What is the Point of Any Spiritual Practice?

What is the Point of Any Spiritual Practice? And What If Your Spiritual Practice Isn’t Working?

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Gratitude, mindfulness and meditation are examples of effective spiritual practices for raising your vibration. But what if we don’t feel successful doing any of these? What if trying to raise your vibe in some way actually makes you feel bored, or sad, or frustrated or even angry?

If that happens, you can turn it into an opportunity that can work for you. Having those kinds of annoying, unpleasant, negative emotional feelings means that you have something to heal, and if you are noticing those feelings then you are noticing an opportunity to heal. Remember, looking for a diversion or distraction in order to get around the negative feeling is only a temporary way to feel better — if you really want to heal it permanently, you must go through the process of sitting with the feeling, whatever it is. Take the opportunity to feel what is really there because that is probably what led you to try such spiritual vibe-raising activities in the first place.

If negative feelings come up while trying to meditate or other spiritual practice – feelings like boredom, frustration, ridicule, anger, resentment and rage – allow yourself to feel those feelings and let them tell you what they have to say. Most likely you have been suppressing those feelings for a long time.
Now that they’ve finally gotten your attention by thwarting your intentions to feel good, you can take this opportunity to listen to them and acknowledge them. The whole process of healing begins with feeling your feelings. Feelings don’t go away if you choose to ignore them or pretend you don’t have them. If you continue to try and suppress them, it won’t help you get out of the discomfort you were in that made you try raising your vibe in the first place.

Most of us have been avoiding feeling our feelings since early childhood. Our parents probably told us not to cry or we learned that expressing ourselves brought painful consequences. So we adapted by developing habits of distraction, avoidance and in some cases, dissociation.

Now that you’ve arrived at the point in your life where you are ready to try quieting your mind, all of the thoughts and feelings you have avoided until now are going to rush back. This is why I am always talking about how important it is to feel what you feel. It’s because feelings do not go away, they don’t die, you can’t kill them, you can’t smoke, eat or drink them out of existence. The only thing you can do is feel them, accept them, understand them, and integrate them.

If you come out of an abusive or traumatic situation, whether it was serious or not, you will have a lot of feeling and healing to do. When someone tries to be nice to you and it hurts, and you feel like you don’t deserve to receive kindness, you have to go into the reason why you feel like you don’t deserve it.

In order to ever feel like you’re deserving of the love and happiness the world has to offer you, do the work of processing the emotions that you’ve been avoiding. Given however long you were allowing the abuse or experiencing the trauma, you can also allow this work to take some time, knowing that you will heal eventually.

The truth is that you are worthy of love and kindness, and you always were. There is nothing you could possibly have done that would ever make you unworthy of having your needs met, including the needs of love, kindness and generosity. You are just as worthy today at the age you are now as you were when you were a helpless newborn that had to have literally everything done for you. You deserve to have your needs met just as much as a helpless child does. Nothing you have done can change that. No mistakes you’ve made, no mean thing you’ve said, nothing at all.

You are infinitely worthy. You always have been, and you always will be. It will take time to fully integrate this truth, but the effort is worth it. Once you accept your experiences, you can then feel the Gratitude and positive energy that is the love from god that comes from inside of yourself.

We don’t have to wait for someone else to love us, approve of us or praise us to feel good about ourselves. This is the point of spiritual practice. It is to remember our divinity, our worthiness, and that we are ever and always whole, no matter what is going on around us. From this conscious place, we can make decisions that feel good, benefit us and others without engaging in drama, karma and codependence. We can move out of the stuckness and move forward with our lives.

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