Spiritual practices have become more mainstream and made their ways to our living rooms, phones and minds. Lots of us use tools like meditation, yoga, journaling or plant medicine as powerful tools to help us thrive and become the best version of ourself.
So far the theory - but are all these practices really serving us ? Are the bringing us closer to our personal goals, making us feel more happy and relaxed ? physically or mentally stronger ? more grounded ?
I had a yoga teacher who would always have us setting an intention for our practice. First, I thought, it is obvious, I am here to practice yoga - but anything we practice without awareness and without being mindful doesn't really serve us.
During all this chaos around the pandemic, I had way more time to dedicate to all my favourite practices, from extended yoga in the morning to ayurvedic oil massage. And I had even more time to question if all these things were serving me personally and supporting me in living my best life or if they were - JUST ANOTHER KIND OF DISTRACTION.
A distraction well hidden behind a healthy or even spiritual mask. But you can do all the yoga in the world and read every spiritual book there is - if you don't take action towards living your best life, if they doesn't inspire you and guide you through living your best life or through rather tough times - why are we even performing them ?
This applies for certain plant medicines as well. Are you ready to learn the lesson and let them heal you or are you just here for another trip or a bit of dopamine?
I don't say that everything needs to have a profound reason or have to be taken super seriously. The purpose of a practice can be as simple as bringing you joy. Allowing you to take a break. Experience the beauty of your body.
But if your 10 step morning routine is giving you more stress than anything else or if you don't like indian spices in your food - less is more ! Why keeping doing it ? We can't be good or bad at spirituality. Wether do we have to dress or talk a certain way to have access to is. It is a tool to yourself. Feel free to ditch everything that doesn't feel like yourself along the way.
This step might be easy. But with that said, you can have the perfect morning routine, eat well balanced vegan meals, practice yoga before sunrise and live in a peruvian jungle for weeks ... but what happens once you grew from that? healed an old trauma. Rebalanced in body or mind ? Once you healed that part of you by dedicating time and love to the practices mentioned above or once you learned to skill you were looking for ?
Will you level up? Are you going to take the leap, take that energy and make it work for yourself and others? Start the training, book the flight, be more present for your kids or partners, sign up for that dance class, quit your 9 to 5 job ? Leave someone that is no longer good for you ? Build a home ? or sell everything and travel the world on a sailboat ?
Nomatter what life is about for you right now… these practices leads us through it, they don't replace it. They remove the obstacles that are holding us back and give us the energy, grounding and guidance we need to get where we're supposed to be.
If you just continue to stay where you are, repeating the same things over and over again, without a purpose, the practice is not really serving you. You don’t own your practice. It's owning you. You can compare it to clean it a floor that's already clean over and over again.
So sometimes, we should sit with ourselves. Breath. Check in. Set new intentions and see what and who can support us on our ways.
Consider the season you're in right now. We can need very different things depending on what is going on in our inner world or in the world outside. Some days we will need an energy boost, others we will need to ground down and sometimes, we just need something to hold on to.
Am I on the right path ? It's not always easy to see. But are the things I do everyday benefiting my mind and my body right now ? This is a question we can ask ourselves. What we do today defines our tomorrow. If something feels wrong in the inside, it is usually wrong.
By the way... stepping out of our comfort zone can be a bit scary and uneasy at first, but letting go of what is no longer serving you and expanding your practices is exciting and freeing and can bring you way closer to living your best life than repeating things to "perfection" that are no longer serving you.