What Is the Spiritual Path?

What is the spiritual path?

It’s an important question.

Let’s take a step back and look at what many people actually seek on the spiritual path. 

While this blog is dedicated to realizing spiritual freedom–freedom from ego suffering–there are other reasons that people follow the spiritual path. It’s important to honor those perspectives of the spiritual path, and I encourage you to really question what it is you are seeking from your spiritual path.

The Spiritual Quest for Happiness

Happiness is often the goal of many people’s spiritual paths, and so that’s what they’re evaluating their experiences against. “Does a spiritual tool or experience make me happy?” Some people are willing to face pain, but only if they eventually get happiness. But the overall goal is to basically feel good.

And, oh man, are there spiritual teachers and healers who aim to give you just that! Spiritual systems and teachers aiming to bring people happiness offer things like:

• Ways to find your soulmate
• Ways to manifest more money
• Steps to discover your purpose

The desire for happiness is so universally accepted that most people will never question it. Many people will have read the above things and found themselves saying, “Yes! I want all those things!”

Yet any thing or experience you have in the world is transitory. So spiritual freedom teachers like me don’t focus on such things. You would no sooner find the thing, then life would be gradually destroy it like a sandcastle being washed away by an ocean wave. Everything and every experience in life is a sandcastle. We have to learn to build these things from a space of joy knowing that they’ll be taken from us one way or another.

How to Build Your Sandcastle (a metaphor on impermanence)

There is value in happiness pursuits for many people. Achieving those things helps some people to eventually let them go. It helps them in their overall development. It helps those who have never felt truly happy to let go of their attachments to misery.

Yeah.

Some people are attached to their misery and resist happiness!

However, what this blog is about and what I point people towards is not achieving happiness. It is unlearning the ego to find a different kind of peace–a peace and stillness that is not an experience. It simply Is.

Deepening Into Stillness and Inner Peace

The Spiritual Path and Safety

Next up, many people are more focused on safety than happiness. Safety could be finding a community to join with which the person has shared beliefs. More than a few spiritual seekers are fixated on finding a community/friends.

Furthermore, major religions often function on the unsaid pretext that if everyone believes the same things, then they’ll get along better, creating social harmony. Many major religions also function on the understanding that most people don’t want to do serious spiritual self-inquiry to figure out right from wrong. So they give them right and wrong beliefs. 

There is something about true, deep inquiry that is unsettling–unsafe. So, religions serve a powerful and useful function in giving people something to believe in when they are not ready to go deeper.

Aligning Right and Wrong to the Spiritual Path

However, the problem is that life is inherently NOT safe regardless of what you believe. There’s nothing to be done about that. Building a wall of spiritual beliefs and practices does not protect us from pain. In some instances, these spiritual systems focusing on safety may impose their will on others and cause harm to others (any kind of Holy war is one example, but there are other forms of harm like social ostracism).

Additionally, life has a way of defeating beliefs. Any belief that we hold on to can be twisted or shown to be insufficient or untrue by a turn of events in life. When this happens, people may have a crisis of faith. But usually instead of turning inwards, they end up trying to find a new set of beliefs and practices to achieve a sense of safety once more.

How to Deal with an Existential Crisis

To be clear, these paths that try to bring communities together with shared beliefs serve important functions. Most people need clear rules to live by in society, and many simply have no interest in self-inquiry. But ultimately, the promise of safety in this life or the afterlife is illusory.

The Spiritual Journey to Heal or Be Free of Pain

For those who feel hurt and wounded, the spiritual journey is specifically about getting rid of pain. That is certainly related to feeling happy and safe. There’s a lot of overlap between these three spiritual goals I’ve mentioned. However, with the healing path, not feeling hurt is far more important.

To be sure, some very dedicated people come from the healing path. They are often willing to go farther than most others because they are driven by pain. In many respects, pain is their spiritual teacher–at least their first one.

The First Spiritual Teacher for Most People and Going Beyond

So any plant medicine journey, sweat lodge retreat, breathwork, or anything at all that offers relief from pain is sought after.

People seeking healing often find teachers like me who talk about freedom from suffering, but freedom from suffering is different than freedom from pain. The spiritual freedom path may work well for the person trying to heal wounds because the ego is often the source of a lot of pain. So deep healing has happened and continues to happen for those who run into a teacher that helps them towards freedom from suffering. 

However, spiritual freedom teachers like myself are not focused on trauma healing, and it is critical to have trained trauma specialists to help someone who has one or several traumas.

Using a Spiritual Teacher as a Therapist

Unfortunately, people on the healing spiritual path tend to quit when their pain is gone. Their goal has been achieved. In all honesty, that’s not wrong. For example, for someone who has endured the pain of sexual trauma their whole life, being healed of that finally gives them a chance to live a normal life.

And that’s a big deal.

Healing Sexual Abuse

Quitting Spiritual Work After Resolving the First Issue

The Spiritual Path to Freedom

Lastly, the spiritual path to freedom is probably the least well understood. It does not seek to find happiness or safety. Both of those arise and pass. Despite our ego attempts to control life, life and our experiences will continue to shift. 

Healing does arise on this path, but that is a happy by-product of letting go of the ego. Having trained practitioners is critical to serious healing work, and deep healing needs to move through the mental, emotional, and physical levels to be complete. This is not what a spiritual freedom teacher is meant to focus on. I encourage those of you on the healing path to find the right people and resources to directly address the issues you want to heal.

The spiritual path to freedom is about letting go of our ego and all of our ideas about ourselves and life. It is an invitation to be profoundly present in this moment because we are always in this moment no matter what our minds do. It is an invitation to dissolve ego attachments to the past and to allow ourselves to find out what it means to truly live.

Sometimes the present experience is enjoyable. Sometimes it is painful. The path to freedom acknowledges that pain is part of this world. As we learn to acknowledge the reality of pain, the more we can be at peace with it. The more at peace we are with such things, the deeper we let go of not just the ego but some of the more basic and powerful animal desires and fears within us. This allows us to be untroubled even when our physical body is troubled by disease or other pains.

This is what is meant by being free of suffering.

And in general, this is what this blog is all about. Spiritual awakening or another significant spiritual realization or event is just a beginning point of ego dissolution. It is not the end. Each time we bring our attention back to the present moment, things can shift. Ironically, things shift and flow when we are no longer concerned with shifting things in life. Therein we find a dance between inaction and action as we dissolve into the present moment.

How to Find Spiritual Freedom

What Do You Want From Your Spiritual Path

Be honest with yourself. 

What do you really want from your spiritual path?

Take a moment to really consider this question.

Answer it, and then ask it again.

When you say that you want to find your purpose or something else, ask what does that really mean? 

What does it look like in the physical world? 

What does it feel like?

Again, I’ll emphasize that people usually find a combination of happiness, safety, and health/healing at the root of most their interests with spirituality. When we find that, we see our insincerity on the path.

This is a humbling thing for many people. After being humbled, we’re forced to let go of what we actually wanted to truly embrace the path to spiritual freedom, or we endlessly try things (teachings, retreats, spiritual techniques, etc.) to no good effect. The ego stays in control; we are still in denial.

I’ve watched this happen with many people.

It truly is humbling to come face-to-face with your insincerity, and the ego will scream if you let go of what it is you’ve been after. But that is the choice you’ll likely be confronted with. All I can say is that the release from the ego suffering is beyond value. You learn to see what life actually Is, and then you go live it.

Want help on your spiritual path? Consider coming to one of my classes. I announce upcoming classes via my newsletter. You can sign up here:

(Updated 11/2/2021)