Personal Growth

Personal Growth

Do you want some Spiritual Growth? I’ll take five pounds please.

I’ve heard my minister state repeatedly one of the tenets of his church’s philosophy, “Our purpose here is to grow and evolve,” to experience personal growth and spiritual growth. So, I’ve been waiting and not much has happened. I guess I have to do something! I know that if I don’t grow, I’ll stagnate, and die – a sad state of affairs.

This week, I set out to understand Spiritual Growth, what the term means, and what the components of that growth are. This is not the first time I’ve approached this subject; however, it is the most I studied the concept and tried to add some order to a bunch of scattered concepts I’ve held. I acknowledge that my appreciation of this term and its meaning have changed as I have aged. I conclude that Spiritual Growth is elusive: worthy of pursuit, but never completed because we change the goal as we discover new territory.

The Growth we need evolves over time. The things that were important to us for our growth as teenagers are different from what we need in mid-career, and still different for those in retirement. (Of course, I’d love to be a teenager with what I know now.) In mid-career, for instance, I need skills and abilities for my profession, as well as a set of spiritual skills that fit with the secular part of my life. Later in life, I can devote more time to the development of spiritual skills.

My current list of Spiritual Skills follows. Increasing mastery of these curricula certainly appears to put one on a transformational path of self-discovery.

• Love
• Intimacy and Openness
• Compassion
• Tolerance
• Gratitude
• Faith
• Contemplation
• Affirmative Prayer
• Meditation
• Visioning and Visualization
• Balancing
• Intention
• Intuiition
• Living in the Now
• Risk Taking
• Awareness
• Healing
• Charity
• Forgiveness
• Service
• Nurturing
• Integration

Earlier in my life, I paid only passing attention to many of these areas. Moreover, no one gave me the list and said, ‘Fill in the blanks. Get good at these. You’ll be tested on these late in life!’ In hindsight, I was supposed to impute the skills from all the diverse and often confusing concepts people talked about in this spiritual arena. There are different levels of consciousness and different skill needs appropriate to one’s age and station in life.

Achievement is closely linked to the terms Personal Growth and Spiritual Growth. To do well in Personal Growth or Spiritual Growth, I have to follow through; I can’t take weak indefinite steps towards their accomplishment. I have to set goals and finish them. I must do things fully, and with enthusiasm – so I know I did my best. I know when I master a professional skill because I can start to use it and adapt it in my work. The same holds true with your spiritual skills: you have to work to master them, so you can use and adapt them in your life. Spiritual skills take practice too.

Personal and Spiritual Growth involve Learning. We learn from many sources: books, CDs, movies, classes, lectures, friends, experimentation, contemplation, and trial and error. Some of what we study will lay fallow, and seldom be called upon. Other areas we’ve learned, areas we felt we’d never need, will find daily use in important areas of our lives often driven by synchronicity. So, be open to learning situations; don’t allow your biases from the past to jade your ability to learn from some new situation you face. Learn from all situations.

There is an implication about risk taking here. You need to take risks to try your new skills, to see whether they’ve advanced your growth. So practice Spiritual Skills, and relax, perfection in these areas appears a tall order, particularly if we remember the stories of Buddhist monks that spend a lifetime trying to master just one of these practices. Take the risk. The biggest risk is that you may end up believing that you wasted your time. You didn’t.

There is no one right path for Spiritual Growth. Everyone finds their own path and advances along it in their own way. While we may share milestones on the path, for instance a book or lecture, what we read, see, hear, or feel will differ for each of us based on the inner revelations we allow.

The mastery of Spiritual Skills already lies within you. Our Growth is the uncovering of the perfection and knowledge we already have within us. Our learning reveals what we already know. Learning comes from within. The right guidance always comes at the right time.

In the coming weeks, I’ll focus on some of these Spiritual Skills. If you have some you want to add to the list, please reply e-mail.

Namasté

This newsletter is to stimulate your spiritual thinking in the hope that it will contribute to your spiritual growth. The essays are not meant to be complete treatises on the subject, only short papers to stimulate your thinking. The author invites your comments and critiques by reply e-mail to bob@futuremoons.com.