I can’t pinpoint one thing to focus on for this blog post – instead, I feel the need to share my journey this week in all it’s ups and downs and moments of clarity and understanding that come from deep diving into the whys and hows and whos. And so this may be a slightly longer post to read. Today’s blog post comes from place of being completely up front and honest about what the Spiritual Journey can entail at times.

To say this journey is a difficult one, feels like a gross understatement. And sometimes I begin to think that it would be easier to simply give up, to go back to not knowing, to not understanding, not seeing and to living in a world of ignorance. What’s that saying? “ignorance is bliss,” but is it really? I remember the dissonance I felt within myself, I remember how muted and downtrodden I felt, in comparison to how much more alive I feel now. The Spiritual Journey isn’t easy, but for me I choose to wake up every day and work towards becoming a better version of myself. I choose the hard and the difficult, the emotional, the turmoil, the deep introspection, the growth, the beauty of connection and the potential and hope that blossoms within me. And I guess, that’s the message behind this blog post.

This week these are the deep dives I’ve taken into myself and what I’ve learnt from that process…

The Basics

As I continue to grow in a personal sense, my spiritual abilities also continue to grow. I’ve found myself opening up more. It’s been exciting and wonderful and it makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I’m being more me, than I ever have before. However after talking to my mentor on Tuesday, I realised I had been making the rookie mistake of not closing down fully. I am more attune to other people’s energy, and have found myself absorbing other people’s energy. I hear myself speaking in ways that aren’t me, and feeling overwhelmed with emotions that do not belong to me. I’ve been living in a constant state of over-stimulation and “noise” and it’s exhausting. This week my mentor reminded me of the importance of the basics – grounding my energy, and protecting myself.

For me, the basics along this journey include – daily meditation, grounding, protection, gratitude, journalling and reaching out to others for help and clarity when I need to. Sometimes those basics get forgotten about, or I fall out of routine, but I am becoming more and more aware of how integral it is to maintain them along the way. So, I am taking extra care and paying extra attention to the basics. I’ve reached out to people that I know, and have completed some research of my own and I am learning and implementing new ways of protecting myself because sometimes the old ways don’t resonate any more. You outgrow them, like you’ve outgrown your favourite item of clothing over time.

Meeting my own needs first

I have been working towards delivering workshops and classes to the public. I have a beautiful venue, that feels like home and beautiful people to support me in getting them up and off the ground, however, nothing is moving, nothing is happening and I haven’t manage to gauge any interest what so ever. My mentor reminded me that nothing is happening because there are more pressing things that I need to do first. These pressing things, revolve around taking care of my needs first. I asked the question – did it have anything to do with the fact that I still have things to work through in my personal life, I still have healing to do? And I was reminded that this journey there will always be healing to do, things to work through, we are never healed to the point where all our pain is gone. It is more to do with the fact that there are pressing needs in my life that I have to meet first – like finding a home for myself, a safe space where I can be me. This is more important than a workshop or a course.

This conversation reminded me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s something that’s very relevant to my teaching career and one theory that I adopt in my teaching practice. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is presented as a tiered triangle where the lower level needs must be met before the higher level of needs can be fulfilled. At the lower level is Physiological needs – food, water, breathing, shelter, clothing, sleep. The next level up is safety and security, then love and belonging, followed by self-esteem. At the top is self-actualisation, where you experience acceptance, creativity, spontaneity, purpose, meaning and inner potential. I sit somewhere in the middle of the triangle, somewhere between safety and security, love and belonging and self-esteem. I haven’t met my needs there, so the self-actualisation can not happen yet.

I’ve gotten some clarity around what I need to focus on right now and it isn’t running workshops or courses to help people. It’s taking care of my own needs and at the moment, it’s to find a safe place, a home for myself and my dog, and to build and work on the new friendships and beautiful connections I have with people. I have to take care of me first, and that puts a new perspective on why my workshops and courses haven’t been successful yet – it isn’t a failure on my behalf, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t my purpose, it just means that there are more important things for me to be focusing on right now!

Finding my compass

This is also related to the workshops and courses I have been building. I am close, so close, but I’m not quite there. I need to rejig, revisit my compass points. I need to sit down and work out what direction I want to go in and refine my vision. I need to refocus on where I’m going, and get stuck in where I am right now. If I look back over my two year Spiritual Journey, I can see how far I’ve come. It’s been huge and I am not the person I was when I first started out. I love where I am now, but it’s easy to get bogged down in how difficult it is, to get frustrated by the things that keep bubbling up especially the things that you thought you could pack away forever. But it’s important to keep my eyes on the future ahead of me, to remind myself of the why. Things bubble up for a reason – mainly because it’s time to work through them so that I can move one step closer to the bright and brilliant future ahead of me.

Trust

Trust is something that always comes up for me – it’s one concept that I really, honestly and openly struggle with. I had a friend ask me, “why do you never trust anyone?” and it’s bubbled away at me under the surface since then. I have some blossoming new friendships, new connections and new people in my life that have quickly become important to me, and because they’ve become important to me, I’ve started to encounter my trust issues. I’ve experienced some devastating friendship blows over the course of my life so far and they have just compiled into some pretty massive trust issues when it comes to friendships. I start to get close to people and then my brain kicks in and I start to have thoughts like, “I’m too clingy and they don’t want me around any more,” or “I’ve said or done something wrong,” or “they’ve decided that they don’t want to be friends with me any more.”

With those thoughts, I feel myself begin to put walls up, to slowly and steadily back away. I am terrified that the people I care about will leave me. My mentor encouraged me to look at the friendships I’ve had in the past, at the cause of my trust issues to find things that they had in common. This morning, I sat down with my journal and did just that…

1. None of it was anyone’s fault. It wasn’t due to something that I did, it wasn’t due to something that they did.
2. All of the splits in friendships I’ve had over the time happened to make space for better things, for new connections, new people, new places and a better, more authentic version of myself.
3. If friendship requires you to suppress or to be something other than yourself, then it’s not friendship. If you feel like you’re constantly jumping through hoops to please someone else, or they’ve placed expectations on you that you can’t meet while being your authentic self, then they are not your people.

As for trust and working through my trust issues…I think they run deeper and do not originate with my friendships. I think there’s more to work to do there, deeper work, but I also feel as if it’s an issue I will need support and guidance to tackle. But, trust is a funny thing – it’s a muscle that you build, that you have to work at to make it stronger. I think it just comes down to awareness and being aware when my trust issues kick in and being brave enough to stare them down and tell myself, “that’s bull, and you know it. “ And to know that when things happen within my friendships, it’s always leading me to new opportunities, to new people and new connections. It’s okay, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end. So, buckle up butter cup and hold on because better things are coming.

These experiences and learnings all bubbled to the surface over the course of six days. I speak openly about them to make you aware that this journey is not an easy one, and there will be many times where you will question whether it is easier to give up and bury yourself back into the grind. For me, I have a choice every single day and every single day, I choose to move towards becoming and building a better version of myself. And that sounds like a worthy reason to keep going, to keep trying, to keep digging and to keep working.