Rethinking Your Spiritual Practice: How Personal Growth Leads to Alignment

What is a Spiritual Practice?

A spiritual practice is any activity that allows you to build a deeper connection to the universe and to yourself.

Connecting to yourself means you feel grounded, whole and comfortable with yourself. You have a sense of calm and confidence – even when things aren’t going well. That wholeness represents that you are living a spiritually aligned life. That you are living the way that you intended to when you came to earth.

Connecting to the universe allows you to feel not alone – like there is a greater purpose and meaning within the world. You may question it from time to time, but you return to this knowing that you aren’t alone.

A spiritual practice isn’t a one-way road to enlightenment. Instead, it is a practicebecause as we interact with the world, we experience emotions, setbacks and moments when we question it all.  All of which can knock us off our road. Our spiritual practice gets us back on the right road.

Ultimately it is how we manage life and belief in it – even as things aren’t going the way we intend and desire.

Now, let’s walk through what living spiritually aligned means and how you do it, as understanding this will help you better pick out the right spiritual practices for you.

What is Spiritually Aligned Living?

It is living your life as you planned before you were born. It includes:

• Connecting to your true self – the core of who you wanted to be in this life. You can consider this the blueprint you came in with. How you want to show up in the world.
• Living your purpose – the broad theme that you choose to focus on in this life.
• Accomplishing your incarnation plans – what you set as goals to accomplish in this life. Including healing, learning a specific lesson and more.
• Living according to your beliefs and values. It is one thing to say you value something; it is another to live those values in your everyday life.

How Do You Live Spiritually Aligned?

The following five things will help you align to yourself.

• Self-discovery/awareness – you need to uncover who you are, what you want, what you believe. Self-discovery is an active process that moves you towards alignment with your true self. Each new discovery bringing you closer to understanding why you are here and how you can turn that into reality.
• Emotional healing – we all have emotional wounds; it is part of interacting with other humans. These wounds block us from seeing ourselves as whole and being able to fully step into ourselves. When we heal these wounds, we can begin to see ourselves as whole.
• Spiritual healing – spiritual blocks include everything from ancestor curses to possession and life contracts that are harmful. These spiritual wounds can directly impact your ability to align to your true self, because they cover up the real you. Removing them helps you connect to all aspects of aligned living easier.
• Energetic sovereignty – we are all made of energy, and it can be negatively impacted by other people, ourselves and our environment. Learning to manage and heal your energy will help with making everything else easier to do.
• Spiritually connected living – this is a broader category of practices that help you stay connected to the spiritual world.

Let’s dig more into all the pieces of being spiritually connected.

What is Spiritually Connected Living?

It includes the following:

• Developing your relationship with your source. No matter what you call it – Universe, God, Higher Power or anything else.
• Developing your relationship with your spirit guides and other helpful beings from the spirit realm.
• Having daily practices to maintain your energy and connection to spirit. For example, meditation or journaling.
• Integrating your spiritual connections into decision making. This allows you to have a broader view of what is impacting you. Your guides can see things you can’t, just as you understand being human like they can’t. (Learn more about getting spiritual guidance.)
• Healing blocks to connection, growth and yourself. These can be emotional, physical, mental or spiritual.

Analogy to Better Understand Spiritually Aligned Living

Imagine a wooden bucket – this bucket represents your life when you are spiritually aligned to yourself.  When the bucket is full you are aligned and connected. When the bucket isn’t full you are out of alignment to yourself and why you came here.

To fill the bucket, you need to do the five things from above: self-discovery, emotional healing, spiritual healing, spiritually connected living and energetic sovereignty.

Reasons You Are Struggling to Fill Your Bucket:

There are two main reasons your bucket won’t fill – you are focused on too many buckets, and you have holes in your bucket.

It is easy to pick up “other” buckets – this happens when you are living your life based on other people’s desires for you and not understanding yourself.

The holes in your bucket(s) include emotional wounds, spiritual wounds and energetic wounds. These let the water stream out of your bucket.

Imagine you have five buckets and you are running between them trying to pour water in them, but it’s just splashing all over the place and only filling each bucket with a few inches. At the same time the buckets all have holes in them, so what water does get in them drains out.

Eventually after years of doing it this way, you can feel burned out, overwhelmed and you start to feel defeated.

This approach can have some success if the following is happening:

One of the buckets doesn’t have as many holes. Eventually the water will rise higher, and you will have success. This doesn’t mean it is the true self bucket, just that with hard work it was fillable. But with this you will continually have to work hard at keeping it full.

This Process is Normal

Part of these scattered attempts to align to yourself is necessary – you need to start with different buckets to find the right one for you. That is part of the self-discovery process.

You will have emotional and spiritual wounds – this is normal and part of being human.

You do need to learn to handle your own dreams, ideas and energy. This is part of growing into an independent person.

Learning to be you and dealing with the blocks to being you is part of the journey. Your soul came here to learn this. Your goal is to find the right bucket, patch the holes and then fill the bucket full!

So, circling back to your spiritual practice. You can choose to focus on emotional healing right now – and that is a spiritual practice. Or maybe you have done the emotional healing work, but have no clue what your purpose is, so your spiritual practice becomes the deeper self-discovery work and learning to better connect to your spirit guides.

How do you decide what to focus on? Review the areas above and ask yourself the following questions:

• Where do I feel the most disconnected?
• Where do I keep working hard but never seem to make progress?
• What do I do that fills me with dread? (The thing you really don’t like doing!)
  • Why do I dread this?
• What do I want to learn more about? It maybe that you need to learn more about some of these things before you make a decision.
• What makes me feel connected to the universe? Do I do that enough to allow myself to feel connected?

After spending time thinking about these, pick one area to start focusing on and let that be your spiritual practice.

Here are some resources to help you with the different areas:

Emotional Healing Tools

Energetic Sovereignty

Self-Discovery

Learn more about spiritual blocks

Life Planning Workbook – help you uncover what you want