10 Reasons You Should Develop a Spiritual Practice

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A spiritual practice is the regular performance of actions and activities undertaken for the purpose of inducing spiritual experiences and cultivating spiritual development. A spiritual practice is something you do every single day that facilitates deeper self-awareness, empathy, and connectedness with others. Regular spiritual practice produces feelings of insight, understanding, integration, certainty, conviction, and truth, which surpass ordinary understandings and tend to persist long after the experience. Personal practice reconnects us with our deepest core values and our highest vision of who we are and why we are here. It heightens our sense of mission and purpose, empowering our personal evolution. It is important to remember that each person is different and so what works for one person may not work for another. The key is to choose an activity that makes you feel calm, centered, and relaxed. A spiritual activity might be gardening, hiking, running, dancing, drumming, chanting, painting, meditating, praying, doing yoga or tai chi. Here are 10 good reasons why you should develop a spiritual practice:

1. To integrate the body, mind, and spirit into wholeness and balance. Through reintegration of self, we come to understand who we truly are. The moment you bond with your spirit is the moment your heart opens. The first time you glimpse your spirit self, you gasp and cry. You know who you are. That is the moment you begin to heal.

2. It connects you to your inner truth. It is necessary to still the mind and quiet the emotions so that your personal truth can emerge. Inner stillness quells the ego and reconnects you to the guidance of your own intuitive knowing. Intuition reveals appropriate action in the moment for a given set of circumstances. So long as you follow your intuitive sense, your actions will be in accord with the true self and ultimately the cosmos.

3. To explore and develop the “inner life.” Spiritual practice helps make us more fluent in the language of the inner life, which is where meaningful healing, transformation and insight arise. Being mindfully present with our thoughts, feelings and sensations is a journey into deeper self-awareness, heart awakening and embodied liberation. Regardless of what you call it — personal growth, personal development, self-actualization or finding yourself — this journey is you exploring and developing who you truly are.

4. It affords a holistic perspective of your life on a macrocosmic level. Spiritual practice is a valuable tool for stepping back and getting a balanced and ordered perspective on the broader picture. Through regular spiritual practice, we gain the perspective needed to move with the ebb and flow of change with grace and ease.

5. To achieve joy and bliss. A daily spiritual practice is the surest path to Joy. Joy is our song, which we share with the universe. Every living thing has a unique song, a pulsing rhythm that belongs only to it. Within the heart of each of us, there exists a silent pulse of perfect rhythm, which connects us to the totality of a dynamic, interrelated universe. This silent pulse is ever-present within each of us, but our awareness is rarely in sync with it. Awareness of perfect rhythm is not possible until we relinquish the desires and manipulations of the ego.

6. In order to cultivate the attention required to complete your tasks. Precision and awareness become elevated in whatever you choose to apply yourself to. Attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience. It is through our attention that we influence and direct the aspects of our experience and the world around us. Those aspects of our experience that are most enduring are the effect of habitual expectations and beliefs. What we pay attention to becomes what we know as ourselves and our world, for energy flows where attention goes.

7. It cultivates equanimity or steadiness of mind. Equanimity is the capacity to remain poised and calm even when under stress. The kind of equanimity required must be rooted in the insight that we create our own reality. Nothing that happens to us comes from an external source outside ourselves; everything is the result of our own thoughts and deeds. Because this knowledge frees us from fear, it is the foundation of equanimity.

8. To develop divine qualities. We are all sparks of the same one Divine Source. Over time, spiritual practice helps to dissolve our mind and through it we gain access to Divine consciousness. This closeness to Divinity allows us to assimilate divine qualities and evolve spiritually.

9. It clears the mind of illusions and obstructions, transforming thought patterns of confusion to reveal inherent clear mind. The fire of clear mind is ever present within each of us, and to remove any obstruction of its clarity is the duty of all people, so that each may find the way to unity and harmony. Through the insight and understanding of illuminated mind, we can bring enlightenment to the world!

10. To ground ourselves fully in the present moment. The present moment is all you ever have. When you aren’t present in the moment you become a victim of time. Your mind is pulled into the past or the future, or both. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. The present moment is the fundamental ceremony of life. When we bring ourselves fully into the present moment, our life becomes the spiritual practice.