Ian | Spirituality for Seekers

The Power of Belief

A belief is any idea which an individual accepts as being true, and all human beings hold a significant number of them at any given time. We have beliefs about the kind of people we are, what we are capable of doing or becoming, and how life works. We also have beliefs of a more spiritual nature, which reflect our stance on whether there is any such thing as a higher power, a human soul, life after death, and so on.

We most often use the word belief to describe a position that we take about matters of a subjective nature, and so there are as many different beliefs in the world as there are individual perspectives. Your journey as a Seeker may therefore involve a study of the beliefs held by various different traditions, as well as a more conscious exploration of your own personal beliefs.

Belief and Reality

Beliefs are important because they serve as filters between the facts of life and your experience of those facts. Just as a photographer can create a sepia or rose-tinted image by placing a correspondingly coloured filter on his lens, so your experience of reality will quite naturally be coloured by the beliefs that you hold.

– Those of you who believe in a higher power which is external to yourself may experience the events of your daily life as things that are being ordained, guided or permitted by that higher power.

– Those of you who believe that you yourself are a fragment of the divine whole may experience the events of your daily life as things which you yourself are bringing into manifestation through your thoughts, words and attitudes.

– Those of you who believe that there is no such thing as a higher power or divine force may experience the events of your daily life as things that happen due to physical cause and effect or random chance.

Now, we cannot say which of those beliefs is factually true, because the concept of god or divinity is a very subjective – as opposed to a scientific – matter. However, we can say that the three beliefs just stated will give the individuals holding them three very different experiences of reality.

‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought.’
The Buddha

Look back once again at my parable of The Island and you will recall how the man’s experience of his environment was coloured by the beliefs he chose to hold after visiting the temple. When he believed he was a criminal, his experience was largely negative. When he believed he was a lottery winner, his experience was largely positive. And when he believed that he was a scientist, his experience was detached and objective. We still don’t know which of those perspectives was true, if any, but we can see how they all had consequences.

And so it is in your own life. Everything that you experience, whether you are at home, work, in the shopping mall or at the gym, will be filtered through your beliefs. If a man believes himself to be stupid, ugly or disadvantaged, and in addition he believes that ‘life is a bitch’, his daily experience will be largely negative, and even ‘good’ events will be reframed to match his belief filter. At the same time, if a woman believes herself to be intelligent, attractive or lucky, and in addition she believes that ‘life is a beach’, her daily experience will be largely positive, and even ‘bad’ events will be reframed to work in her favour.

I will not state here that thoughts are things, and that your beliefs directly create your reality, for those are possibilities which you must consider for yourself. I will, however, state that your beliefs directly shape your experience of reality, whether you like it or not.

Change Your Beliefs and Change Your Life

Since beliefs on subjective matters cannot be proven one way or the other, but their influence on the way you perceive life is readily observable, you would do well, as a Seeker, to take a good look at what you believe and at how those beliefs are colouring your experience. Then, if your current beliefs are not helping you to experience life in a wholly positive way, consider changing them for ones which would.

‘To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.’
William James

The idea of deliberately and consciously changing your beliefs may sound too good to be true, but beliefs are not as solid, fixed and unchangeable as many people think. They are merely viewpoints, and you can adopt a brand new viewpoint on almost any matter at will. All you have to do is decide to think about things in a different way – preferably in a way that empowers you.

As you explore different spiritual traditions and ideas, try their beliefs on for size in the privacy of your imagination. Ask yourself how adopting a certain belief would change the way you experience life, and if your intuition tells you that it would improve your experience, consider adopting it for a few weeks or months. If your intuition is right then your life will improve and you can continue holding the belief. If your experience of life does not improve, you can continue working with different beliefs until you find the ones that fit you perfectly.

It is no exaggeration to say that if you change your beliefs, you will literally change your life, so consider this idea carefully and don’t be afraid of adopting a new perspective on yourself, on life and on the universe at large.

How to Handle Stress

by Ian Leave a Comment

Stress is one of the most common problems that people face in life, but the good news is that it is something which can be handled quite effectively by anyone who is willing to adopt a more spiritual approach to life. Some people realise this quite intuitively, and many are happy to admit that it was their desire to regain some calm, tranquillity and peace of mind in a time of particularly high stress which motivated them to embark on their spiritual path in the first place.

Given that the problem is so prevalent, and that at least a few who reach this website will be searching for a spiritual solution to it, in this post I will take a look at stress and why it occurs. I will also provide a workable action plan that can be followed by anyone to bring about speedy relief from tension and anxiety, as well as develop a greater sense of emotional peace and stability.

The Stress Response

Stress is a psychological and physical response to any event which contradicts our hopes or expectations. The exact stress response that is experienced by an individual will largely depend on their personality, earlier life conditioning and the perceived seriousness of the situation being faced. That said, the stress response may be experienced as anything from a mild but uncomfortable sense of general tension and anxiety to increased heart rate, higher blood pressure, nausea and insomnia. Often referred to as the ‘fight or flight’ mode of being, stress can make different people react in different ways.

– Some people have a tendency to go directly into ‘fight’ mode by getting irritable, angry and confrontational. If these types can’t vent their feelings of aggression at someone they view as being responsible for the situation which has triggered their stress response, they will often lash out quite arbitrarily at the people around them, or even blame themselves for getting into the situation in the first place. This often happens even if the triggering event had no human or preventable cause, which is why many people get snappy when their car breaks down or the weather decides to rain on their parade.

– Other people have a tendency to go into ‘flight’ mode when they experience a stressful event or situation. These types become nervous, quiet and withdrawn, and would much rather run away from the situation than fight it. Indeed, many will get the urge to crawl into a dark corner and hide until the situation changes of its own accord or their feelings of stress fade away.

These are tendencies, rather than fixed reactions, so most of us have experienced both fighting in some situations and taking flight in others.

This fight or flight response has evolutionary roots, and it is sometimes extremely valuable. For example, if you encounter a bear in the woods, fighting or running away are probably the two best courses of action you can take. However, in situations that are less than life-threatening, fighting or fleeing can do a lot more harm than good, and so a big part of effectively handling stress in the modern world involves identifying and learning to respond in a way which is more appropriate to the situation at hand.

What Causes Stress?

As stated earlier, stress is a psychological and physical response to any event which contradicts our hopes or expectations. In the previous section I focused on the response itself, but now we must look at the second part of the statement, which involves our hopes and expectations.

If you were to ask 100 people to describe the kind of events and situations which cause them to feel stress in life, they would come back with all kinds of answers, ranging from the minor to the major.

At the minor end of the spectrum, they might talk about getting caught in traffic, being late for an appointment or burning the dinner. At the opposite end of the spectrum, they might talk about losing their job or business, breaking up with a long-term partner, receiving a negative medical diagnosis or the death of a loved one. And in between those two extremes there are literally millions of other things that could be mentioned.

Whilst the number of ‘potential stress events’ that we might encounter in daily life is quite enormous, all such events can be placed into one of just two broad categories, as follows:

– Events, situations or circumstances which, although we desire them, do not currently exist.

– Events, situations or circumstances which, although we do not desire them, do currently exist.

In both cases, the stress is caused because our current reality does not match our expectations.

– Individuals who get delayed in traffic may experience stress because they want to be on time for their appointments, whilst individuals who burn the dinner may experience stress because they want to cook a perfect meal.

– Individuals who get sick may experience stress because they don’t want to be in poor health, whilst individuals who lose their jobs or businesses may experience stress because they don’t want to be in financial difficulty.

This may sound like a huge simplification, but if you take an honest look at the events, situations and circumstances which cause you stress in your own life, you too will find that your experience of stress is all due to you wanting things to be different than they currently are.

Handling Stress – An Action Plan

It is unrealistic to think that we can eliminate all potentially stressful events from our lives, but it is perfectly realistic to think that we can learn to handle events in a way that dramatically reduces or even eliminates the experience of stress. That being the case, I would now like to offer a simple yet effective action plan for your consideration. This action plan takes a multi-faceted approach to stress, using concepts and ideas from various traditions, so try it yourself and please feel free to report back on how effective you find it to be.

Step #1 – Accept the Moment

The first thing you should do when you encounter an event that you are not happy with is simply pause and accept it as the reality of the moment. Realise that the event has occurred (or has not occurred, if you are desiring something which you do not have in your life) and that your view of the situation will not change that fact.

What you can change is your response to the fact. If you choose to respond by resisting reality, by moaning, grumbling, kicking and screaming, you will experience a heightened level of stress and discomfort. If you choose to respond by accepting reality, by simply sitting with it for a moment, you will experience far less stress.

You should note that accepting the reality of the moment does not mean that you are resigning yourself to living with things as they are for the rest of your life. Nor does it mean that you cannot plan to make changes or improve conditions in your life. All it means is that right now, in the moment of the event, you accept things as they are, without resistance.

Step #2 – Evaluate the Situation

Having paused to accept the moment, you can evaluate the situation from a quiet and objective viewpoint. Leaving your emotional responses out of the equation as far as possible, take a good look at the situation as it is, and ask yourself whether anything can be done about it.

For example, if you are stuck in traffic, is it possible to take an exit and get to your destination via an alternative route? If you have lost a job, can you do anything to get a new one? If you have been diagnosed with an illness, are there things that you can do to improve your health?

This evaluation of the situation will often reveal that there is some type of action that can be taken to change it, in which case you can focus on deciding which actions are most appropriate and start taking them.

If there are no actions that can be taken at the current time (perhaps because you are caught in heavy traffic and there are no alternative exits to take) then at least you can feel good about the fact that you have evaluated the situation in a balanced and objective manner.

Step #3 – Practice Gratitude

No matter what potentially stressful event you are facing, there are still plenty of things in your life to be grateful for, so pause to identify some of those things. Take another look at my post on Practicing Gratitude to remind yourself of the various approaches that are available to you, and start working with one or more of them to generate gratitude for all the good things in your life.

I would also suggest that you specifically look for things to be grateful for in the situation itself. This isn’t always easy, especially when you are facing a major life event, but give it a try. Maybe losing your job presents you with an opportunity to start over, and create a career which is even more rewarding and fulfilling. Or maybe getting caught in traffic gives you a little more time to take a few deep breaths, or to listen to your favourite audiobook or podcast.

By practicing gratitude in the heat of the moment, you are bringing your focus back to what is working in your life, rather than dwelling on the event itself.

Step #4 – Embrace Impermanence

One of the most important truths to learn in life is that nothing is permanent, but everything is subject to change. By embracing this fact, you will find it easier to be less attached to the things you enjoy in life, and less averse to the things that you don’t particularly enjoy in life.

Jobs can last a long time or a short time, but they never last forever, and the same can be said about relationships, possessions and all other external conditions. Sitting with this observation, and really taking it to heart, can make dealing with a potentially stressful event a lot more bearable, because you know that the situations which you may view as negative are also subject to change.

It doesn’t matter how bad you may feel, how bleak the outlook appears, or how precarious the situation may seem, remind yourself that – thanks to impermanence – it won’t be like that forever. Every year has four seasons, and every winter is followed by a spring and then a summer and an autumn. Similarly, when you find yourself in a ‘winter’ situation, be mindful of the fact that your feelings will eventually lift, the outlook will improve and the situation will stabilise and prosper.

Step #5 – Look for the Lesson

Next, look for the lesson which the universe may be trying to teach you through the event you are facing. The more experiences you have as a Seeker, the more you will come to realise that the universe is always communicating something to you, so pause and ask yourself what it could be saying through the event you face right now.

It could be that the traffic jam is teaching you to be more patient, or to avoid attributing so much importance to relatively trivial things. It could be that the job loss or the end of the relationship is teaching you to stop looking for security in anything or anyone outside yourself. There are as many lessons to be learned as there are events to be experienced, so look for the lesson you are being taught today.

Step #6 – Trust

Last, but by no means least, make a deliberate effort to trust the process of life itself. How you do this will of course depend on your own spiritual perspective, so some of you will want to trust that God is looking out for you, whilst others will want to trust that the universe at large is with you, rather than against you. Whatever terminology you use to describe such things, relax and let go a little, and trust that your life is unfolding exactly as it is meant to unfold.

According to your intuition, you can view this as a simple shift in perspective which serves to ease the stress of the moment, or you can view it as a position of literal belief. The important thing is that you make the deliberate decision to trust, and allow your life to unfold exactly as it should.

***

Facing events, situations and circumstances which can potentially cause us to experience stress is a natural part of life, but the experience of stress itself is largely a choice. Choose to resist reality and stress will follow, but choose instead to respond with this simple action plan and your experience will be very different. In fact, in many cases you will find that you can handle stress quite effectively, and that your experience of the event can be transformed into one which is positive and sometimes even helpful.

Practicing Gratitude

by Ian 1 Comment

Gratitude is a word which is normally used to describe a feeling of being grateful for something, but it can also be a powerful spiritual practice in its own right. In the former case, gratitude is a feeling that arises quite naturally when we find ourselves in a situation which we particularly appreciate. However, in the latter case, it is a feeling that is deliberately cultivated by taking time to focus on situations and conditions which are worthy of mindful appreciation.

Why Practice Gratitude?

There are several reasons why you may want to consider making gratitude a part of your daily spiritual practice, and the three main ones are as follows:

Gratitude Feels Good
The first reason to practice gratitude is because it is something that makes you feel good. It is incredibly difficult to feel anxious or stressed when you are deliberately feeling gratitude for the good things in your life, so cultivating gratitude on a daily basis can serve as a very useful spiritual tonic.

Gratitude Balances Perspective
It can be quite easy for us to lose our perspective in life, and if we aren’t careful we may find ourselves focusing on all of the things that are not going quite as well as we would like them to be. Practicing gratitude on a daily basis can help us to maintain a more balanced perspective which pays due attention to all the things that we have to appreciate.

Gratitude Promotes Growth
There are many spiritual traditions which say that our thoughts create our experience, and that whatever we focus on expands. In this case, spending time each day being grateful for the good things in your life can be an excellent way to enjoy even more of those good things in the future. Based on my own experience, I personally believe this observation to be accurate, but you should of course test the principle for yourself.

How to Practice Gratitude

Practicing gratitude is not a complicated matter, and so it is something which you can incorporate into your life very easily. Three approaches that you may want to consider as starting points involve daily reflection, keeping a gratitude journal, and making gratitude a habit.

Daily Reflection
To practice daily reflection, all you need to do is set aside a few minutes – perhaps at the end of your daily spiritual practice – to reflect on the events of the day and on your life in general. Your aim here is to recall and give thanks for everything that you appreciate in your life. It can be useful to run through the day from morning to evening, recalling in your imagination everything good and positive that happened, as well as the people and situations that you appreciate.

Keeping a Gratitude Journal
This is a variation of the daily reflection approach, and involves writing down a specified number of things each day that you are thankful for, such as your job, your home, your family, the weather, the unexpected tax refund, and so on. Some people like to keep their gratitude journal separate from their main spiritual journal, whilst others include their gratitude list at the end of their spiritual journal entries, so feel free to adopt the method that appeals to you.

I recommend starting a gratitude journal practice by writing down at least five things that you are grateful for each day, but adding to the list whenever possible. In other words, if you have a dozen things to be thankful for, don’t stop writing at five, but note them all down. As I said earlier, gratitude has a habit of giving you even more to be grateful for, so limiting your list would effectively be limiting your future experience.

Making Gratitude a Habit
The third approach to practicing gratitude is to make it a habit throughout the day, pausing for a moment to be thankful for the positive things in your life as and when you experience them.

You could be thankful for having a good night’s sleep when you wake up, for example, for the car or public transport that you take to work each morning, for the person who serves you groceries in the store, and so on. You could even get into the habit of being thankful for the product or service that you have enjoyed whenever you pay for it.

This method of practicing gratitude may take a little time to become a habit, but when it does it will be very helpful in making you more aware of just how much there is to be thankful for in your daily life, for there is always much more than we might first believe.

The benefits of practicing gratitude are difficult to appreciate fully until you have done so for a while, especially if you currently find it difficult to see things to be grateful for in your life. My advice would be to adopt the practice of gratitude anyway, right where you are, and to let the results speak for themselves.

Spiritual Journaling

by Ian 1 Comment

Spiritual journaling is the act of writing down spiritual observations, intentions, insights, experiences and progress on a regular basis. It is a practice which can be found in a great many traditions, but it will be particularly useful to you as a Seeker, because it can serve you in multiple ways: as a record of your spiritual development and growth in the past, as a point of focus for exploring the present, and as a source of inspiration for the future.

There is no right or wrong way to keep a spiritual journal, and so today I will present a handful of approaches that you may wish to consider as a starting point.

Reflective Journaling

Our experiences can often be rich sources of useful information and insight if we would just spend some time reflecting on them, and reflective journaling can be a useful way to do that. Date a page and write down any recent experience in your life that currently seems to stand out in your mind. The experience could be one that you view as positive, negative or neutral – all that matters is that it is on your mind when you come to practice your journaling.

Having described the experience in your journal, ask yourself what it could be trying to teach you from a spiritual perspective, and then write down the insights you receive in response to that questioning.

Reflective journaling can be very effective in helping you to gain a brand new perspective on the various situations in your life. Indeed, after a while you may well come to the realisation that everything you experience in life contains a valuable lesson which, if learned, will serve you well in the future.

Exploratory Journaling

This is a form of spiritual journaling in which you explore your own ideas, beliefs and opinions about the big questions in life. For example: Do you believe in God, either as a concept or as a divine being? Why, or why not? What are your ideas on the nature of God or reality at large? Where did these ideas come from? Do you believe in life after death? If so, do you also believe in life before birth? Is there a fixed purpose to life, or do we give it our own meaning, and why do you believe that to be so?

The aim here is not to come up with answers which prove a point either way, but simply to explore and define the ideas and beliefs which you currently hold at the present stage of your spiritual journey. Your answers could and probably will change over time, so recording them in your journal will help you to look back at some point in the future and appreciate how your ideas and insights are constantly evolving.

Conversational Journaling

A third way to practice spiritual journaling is to write down a question that you would like an answer to, then write down the answer that you believe would be given by God, the universe, your intuition or however else you describe spiritual reality.

It can be useful to write questions and answers with differently coloured pens so that they are easy to distinguish in the future, when you may return to read the journal, but that is of course entirely optional and not something which affects the usefulness of the practice..

This type of spiritual journaling can be extremely valuable, and when you relax into the idea of receiving information directly from your intuition, you will find that it provides some very good insights – perhaps even the kind of insights you didn’t know were already within you. Eventually, your questions and answers will become an ongoing conversation with your intuition, and you will have embarked on one of the most fruitful spiritual practices available.

Perhaps one of the most famous practitioners of conversational journaling (although I am not sure if he uses that terminology) is Neale Donald Walsh, who is the author of the Conversations with God series of books.

Conversational journaling, or ‘inspired writing’ as it could also be known, is a powerful tool, and one that I highly recommend. The spiritual texts of past traditions have all come to us as a result of men or women having been ‘inspired by God’ to write down their intuitions, so having your own conversational journaling practice would put you in very good company.

Dream Journaling

Those of you who currently find it easier to pay attention to your dreams than to the ‘still, small voice within’ may prefer to consider dream journaling. This is where you get into the habit of recording your dreams (keeping your journal by your bedside is a good idea if you don’t want to forget anything) and then reflecting on what they could be telling you.

The content of dreams can often be incredibly useful, if not occasionally prophetic, which is why paying attention to dreams is very important in the Shamanic and other traditions. Of course, it isn’t always wise to take dreams literally, so take a balanced view, and always look for the highest and most applicable insight you can get from them.

These are just a few of the spiritual journaling options open to you as a Seeker, and I encourage you to begin practicing one or more of them today. You may, of course, change your approach as your spiritual path unfolds, but the journaling practice itself is one which should prove rewarding for a lifetime.

Spiritual Reading

by Ian Leave a Comment

Whilst you will find your own truth by looking within, it can also be very useful to explore the ideas and understandings of spiritual Seekers who have gone before you.

Men and women have been asking the big questions about life since the dawn of consciousness, and exploring the various answers that they came up with as a result of their sincere questioning. Looking at writings which were inspired by the intuitions and reasoning of our predecessors can help us to clarify and bring into focus our own thoughts on spiritual matters.

There are two broad categories of spiritual writings, which can be referred to as ancient and modern. Examples of ancient spiritual texts include the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Dhammapada and the Tao Te Ching. Examples of more modern works include The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes, A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield or The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ – John 1:1

The kind of writings that you choose to read is, once again, something that should be guided by your intuition. My belief is that all spiritual traditions eventually lead to the same place, or at least strive to do so, which means no one text is vastly superior to all others. That being the case, you are far more likely to find a text that suits your current needs by following your intuition than you are by wading through any set reading list just for the sake of doing so.

If you have no existing ideas about which spiritual writings you would like to explore, consider visiting the Religion & Spirituality section of Amazon and browsing through the titles until you find one which resonates with you.

Spiritual Reading Guidelines

To help you get the most out of spiritual reading as part of your daily spiritual practice, here are a few recommendations which you may find useful:

Be Selective

For your spiritual reading practice, I recommend that you select and work with no more than one ancient and/or one modern book at a time. Your aim in spiritual reading is not to acquire as many titles as possible, but to give each title thoughtful consideration, so be selective and assume that you will work with your selections for several weeks rather than several days.

Read Slowly

Although you can read spiritual writings from cover to cover at breakneck speed, much as you might read a novel, that is not the best way to give the material the attention it deserves. Instead, read slowly, taking a section per day and thinking carefully about what you read as you go along. This will ensure that you don’t rush through the writings and overlook something useful or possibly even life-changing.

Adopt a Balanced Perspective

Approaching any spiritual text as if it were an infallible account of actual historical events or ‘the one and only’ way to view the world is rarely something that is useful to a Seeker. A much better approach, in my opinion, is to adopt a balanced perspective, and to remember that every book you read – be it a particular book of the Bible, a New Thought classic or the latest ‘law of attraction’ title – is simply one author’s way of viewing the world based on his or her own experience and beliefs. Coming from that perspective, you are perfectly free to take what makes sense to you and set the rest aside.

Listen to Your Intuition

As you read, listen to your inner voice, and pay attention to anything that seems to speak to you personally. It is this habit of listening to your own spiritual nature which makes spiritual reading an altogether different experience than simply reading for pleasure or entertainment.

Make Notes

When you do come across something which speaks to you, make a note of it somewhere. Many people find it useful to have a dedicated reading notes journal (which is separate from their main spiritual journal) so that they can make notes about each book they work with in chronological order and review them at a later date without having to remember exactly when their intuition spoke. If you choose to take this approach then I highly recommend Moleskine notebooks, which are a pleasure to use and sturdy enough to last a lifetime.

Apply What You Learn

My final piece of advice for your spiritual reading practice is to apply what you learn. You may not come across something that jumps out at you every day, but when you do, you should think about how you can apply that intuitive truth or insight to your own life, starting immediately. It is applying what you learn that facilitates spiritual growth, because as you begin following the guidance of your intuition – as revealed, in this case, through the writings that you are spending time with – you will demonstrate to yourself that such guidance can be both incredibly helpful and dependably reliable.

With those guidelines in mind, consider selecting your first spiritual reading title today so that you can start listening more effectively to your inner voice in the days and weeks ahead.