Spiritual Practice | Spirituality for Seekers

How to Create a Sacred Space

Seekers can conduct their daily spiritual practice anywhere, but you may want to consider creating a sacred space in your home or office which is specifically set aside for the purpose. Reading, journaling and meditating in the same location on a regular basis can make that place one which quite naturally evokes a sense of calm and quiet, and serves as an oasis of peace and stillness no matter how busy or hectic the rest of your life may be.

A sacred space can be as simple or elaborate as you want to make it, and should be created to accommodate the requirements of your own individual practice rather than any external idea of what is right or wrong. That said, there are several possible elements of a sacred space which you would do well to think about when establishing your own.

Silence and Solitude

Having previously discussed the importance of Silence and Solitude, it makes sense to try and locate your sacred space in a place which will be relatively free from interruptions. If you are fortunate enough to have a spare room which you can use for the purpose then by all means take advantage of that, but such extremes really aren’t possible or necessary for most people. It can be just as effective to set aside a quiet corner of a room, or even a quiet location outdoors if the climate permits it. The key in all cases is that your chosen space affords quiet and privacy at the times when you intend to practice.

Seating

You should next consider how you will sit for your daily spiritual practice, and make suitable arrangements. For example, if sitting meditation is a key part of your practice then you will probably want to equip your sacred space with a meditation cushion of some sort. Or, if your practice focuses more on spiritual reading and journaling, you may find that a standard armchair and a simple lap desk provide all the comfort you need.

Some might think that such considerations about proper seating are unnecessary, but if you want your daily spiritual practice to be something that you look forward to, it needs to be a fairly comfortable experience, and not one that causes physical aches and pains.

Altar

An altar is a structure which serves as a visual point of focus, and can be very useful in helping you to make the mental transition between daily life and your spiritual practice. It needn’t be a purpose-built structure, but could just as easily be a shelf or table in your chosen location. The important thing is that you should be able to view your altar when seated.

How you furnish your altar should, as always, reflect both your personal preferences and the needs of your own individual path. Items which are commonly used by Seekers include statues or images of spiritual figures (such as the Buddha, Jesus or Ganesh), potted plants or fresh flowers, singing bowls, candles and incense burners, but any other items which help you to turn your focus towards spiritual ideas and concepts can also be included.

Storage

A fourth component that you might like to consider is some kind of storage facility, which can be used to store spiritual texts, journals, mala beads and whatever other items you use in your daily practice. This storage facility could be a shelf or a carefully chosen box, but having all the things that you need for your daily practice in one specific place will make it easy for you to focus on what matters when you come to use your sacred space.

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Creating a sacred space won’t prevent you from conducting your spiritual practice elsewhere from time to time by any means, but it will give you a clearly defined place that you can call your spiritual home. Spend time practicing there on a regular basis and its value will soon become apparent.

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.

Silence and Solitude

by Ian 4 Comments

Creating your own spiritual path is all about learning to follow the guidance of your own intuition – that still, small voice within you which can be relied upon to lead you in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time. Before you can follow that inner voice, however, you first need to be able to hear it, and it is therefore no surprise that one of the key practices in almost all spiritual traditions is spending time in silence and solitude.

– Around 2,600 years ago, the prince Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, or ‘awakened one’ after developing and practicing Samatha and Vipassana, or what we now refer to as concentration and mindfulness meditation.

– Around 2,000 years ago, Jesus was in the habit of spending a great deal of time in silence and solitude. Mark 1:35 says that: ‘Early in the morning, while it was still dark, he rose up and went out, and departed into a deserted place, and prayed there.’ The Bible also reveals that he often liked to sit by a lake, or on a mountainside, and that his ministry began only after he had spent forty days in the desert.

Explore other traditions and you will find similar accounts of spiritual development being realised through silence and solitude, and so it is a proven habit which can be just as fruitful today as it was in previous times. In fact, when you consider how much noisier and busier the world is today, it could be argued that the practice of silence and solitude is even more important.

Learning to meditate properly and then doing so on a regular basis is one of the simplest ways of spending time in silence and solitude, and two of the very best books on the subject (both from the Buddhist tradition) are Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana and Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond by Ajahn Brahm.

Of course, meditating isn’t the only way to spend time in silence and solitude, and you could also consider taking yourself away to a natural environment – by a lake or the coast, or in the heart of woodland, for example – to simply sit and enjoy the peace and stillness of that place.

Whichever of those approaches you choose to pursue, the important thing is to immerse yourself in the silence and solitude. This doesn’t always come easy, because we live in a world in which it is considered normal to check emails, texts and social network updates around the clock, but if you make a resolute effort to ‘unplug’ from the noise of daily life for a few minutes each day, you will soon appreciate the benefits.

And what are those benefits? Well, they are numerous, as any number of scientifically rigorous studies can confirm. Your mind will quieten, your stress levels will reduce and your perspective will broaden. You will also find that the inner voice of your intuition becomes a great deal easier to hear, putting you in closer touch with a built-in spiritual guidance system that will never let you down.