Wellness Expert Reveals the 5 Things to Avoid on Your Spiritual Journey | Light Watkins

the question is not am I on my spiritual journey the question is am I aware that I'm on my spiritual journey then I can optimize for that versus being ignorant of it and then inadvertently making the journey a lot more challenging there are principles that can benefit us when we understand them and if we don't understand them it may appear as though our life is becoming increasingly more and more chaotic if you want to avoid that chaos then you want to reduce the level of judgment you're experiencing and the way you do that is to if you want to know what's going to happen tomorrow then start making yourself as present as you can today because the seeds of whatever is being planted in the future are always available to those who are able to you can feel like a Long Wolf like I'm the only one in my whole family my whole friend Circle the only person I know who's as dedicated to these spiritual practices everybody else is too busy binge watching TV or rolling through social media feels like we're stuck because you have lost the momentum you want to take the same approach with your spiritual practices as you take with your investment strategy investments grow over a period of time with consistency and the cumulative effect it's going to scale a lot faster as long as you're now why would we want to avoid anything on our spiritual journey well first of all we have to acknowledge that we are even on a spiritual journey and what that simply means is one aspect of you is the human aspect right which is what most people identify with which is representative of the facts of your life right for me I'm a black man 6 fo from Montgomery Alabama such and such years old I have this many brothers and this many sisters and I do this for a living and I love doing those other things and these are my preferences and these are my pet peeves and all of all of that is a description of our humanness right but there's two words to our identification the human being human being so the human aspect that's what I just listed off but then we often times don't we don't recognize the being part and the being part is a description of the sort of spiritual aspect which means there's a different part of us that's you could you could argue as animating the human aspect right the Consciousness the Consciousness the the inner inner awareness when we talk about things like the heart voice and the intuition you could could make the argument that those are umbilical chords to this spiritual aspect those kinds of voices with that quality of awareness are nudging us in the direction of doing the right thing they are prompting us to speak Our Truth they are encouraging us to stand up for others you know to help elderly people across the street to give without expecting anything in return so so so those are symptomatic of the spiritual aspect which means they don't really satisfy the egoic desires which could be about protection or about standing out or looking good or my status all of that is kind of dealt with in the human part of the equation and so when we talk about spiritual journey it's really about cultivating the connection that we have as our human aspect with our being aspects so that we can benefit from both of those different aspects and not not be sort of um heavily identify with one or the other I don't think it's I don't think it's necessary to ident to overly identify with the spiritual aspect and look at the human aspect as maybe less important because if it was less important then you wouldn't be here in a human body so the fact that you are here on this planet on this plane of Dimension listening to this podcast having your day-to-day life experiences means from a spiritual perspective means that there's there's not just you know some importance but there's a lot of relevance to where you are what you're experiencing how you feel about it what you're doing about it and all the other aspects related to your humanness and and we also want to amplify the being aspect so that we can take full advantage of it as we're riding our way through this human lifetime it kind of just makes things a lot more manageable we'll put it that way I was going to use the word easier but I wouldn't say that things get easier necessarily but they do become a lot more manageable and if you think about when we when we have a what we call a good day versus a Bad Day right everyone said that oh today was a good day or today was a really bad day what you're really describing when you say those words good day versus bad day is you're saying today was a manageable day versus it wasn't manageable meaning it was just super chaotic there was stuff happening around me that I had no idea what to do about it if I should do anything about it and so these five things to avoid are things that can ultimately cause a bad day to become a worse day and I'm going to give you some alternative actions that can reverse the that sort of bad day description in the direction of a good day Andor a more um manageable day and so again I'm choosing my language carefully here because I don't like the binary terms good and bad anyway but if we look at our life as a spectrum and we're kind of going between um what we may call good or bad but really it's just about feeling like we can adapt or manage and feeling like we can adapt or manage to whatever is happening or feeling like we can even see the big picture and have a greater sense of understanding and context to what we're experiencing which can then lead us to feel like okay I'm able to manage this maybe not in the in the immediate sense but maybe I can choose things that will help me be in a better position than I'm in right now down the line that's also in the category of feeling like I can manage this so having that broader perspective and perspective is definitely something that we can gain greater access to when we are being more intentional about our spiritual journey and what we can do to optimize for that okay before we get into the five things though I just want to give more of an understanding of what it means to be on a spiritual journey because it's not something it's not like a water faucet where we can turn it off and on and we can decide okay I'm on I'm going to be on my spiritual path Now versus my whatever other path there is conventional path you're always on your spiritual journey the question is not if am I on my spiritual journey the question is am I aware of the fact that I'm on my spiritual journey and when I'm at least aware of it then again I can make certain choices that can optimize for that Journey versus being ignorant of it and then inadvertently making choices that makes the journey a lot more challenging okay and it's very similar to our planet the Earth that we live on just on a day-to-day basis right wherever you are right now maybe I'm sitting in my home office you may be sitting you know in your living room or somewhere like that or perhaps you're walking around and it seems like you're on this kind of static plane of existence it's not particularly moving you can see the sun kind of changing position in the sky but not not exactly in real time and yeah it just seems like things are just kind of staying the same obviously there's day and there's night but it's happening so gradually so slowly that we're barely aware of it happening in real time but what's what's actually happening is the Earth is rotating quite fast fast it's literally rotating on its axis faster than 1,000 miles an hour okay so the speed of sound is only 760 something miles an hour so it's actually going faster than the speed of sound on its axis and so that's not a that's not a passive amount of motion that's actually quite significant we we don't feel it any more than than we feel like we're going fast in a car that's going you know 60 miles an hour until we start to hit the brakes or we start to hit the accelerator and then we can feel it but if it's the same 60 M an hour the whole time we don't feel it if we're on a plane and we're flying in the air at 30,000 ft at 400 miles hour we don't feel it until the plane hits the runway and start slamming on the brakes then we feel like oh wow I was going a lot faster than I realized and not only is the Earth spinning at a th000 plus miles an hour but it's also flying around the Sun at something like 66,000 miles an hour so it's spinning on its axis a th miles and it's flying around the Sun now there's no wind in space so we definitely don't feel that either but we're moving very very very fast um you know almost a 100 times the speed of sound around the Sun and then the sun is also not static the sun is in motion as well the sun is busy flying around the center of our Milky Way galaxy get this at almost half a million miles an hour okay so the Earth is rotating at 1,00 miles an hour it's flying around the Sun at 66 something Thousand Miles hour the sun is flying around the center of the Milky Way which is probably a black hole at almost half a million miles an hour then the Milky Way galaxy itself is also in motion it's flying towards something that astrologers called the Great attractor at about 1.3 million miles an hour okay so again there's a lot of motion happening we don't realize it because all we're paying attention to probably is what's in front of us right now or some experience that we're going to be having you know very soon or something that just happened not that long ago and and so spiritual awareness is very much like this in the sense that there's a much broader perspective that can influence the types of exper experiences that we're having that we just aren't even aware of because mostly what we're aware of is what's happening right now or what just happen or what's just about to happen but then we can factor in things like our Karma we can factor in things like sacred spiritual contracts we can factor in um things like reincarnation and you know perhaps even a life in between lives and soulmates and spiritual advisors and you know all kinds of other variables that could be having an impact on the the experiences that we're having in our along our spiritual journey which is why everyone's spiritual journey is relatively unique there's no two spiritual Journeys that are exactly alike so you can't really you can't really inform your journey based on anyone else's spiritual journey journey and what happened with them right you can have two people who on paper look like they have very similar Lifestyles but they may feel very differently inside one person could be the happiest person that you know the other person could be the most depressed person that you know and it may not be based on what they experienced as children or what their parents did or where they grew up or any of those kinds of things it could be based on something um in their spiritual uh context could be based on their karma could be based on who they were in their last Incarnation versus who they are in today's Incarnation and what spiritual sacred contracts they may be working out and how they casted their life in this lifetime and the characters who play their parents and their siblings and their teachers and their bullies and their spouses and their children in this lifetime and what those contracts all had to say and what was the fine print in those contracts conts you know etc etc etc but as with most things there are principles there are principles that can benefit us when we understand them and if we don't understand them it may appear as though our life is becoming increasingly more and more chaotic and that's what I want to speak about today are those five things to avoid when you're on your spiritual journey so in other words five principles that you want to adhere to as much as possible and when you break those principles or violate those principles then you are making your spiritual journey that much more chaotic and I don't think anybody's aiming for more chaos in life because life itself just already has enough built-in chaos and um and and and when we can really tap into that spiritual aspect that beingness then it allows us to feel like we're in more of a flow when it comes to just dealing with day-to-day life which is I think what most of us Aspire towards is being in a in a sort of Flow State I don't think anybody is really aiming for Perfection but we all kind of want more of a flow State because as evidenced by the fact that that's something we can brag about ourselves oh I was in the flow right um that was an amazing way that I dealt with this situation I felt like I was just in a flow I wasn't really even thinking about it I was just responding to it I was adapting to the thing that happened right everybody wants that and so how do I get more of that all right so that brings us to our first thing we want to avoid hey so a lot of you all have been reaching out with your guest suggestions and look I appreciate it I do and to help make it easier for those guests to say yes to my invitation I need you to subscribe to this channel just hit the Subscribe button below and that's literally the best way to help me get you that guest on my podcast all right thank you so much for helping out and back to the show first thing we want to avoid is probably one of the hardest things to avoid which is control control I love that that uh Cartoon that says it's like these two monks talking or something says don't worry uh nothing's in control and when you understand that nothing is in control then you can let go of this illusion that you have some control over what you're experiencing and this goes this goes down literally to even the thoughts that you're having right A lot of people think well I can just control I can be happy by thinking about being happy or I can be present by thinking about being present it doesn't work like that actually doesn't work like that because you don't control your thoughts and this is something that was actually quite surprising for me as a meditation teacher because I did a lot of research on how the mind works and what I discovered was that we have something like 60 to 90,000 thoughts a day and what's even more interesting is that 90% of those thoughts that we have on a daily basis are recycled from the dayb before so not only is the Mind incredibly busy because 990,000 thoughts breaks down to like three thoughts a second or something like that but the majority the overwhelming majority of those thoughts are recycled they're coming from yesterday 90% of yesterday's thoughts are from the day before yesterday and like that it just the most of what we're thinking about how we're processing information how we're dealing with our demands and pressures it's not very unique compared to what we've done in our past and this sounds like an unfortunate way that the the mind works but actually if you think about it it's very useful because you know for those of you who are raising children you know that children don't just automatically know how to brush their teeth they don't know how to tie their shoes they don't know that they need to look both ways before they cross the street they don't know how to feed themselves with a spoon or Fork they don't know how to dress themselves they don't know how to use the bathroom they don't know how to wipe themselves they don't how to wash their face they don't how to do their hair you have to teach children to do absolutely everything and the way the Mind and Body Works is that when you repeat an action enough times your brain will start to hardwire that action and the outcome of that action into place so that you don't have to keep relearning how to do the thing um over and over and over for the rest of your life right so when they say we have 90,000 thoughts the majority of those thoughts are just kind of automated actions and outcomes that we've been exposed to all of our life so that we don't have to relearn how to find our way to the kitchen or how to make our way to work or how a cell phone works or how a computer works it's the same thing that happens in fact in your browser your browser memorizes which website you go to which images are on those websites how you type in the website so the next time you even start to type in the website you just type the first couple letters what does it do it autocompletes it so it saves time it's more efficient and that's how the brain and the body work it's more efficient to just fill in the gaps of what your mind thinks is happening based on what happened in the past and that way you can just get on with your life and perhaps survive a lot longer okay so all that to say if you've been processing information in maybe an unsustainable way where you've been kind of creating more chaos that doesn't just stop by reading a book or listening to a podcast about why you shouldn't create more chaos you will still do it until you begin actively practicing doing the opposite right so if control can lead to chaos even starting in the mind trying to control the mind is what leads to chaos that's why a lot of new meditators talk about monkey mind you don't have monkey mind what's happening is you're trying to control your thinking mind you're trying to stop the thoughts that you are having those those those 60 to 90,000 thoughts and the reality is that you can't stop your thoughts by thinking about not thinking because don't think is a thought so all you're doing is you're actually adding more thoughts on top of the thoughts that are already there which then makes you conclude that oh my mind is somehow especially busy right and unable to be controlled and so the the opportunity there is to do the opposite of what you think you should do Which is less control least control and ultimately no control stop trying to control your mind and ironically when you stop trying to control your mind guess what happens you will start to experience a more settled mind experience your mind will start to get quieter on its own you don't have to try to make the Mind fall quiet you just want to stop controlling it and that extends into the rest of your life right right that's why you can look at meditation as a simulation for life because the thing that you want to do in meditation which is control is also the thing you want to do in life you're trying to control people that you're in a relationship with well guess what nobody likes to feel controlled surprise surprise or you're trying to control your career path and you end up looking desperate and needy or you're trying to control your children and they start rebelling against you and what very few people ultimately end up trying without being forced to is to let go of control and instead to practice adapting to whatever is happening okay so this is the primary instruction in my meditation trainings is I'm always telling people stop trying to control your mind you're just making it busier start start adapting to what is happening so create more of a free range environment for your mind let the mind go wherever it wants to go and then when they start to really embody that approach they find that their mind can settle a lot easier and as a byproduct of that they're able to rest a lot deeper and as a byproduct of that they come out of meditation and they find that there's a correlation between rest and their ability to adapt to change so in the relationship in the career path as a parent when things inevitably change because it's all in motion just like the the solar system and the Galaxy and all that when you're able to adapt to those changes that's where you're able to find the most flow the most connection you're able to find that your ability to manage life uh goes up and so your sense of fulfillment your sense of inner peace and your sense of presence and your sense of Happiness also begins to increase which makes you available for more subtle uh changes and and and opportunities that are also happening all around you at all times the only thing is it's hard to see it and experience it to the degree that you can when you're not trying to control your life um and that's that's the opportunity that's the spiritual opportunity stop controlling get more access to the present moment and if you want to know what's going to happen tomorrow then you better start making yourself as present as you can today because the signs and the seeds of whatever is being planted in the future are always available able to those who are able to drop into the present moment organically and naturally and rather spontaneously not by trying to be present but but by feeling relaxed and fulfilled on the inside so much that you can manage whatever is happening on the outside and you can stay in that present moment awareness state so instead of trying to control your way to happiness what you want to practice is adapting to change and happiness will be a natural byproduct of that okay second thing you want to avoid along your spiritual journey is taking things personally taking things personally there was a moment that I experienced uh maybe a year ago down in Mexico City I was at this Cafe and I ran into a friend of mine she wasn't like my best friend or anything but she was a pretty decent friend and I ran into her she was on a phone call and we were both at this same small Cafe neighborhood Cafe and I see her on the phone and you know normally when you see your friend even if they're on the phone you make eye contact and you just kind of wave or acknowledge each other right I wasn't expecting her to get off the phone or anything but we made out well we made eye contact I kind of like nodded and kind of smiled and she looked as if she had no idea who I was and she kind of turned around and just continued on her phone call and I was like wow that was very rude that's what I was thinking to myself so I got my little coffee and and kind of had my story around the fact that that was a rude way to inter interact and so cut to later that day I see her and she comes up and she's all warm and she's friendly and she invites me out to this event and I started to bring up the whole Cafe interaction but I thought you know what maybe she was having an intense phone call maybe she didn't even see me like I thought she saw me I mean it's possible so I just dropped it and we we departed from one another and then the next day I see her J jogging down the uh the path there's this little um walking SL jogging path in my neighborhood so she's coming down the path I'm walking straight towards her and as we're getting closer to each other it's only her and I on the path in that particular section as she's getting closer to me she kind of look straight past me she doesn't even acknowledge me and I couldn't help it this time I just kind of like put my arms out like what the hell is going on and she passed es me and then she turns around and she says uh she says I'm sorry I'm not my sister and what what I what I came to realize is that my friend had an identical twin sister who was in town and she kind of had the same style they both jogged they both love coffee and they look exactly alike and so that's why when I saw her at the coffee shop she didn't recognize me she didn't know who the hell I was and that's why she was very warm and and inviting the next time because that was my actual friend that wasn't her sister so that was a situation that reminded me that you can be both right and you can still be wrong at the same time but more so than that it's just it doesn't ever benefit us to take things personally right which is what I was sort of grappling with because because I felt shunned by her sister who didn't know who the hell I was you know on two occasions and when we when we do that when we take things personally what ends up happening is we end up getting yanked out of that precious present moment awareness which is where we want to be because that's giving us all of the cues and the clues about what's going to be happening next and we're now in past regret or we're in future worry or we're in anxiety or we're in some s of circumstantial depression and that's not where we can access our most authentic self that's not where we can a access our best self that's not where we can do our best work so so we want to try to protect that present moment awareness as much as possible and therefore we want to remind ourselves that no matter what we're experiencing it's much more beneficial to be anchored in the present moment than it is to create a story around whatever has happened or didn't happen and use that to start taking this situation personally and I get it I understand completely how tempting it is to take things personally but when you have those kinds of situations that occur you just end up feeling foolish you right anyone in my past who I felt you know didn't see me or or or or didn't invite me somewhere or didn't do what I thought they should have done and I took it personally years later I would always find out that oh that person was feeling insecure at that time or that person was on drugs at that and that's why they dropped out you know they went they went radio silent for months at a time or they were in some bad abusive relationship or um or they just didn't even realize that I was you know wherever I or they didn't realize that I even wanted to be a part of what whatever it is that they were doing right but very very rarely that they do something intentionally to hurt me usually it was really just about themselves they weren't even really thinking about me and that's why they behaved the way that they behaved you have to understand that everybody is wired for self pres preservation and if they're not doing the things that we want to do is because they don't have have the same life experience that we have they don't have the same awareness that we have if they haven't been doing the same sort of spiritual practices that we have then they haven't developed the same sort of conscious receptivity that we have and so all of that is a informing how they behave in addition to what we talked about earlier which is karma spiritual contracts um reincarnation stuff spiritual guides stuff you don't know what these people incarnated in this plane of existence to do to learn to achieve you don't even know if they're helping you they could be helping you by making you feel abandoned they could be allowing you spiritually to cultivate you know better communication or or stronger boundaries or more Independence or whatever it is that you all agreed to in the spiritual realm before you incarnated here on this planet existence Before You cast it them into your life to come in as your sister your brother your neighbor your aunt your boss whoever that you may be referring to as toxic or narcissistic or avoidant right all of those people who are having that effect on you um and you're taking it personally those are your teachers those are your mentors that are helping you to incorporate spiritually the lessons that you come here to learn if you are being triggered in that way by them and so instead of focusing on the character flaws of your teachers you want to start to focus more on the lessons that you have an opportunity to learn as a result of interacting with those teachers but long story short you can be right and you can still be wrong so don't take things personally number three rushing rushing so one one of the most common uh byproducts of listening to podcasts like this or reading spiritual books one of my fa one of my favorite and and and most effective uh spiritual books that I read years and years and years ago was conversations with God where it gave me so many answers and so much insight and so much context to some of the things that I've been feeling that you you want to take as much action is possible in the direction of embodying some of these spiritual Concepts and some of these things just take a little while to sort of live your way into them right it's one thing to have an intellectual understanding of a spiritual concept but it's another thing to actually live your way into that understanding which means often times that you have to get onto the other side of that understanding before you can truly embody it because you know there's a tendency to have a little bit more of an arrogant um approach to some of these spiritual Concepts like oh I'm the spiritual one in the room and these people are all ignorant and they're not you know doing the things that I do because I know better and I read this book and I study with this teacher etc etc and I've been there which is why I can articulate that so I know what that feels like but then eventually what'll start to happen is you'll find yourself on the other side of that especially in relationships right if you're in a relationship with somebody and they say something crazy to you or they do something crazy to you right maybe they they go out and flirt with somebody else and you're like oh my God I can't believe that they you know weren't loyal and they flirted with me and they did this and they did that with this other person and oh my God oh my God and you have all this judgment around it what that does is it ends up attracting a similar type of situation to you that's been my experience the moment you start judging someone for being whatever kind of way you thought they shouldn't have been you find yourself in their shoes you find yourself in a very similar situation and then without even realizing it you'll have an epiphany oh that's what that feels like oh my God I owe that person an apology now I see how someone could end up in this in this kind of situation and you start having all this empathy and you start having all this compassion for this other person that you just judged and judged and judged but in the process you're embodying you're embodying these these understandings and so when I say don't rush what I'm really saying is don't rush to judgment you know don't rush to judgment around what you think should be happening versus what's actually happening and instead of rushing you're going to you're going to replace that with the understanding that whatever is happening is exactly what's supposed to be happening not for one reason not for two reasons but for all reasons for any reason you can possibly come up with that's why it's happening and it's not only happening you know in real time but it's happening perfectly it's the perfect way for it to happen for everybody involved to get exactly what they need on a spiritual level including you including you so the the opposite of rushing is to just be in the moment again and to try as much as as possible to withhold judgment whether it's judgement around you and how you screwed up and you shouldn't have been in this situation and all that that's still judgment and or judgment around the other person I can't believe they did this I can't believe they did that how could they right all that judgment is only attracting more of that same situation to you which is again creating more chaos in your life so if you want to avoid that chaos then you want to redu reduce the level of judgment that you are um you are experiencing as much as you possibly can and the the way you do that one way to do it I should say is to just again focus on on the lessons keep focusing on the lessons and as much as possible try not to focus on the character flaws of the people who are involved in that lesson all right let's move on number four so we talked about control we talked about don't take things personally we talked about don't rush to judgment number four inconsistency inconsistency so this this applies mainly to your inner work your meditation practice your gratitude practices even your yoga practice right when you are in in involved in your your your spiritual practices there's a tendency to treat them like extracurricular activities and the reason why we treat them like that is because especially in the western Society we just don't see it as that important it's not something that is actually moving the needle in a real world way in a tangible way that we can be recognized for status wise so the thing we get recognize for status wise is how much money we have what kind of house we live in what kind of car we drive what our partner looks like and and how they dress and where we go on vacation and all these kinds of things very tangible things right five sense related things things we can see touch taste smell feel add up and um hear and so all these sort of ephemeral attributes and qualities and traits you know feeling fulfilled inside feeling happy inside doing things that are aligned with our spiritual aspect you know these kinds of things they get prioritized by people who put in enough work but for the most part for the majority of society take it or leave it doesn't really matter that much um and so that's how spiritual that's how Spirit the spiritual journey can feel a bit Lonesome I won't say lonely because when you're fulfilled inside you don't feel lonely but it can't be Lonesome you can't be you can you can feel like a Long Wolf like I'm the only one in my whole family my whole friend Circle the only person I know who's who's as dedicated to these spiritual practices everybody else is you know uh too busy or they're spending all their time watching the game or going out to clubs or drinking their pain away or binge watching TV or scrolling through social media and here I am sitting in my bedroom meditating and and doing my five minutes in a journal and going for these long walks cont contemplative walks and trying to you know be uh grateful and and and do acts of kindness and all these kinds of things that are associated with spiritual practices and so it can be tempting just because we want to fit in because we're human and we're tribal we be it's tempting to also make ourselves too busy or to adopt that sort of societ narrative that the most important things are things that can be measured and things that are related to our status and the less important things are these other kind of Airy fairy woo woo and tangible things like meditation and spiritual Journeys and Karma and stuff like that that really can't be measured as easily and so when we allow that to overtake our um prioritization of our spiritual practices we create up creating chaos so we fall inconsistent and it feels like we're kind of plateauing feels like we're stuck feels like the meditation practice isn't working anymore the Gratitude practice isn't working anymore because you have lost the momentum and you know it's actually the same thing in finance and in investing you you you want to take the same approach with your spiritual practice practices as you take with your investment strategy right Investments happen over a period of time they they grow over a period of time with consistency and the cumulative effect right you keep putting in a certain amount of money and budgeting a certain amount of money every week every month every year and the cumulative effect Compound Effect is that it's going to grow significantly it's going to scale a lot faster than the frequency in which you're doing it as long as you're consistent and like that with meditation if you're consistant your your progress in your meditation practice is going to have a compounding effect as well because you'll get to a point where your stress levels are are outpaced by your rest levels and as that starts to happen you limit the amount of stress your body can can retain at any given time and the less stress you have the deeper your sleep is going to be the more quality rest you're going to be able to acquire with less and less effort and eventually you get to a point where the stress goes in and it goes right back out because you now have a reliable release valve for the stress to get released and that's what a consistent meditation practice of five six seven years does when I say consistent I'm talking daily practice daily practice not weekly practice not bi-weekly practice not monthly practice but you have to do this every single day because guess what stress isn't taken any days off and so if some people can get that result then and they and they took a very scientific approach to their practice they didn't miss practices they did it in the same kind of way at the same kind of time Etc over a period of time look at it like a science experiment okay if you don't follow the same protocols that the person who got all the results followed then how can you possibly expect to get similar results you can't and it's nothing wrong with the technique usually the error is in the application of the technique there was some sloppiness that made its way into the application of the technique and as a byproduct of that you got chaotic results you got unpredictable results mixed results but the way you get that back on track is you start to incorporate more consistency into your practice it's very simple hey really quickly if you like this content or if you don't like it let me know down in the comments because your likes and comments are going to help me learn what you want more of and then that way I can keep bringing you the good stuff all right thanks so much for your feedback and back to the show okay and then finally number five uh of the things to avoid on your spiritual journey is playing it safe playing it safe what's the opposite of playing it safe the opposite of playing the safe playing it safe is taking a leap of faith now we've all heard that phrase take a leap of faith I've used it before millions of times I've written about it a lot and the reason why it's hard to take take a leap of faith is because there is no certainty right it's not it's not a leap of certainty it's it's a leap of faith which means it's a leap both feet have to leave the ground and a faith which means there's a trust component to it you're trusting that from a spiritual perspective if I'm feeling called to move in a certain direction then that is going to be better for me spiritually which which then translates into being better for me um materially okay if something is better for you spiritually then it is inevitably going to be better for you and all the people who depend on you materially and so I'm not suggesting that anybody go out there and and bet the farm you know Andor quit your job and go and try to be a circus clown or something like that something very extreme taking a leap of faith can also be done in small ways you can keep your job you can stay in your relationship you can you know do what you're doing now but then just incorporate some small leaps of faith in the evenings on the weekends um and even throughout the day when you're going about your day and something compels you to give someone a compliment or something compels you to help somebody in a way where it justes it's not clear that it's going to be reciprocated or something compels you to speak up and and state Your Truth or something compels you to um see the best in a situation where everybody else is focused on the worst those little situations are also classified as leaves of Faith right you don't know what's going to happen when you do that and as you Embrace that way of being more and more you may start to find that you get luier you get luckier right and all that means is you're operating more in alignment with what you're feeling inside spiritually because your spiritual connection is coming through you as intuition and that's kind of like your internal GPS system so so when you're following it you tend to arrive at the destination a lot faster and a lot more efficient then you would if you were ignoring your GPS so from a spiritual perspective your your dharmic uh Des destination is already predetermined it's already encoded in your life right in other words where you are moving towards is is is something that is again beneficial to you and to all of those who depend on you from a dharmic level the thing that you're you're here to do the thing that you're here to do but the road or the pathway to it is not the linear path that you learn in school well if you go and get this master's degree and get this PhD and take these three steps then you can be a doctor or you can be a lawyer or you can be an engineer right it's very linear path but that's not how things work spiritually your spiritual path may involve you getting married you getting divorced a few years later you um losing someone that's close to you and having to deal with that level of Abandonment maybe you being abused in some way learning from that experience maybe you writing a book about the abuse or about the morning process of losing someone going back to school moving across the country um going on a sabatical uh giving a TED Talk somewhere about the sabatical experience uh getting on a flight and there's a lot of turbulence and the flight ends up having a semi crash landing you survive um you you're already used to being a speaker because you gave that Ted Talk that one time you have all these other experiences that have informed your your perspective on life and you end up becoming a keynote speaker giving a talk on Second Chances right and you're drawing from all these different parts of your life that a lot of them wer weren't things you would necessarily have chosen had had it been up to you but that was a part of it that was a part of the journey and so Taking Chances taking leaps betting on yourself are a way that you can stay on track actually with what whatever it is you're here to do spiritually that's actually how you can fast track your process and it's very very important to do that so that those are the five things that we want to remember to avoid along our spiritual journey we want to avoid control we want to avoid taking things personally we want to avoid rushing to judgment we want to avoid inconsistency with our practices and we want to avoid playing it safe and instead of of of doing those things uh what we want to do is we want to practice adapting to change want to practice um not taking things personally so treating people as if they are doing their very best we want to take the tortoise approach instead of rushing to judgment instead of rushing to judgment we want to just understand that everything is is happening um exactly as it should we want to practice being more consistent and we want to make a lifestyle out of taking leaps of Faith right so in other words a leap of faith can't just be this isolated action that we do on rare occasion we want taking leaps of Faith to feel like Tuesday we want it to feel like something that we just do and so we can practice in small ways we can practice with you know giving sincere compliments we can practice with trusting in our heart voice when it's telling us to take a left in life instead of taking a right in life we can practice by giving other people the benefit of the doubt and little things like that just little ways like that and that's how we start to feel like we're on the rails so to speak when it comes to our overall spiritual journey and you'll start to boost up that the feeling tone of the being aspect in the human being equation again we don't really need to focus more on the human aspect we got that part dialed in right when you start to feel the things the sadness the the fear the anger the emotions that's like your human aspect we got that part down and what we want to put a little bit more attention on and prioritize is our being aspect and that's what this is really about is just giving us a bit of a road map for um for boosting that and superp sizing supersizing our being aspect so we can actually feel like I am on as much of a spiritual journey as I am on a human Journey I'm having as much of a spiritual experience as I'm having a human experience and that's very possible when you prioritize it for long enough it's not going to happen in a day or week or month but you continue to take this approach over and over and over and honor these principles within yourself then you will have the same predictable outcome as anyone else who's done that which is you start to feel from the inside out that sense of inner peace that sense of fulfillment that sense of connection with something greater than yourself these are the Hallmarks of a spiritual experience anyone who says I had a spiritual experience usually means they felt connected to something bigger than themselves and they felt the sense of inner peace or Serenity they felt fulfilled meaning they didn't need another external experience to happen in order for them to feel better than how they felt on the inside so when you can just have that going not because you went to some yoga class not because you sat in some meditation Circle but you can have it going in the post office in the DMV and traffic when you're having a difficult conversation with your part partner when you can have access to that internal spiritual experience it can inform how you show up in the next moment and the way you show up is either going to be reflective of you trying to find happiness outside of yourself which is what breeds desperation and um and neediness versus you coming from a place of Happiness which breeds more fulfillment and a sense of a greater sense of self and guess what that's attractive that's way more attractive than neediness and Desperation nobody wants to be around someone who's feeling needy and desperate everybody wants to be around the person who's got a high sense of self and who has a greater sense of fulfillment right that's who we're most attracted to those are the ones who attract more business opportunities they attract more potential mates they attract more um luck into their lives but really that luck is just a reflection of them living a more aligned life so I hope this was simple enough and and practical enough for you to find useful as useful as I found it and um and again I thank you all for listening to my solo episodes as much as if not more than you listen to the interviews we're going to be back next week with another interview but I certainly enjoyed this one and if you have any topics that you would like for me to speak about you can always email me at light lightw watkins.com and I will also put that email address in the show notes all right thank you very much enjoy um uh your spiritual journey and I hope to connect with you again very soon if you like that video You're GNA love the next one click this thumbnail right here and I'll see you over there

Channel: Light Watkins

Views: 738

Keywords: light watkins, light watkins podcast, the light watkins show, inspiration, self improvement, positive, spirituality, spiritual, leadership, inspirational, luminaries, thought-leaders, knowledge, growth, meditation

Id: nk11NTOLhdI

Length: 58min 38sec (3518 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024