Did You Really Think This Was Going to be Easy?

The Truth About Spiritual Aging

You are right to celebrate your spiritual breakthroughs: every risk you take that works out; every outstretched hand that is clasped by another; every fear that is overcome and crisis averted. Over and over again you have claimed new territory, lifting yourself from the shadows to the light.

But for as many times as you’ve managed a transition from down to up, while always welcome, may you remember that this is not the only gauge of psycho-spiritual growth. And neither is the transit from up to down, while not what you’d hoped for, necessarily regression.

The measure of true progress comes about only when you accept the whole of it, and love yourself wherever you are on the cycle. Up, down. High, low. Through all the peaks and valleys of the fully-lived life.

Writes Kathleen Dowling Singh: You “may have thought of the spiritual path as all-glorious, like a rose-tinged, many-petaled lotus opening into unimaginable radiance. Maybe that’s so, but…there will be a lot of bugs and spiders and slugs that will scurry out of their hiding places in the lotus petals before those petals are fully opened….”

For those times when you can experience life without judgment, recrimination or impatience, all the while knowing you are doing even this imperfectly…Can you find it in your heart to celebrate this, too?

—”Third Week of September, Year One” Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life