Why spirituality is hard | What you need to know

When I started my spiritual journey I did not think I was going to feel so bad and things would feel so much worse than when I started. What I found later, speaking with a lot of other people who are on a similar journey, is that this is something very common. And I learned that spirituality is hard. And understanding why might help you to not give up.

Spirituality is hard because it is a path on which you get to know yourself, your fears, your insecurities, and hidden traumas that you carry with you for a very very long time. Spirituality is hard because it is a path of destruction, instead of construction or creation. It is a path of destruction of everything that you believed in for your entire life up to that point. And for most of us, this is a very difficult path to walk.

The confusion of what a spiritual path really is

Now, you might be thinking what is so hard about spirituality? What is so hard about meditation, and yoga, and wearing crystals, and going to satsangs, and chanting mantras, and all these things that are considered to be spiritual. If you’ve seen some of my other videos you already know that I don’t believe these are spiritual practices. But even if you consider these spiritual practices it’s not about the actions that you take that are hard, it’s about what goes on within yourself and dealing with it and accepting it that is hard.

And then when we talk about the true spirituality that is realizing that you are Spirit and nothing but Spirit, and identifying only with Spirit, even that’s not that hard. What is hard is the disidentification that comes with it, from yourself, from that what you believe to be. And the change of beliefs, habits, and thought systems that you identified with up to that moment. You come to realize that everything you tried to create, and everything that you tried to be up to that point in your life was not real, was not true, and had no value at all. Accepting that and finding peace with that is the hard thing to do and it’s something that takes a long time for most of us.

Even new age spirituality is hard sometimes

I do believe that true spirituality is much much harder than new age spirituality. But I do recognize that even when practicing new age spirituality you can find moments that it’s very hard to do and to keep up with. Even though the new age spirituality is all about personal development and the creation of a new self, it still requires you to change the perception about yourself and to let go of a past identity that you currently do not want to identify with anymore, or maybe not even are capable of identifying with anymore at this point in your life. And change and letting go have always been some of the big struggles of humanity in general. Even though change is inevitable and is the only constant that we have in this dualistic world, we often resist it and we don’t tend to feel very comfortable with it.

Spirituality is hard because you lose yourself before you find your Self

Spirituality is hard because you lose yourself before you find your Self. And if you don’t manage to lose yourself you will not be able to find your Self. The self is not who you believed it to be. It’s not your body, it’s not your soul, the self is Spirit. You are Spirit and nothing but Spirit. And to understand that that same Spirit is in everyone and that it makes us all one and that it unites us all is something difficult to understand and to grasp because it unifies everything. And that is something very hard to even imagine in a world where division and separation are the keys to understanding everything that happens in and around us.

The people that are truly on the path of true spirituality tend to go through many many years of pronounced suffering and an overall experience that is seemingly much worse than before they started their spiritual path. This is because from quite early on they understand and truly believe that the concept of true spirituality is real. And in fact, is the only thing that is real. And they also understand that that means that they and everyone around them in the entire universe are simply a misconception of the mind.

Continuing to live in a dualistic world while you believe that it’s an illusion is not easy. You’re forced to let go of all your belief systems, of everything that you believe was important to you up to that point. And even your identity as a human being, your character, different personality traits. And ultimately even of your soul. The soul that has inhabited so many other bodies and lived so many other lives. And slowly you start to understand that none of it was true.

But to go from understanding this concept and believing in it to being able to fully embody it and practice it with full conviction, and to have it shine through all your thoughts and actions in this world is extremely difficult and hard to do. Not because it’s hard to feel and identify with Spirit but because it is so damn hard to disassociate and to disidentify from the body and you’re personal identity.

Spirituality is a path you walk alone, together with everyone

Spirituality is so hard because at first, it might seem like a very lonely path to walk. And it is a path that you have to walk alone. Nobody can go inside of you, your thoughts, and your conscious and subconscious mind and change the way you think, the things you believe in, and the way you perceive life in general.

And even if you find other people that are more or less like-minded and you can gather together to meditate or to practice yoga or any other practice that is considered spiritual, you still are alone within yourself. Often many people lose their old friends and find themselves less in need of having big groups of friends and we tend to find comfort with just a few like-minded good friends.

I can talk about myself here and I can honestly say that I consider myself to have only one really really good friend. Then I have a few other people that I speak to every now and then and might meet up with maybe once every 1/2 year or every year and that’s it. And it has taken me quite some time to find peace with that situation and to stop feeling the need of having other people around me and come to realize that being alone does not mean that you are lonely.

True spirituality is a path you walk alone because you realize that there’s no one else anyway. And at the same time, when living in the material world it is a path you walk together with everyone else. Because they show you where you are in your beliefs and in your capacity to implement your newfound inner peace, also in the external world.

The reward of spirituality

But I can tell you that after this initial phase of the struggle, and suffering, and uncertainty there will come a time that inner peace becomes more prominent in your life. You will start to see certain changes in your thoughts, in your thought patterns, and you will start to feel less attached to the things that you thought were incredibly important in your life before. You will see that your reaction, your emotional and mental reaction to certain situations that a few years ago you would not have been able to handle peacefully, is different, less judgmental, and more peaceful.

Now you start to see that you are more able to accept life as it comes. You do not insist on how things need to be but you simply flow with life and accept what comes on your path. You don’t stay stuck in certain thoughts and certain behaviors. Your inner peace and your happiness are not dependent on outer circumstances. You have come to realize that how you feel is a choice and regardless of the circumstances in your external world, you can feel at peace.

Maybe you won’t always be happy because that’s what the dualistic world is about. But peace is not dualistic, and as long as you choose peace in your mind and have the capacity and ability to do so, it will be yours. And that is the reward of your spiritual work, your discipline, and your perseverance to keep at it and to continue to dig deeper and deeper within yourself to finally find who you truly are. To finally find Spirit that unites us all and that brings peace to everyone. That is your reward.

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