Photo by h.koppdelaney

While self-realization and spiritual growth is a profound goal to pursue, it is important to be mindful of the fact that spirituality is not a panacea for all our challenges. While spiritual progress offers pathways to heal our varied wounds, we also need to work at resolving our emotional and mental baggage. Unless we simultaneously focus on that, some of our emotional issues keep surfacing, even during the journey of spiritual growth.

For example, if we have grown up with a reserved personality, we are likely to remain aloof in our spiritual practice; if our competitive streak has been our psychological copout for feeling inadequate, we will probably be drawn to constant comparison of our spiritual progress with others; and if chasing success was our defense mechanism for not feeling loved, we may pursue spirituality with the same obsession.

Similarly, if spirituality offers possibilities of leading a more meaningful life, we can readily develop aversion for other lifestyles and judge others based on that. If we increasingly value a life of austerity, we run the risk of looking down on extravagant spenders. If we have begun experiencing greater peace, we can easily find accepting anger of people around us challenging.

Moreover, spiritual practice can become an escape from our emotional demons – issues of anger, loneliness, envy, aversion and judgmental nature; instead, it needs to be a path to face them. Working out our emotional past and conditioned mental patterns, alongside pursuing spiritual insights, paves the way for a more wholesome growth. For example, consciously working with our judgmental nature and limiting mental beliefs, acquired during childhood, can be very supportive in our journey.

Each of us desires to be loved – it’s our primal instinct. However, during our formative years, we subconsciously develop personality traits that seemingly best fulfill this need. Depending upon what helps us gain our parents’ love during childhood, be it conformity, winning, diplomacy, aggression, perfectionism, playing a victim and so forth, we subliminally begin to cement those traits into our psyche. Over time, they become an integral part of our adult personality. Only when we are able to bring these traits into our active awareness, effectively neutralize them, and be our authentic selves, can we create healthy shifts in our limiting mental beliefs.

Further, being routinely judged by our parents, teachers and peers during our early years impacts our self-esteem. We feel inadequate within and grow up believing that it is desirable to be perfect. These beliefs get reinforced at our work place as well as in our personal relationships. These experiences guide our value system and we get accustomed to judging ourselves and others.

Instead of constantly seeking perfection in ourselves (and in our colleagues, spouse and children), we need to build an appreciation for wholesomeness. Instead of judging ourselves, we need to learn to be compassionate towards our shortcomings and be comfortable with who we are. This supports our ability to unconditionally love ourselves. This does not mean we stop striving to get better – instead, it entails learning to love our current state and not postpone our contentment to achievement of a new and improved future state alone.

In that sense, by itself, spirituality is no magic pill. Our spiritual answers come more naturally when we stop seeking to be perfect and stay open to accepting all possibilities. We sense greater harmony with everything around us only when we overcome our limiting personality traits and start being our authentic selves. We are more present and better experience being in the flow when we get away from our conditioned judgmental responses.

(I had recently written this article for the Speaking Tree column of The Times of India)