I’ve noticed it’s because I’m not in sync with the universe and stopped pursuing my spiritual practice momentarily.
When you are in sync with the universal laws, things just start to shift. Opportunities come your way, obstacles get removed and life becomes magical. Traffic jams disappear as God himself intervenes to get cars off the 405 (in Los Angeles)!
I hate you, blogger-dude. Or what if you’re already spiritual?
Oh, I get it – you were born at Woodstock, grew up going to Sunday school or spent your college years being a Hare Krishna. You drink organic chai, visit church on Christmas and do yoga. You’ve got spirituality locked up.
Well here’s the deal – practice allows you to be more conscious of and grasp your spirituality more. “In the spiritual realm, it is not that practice makes perfect so much as that spiritual practices reveal your perfection” according to Kumuda, aka Sharon Janis, in the sacred Spirituality for Dummies.
“If you’re a multi-billionaire but you don’t know it, you may find yourself living like a pauper instead of in luxury. Similarly, if you don’t know that you’re an express of divine universal spirit, you may think that you’re just a world-entrenched person living in spiritual poverty” Janis tell us in her spiritual guide.
So even if you think you’re spiritual, spirituality is something that can be perpetually refined. You have to practice spirituality to realize your perfection. It’s not just reading a Deepak Chopra classic the next time you hop on a flight. Spirituality, like dating and diets takes work.
If you’re spiritual, what are your practices and what benefits have you received? If you run from spirituality like you’ve just seen a 7 headed-monster, why?
To pick up my book, Is God Listening, about spirituality and resilience, click here.