Becoming a wiser mature person — how do you do it? For spiritual development, it’s more than just aging and having more experiences, which come automatically. It’s what you do with your time and opportunities that makes the difference.
Shakespeare’s King Lear offers a cautionary tale for us here. The king made some bad decisions on ruling his kingdom with his adult daughters. His most virtuous daughter wouldn’t flatter him, so he gave his kingdom to his fawning daughters, who manipulatively praised him.
As a result, he lost his kingdom — and in the end, he lost his health and sanity. At one point, his companion/counselor — “the fool” — told him: “Thou should not have been old till thou had been wise.”
Part of self-improvement is determined by two factors: having free will and how timing plays into our journey. Free will gives us the ability to choose, to create our destiny by our choices. Whether we make growth or fear choices matters.
Also, there is a timing to life. Sometimes we need patience, other times it’s good to strike while the iron is hot. Plus there are life stages. Often by midlife, for example, a transition or crisis causes us to pause and possibly change direction.
Keeping in mind these considerations (free will and timing), here are five ways to grow spiritually.
Your life is a series of choices. How do you decide which choice to make, to live most fully now and going forward?
Let’s examine three essential components.
Where you have a choice – whether big or small – you may notice a feeling in your gut or heart. The gut and heart do overlap.
To distinguish, a gut feeling has more to do with instincts, keeping one safe. Following your heart takes you in a more soulful direction, connecting with the bigger picture around you.
It’s wise to consider both your gut instincts and heartfelt guidance.
An important caveat on the intuitive mind:
If you step back and consider your life as a whole for a moment, a deeper awareness can emerge.
You realize you are on a lifelong journey, the author or hero of the story that you are now creating.
That your life could be part of a bigger picture ─ something beyond a sense of time and space and material, physical things ─ is an awakening in itself.
In this moment, you can awaken to a greater you, a deeper meaning, a bigger context. a greater life.
At a certain point, it becomes more apparent that you won’t live on this plane, on earth, forever. So you might as well make the most of it.
Isn’t that why you (your presence, what brought you to earth) came here? Aren’t you here for some reason, beyond mere surviving and existing (although that is part of the scheme of things too)?
Coming on seven decades now, for us aging well becomes increasingly important. We have felt that successful aging means a holistic approach – body-mind-spirit.
Our experience – as well as research – has shown four keys to help you live fully. We are talking here about living with the power of your soul, growing wiser with fulfillment.
Here are four keys:
Have you considered that all the separation we’re seeing in our world may be becoming so extreme it’s making us come together? If we don’t come together, it seems we may fall apart. So coming together will help us not only survive, but grow, regenerate and thrive.
As you know, separation is showing up on many fronts: conflicts in race, politics, environment and more.
Perhaps the solution to these growing rifts is to make the following a priority: to mature spiritually. We automatically get older, but what we are talking about here is becoming wiser.
Before we offer some how-to specifics, let’s start with a fundamental principle for spiritual growth. We are all spiritual beings – regardless of race, creed or religion – having a human experience.
And we all deserve dignity, no matter how “bad” an actor a person is, however narrow-minded, belligerent or destructive that looks like.
Just as peace begins with me, so spiritual growth begins with me too. This means facing one’s own narrow-mindedness, hostility and destructiveness as well as others’.
To gain clarity in maturing spiritually, here are three comparisons to help move us forward.
Do you have hope, hope for a better tomorrow? We hope so, some pun intended.
In a world of COVID-19, civil unrest, climate change and more, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and feel helpless.
That is why hope is an essential quality, both a state of mind and an emotion. It’s not something to cling to, but to develop and cultivate.
It can find the light at the end of the tunnel, or there can be a “hope against hope,” with little prospects of success.
What is hope, then, and why is it so important for your life’s journey? Wikipedia notes that hope is an “optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one’s life or the world at large.”
In life’s meandering journey to wholeness, hope serves as an energetic tonic to empower us and get us there. The “there” in the future can become, with hope, a brighter present. In other words, today’s hope becomes tomorrow’s better future.
Hope then need not be a desperate measure, a Hail Mary pass when all else fails. It can become a vibrant hope, filled with love, healing and more, brimming with possibilities. Without hope, you become less confident, more weary.For without real hope, life drains out of you till you eventually become hopeless.
Words are so much a part of our lives, we rarely examine them. Here are a couple important things to keep in mind.
Our ongoing stream of thoughts contains many negative messages, some reasonable alerts, while many others are false warnings and alarms. We also re-play our favorite negative messages about ourselves and the world.
What’s more, living presents many societal problems that affect us. The media focuses on conflict as well, influencing – often unconsciously –how we describe things.
As a result, it’s easy to use negatively laden words and phrases without realizing the toll they take – on our daily life and the quality of our life
By contrast, using words with awareness can make a positive difference. Let’s explore how words can depress us or uplift us.
We describe below a powerful little exercise from our recent book The Ultimate Paradigm Shift.
Even in these times that try men’s souls, we seek an optimal future. The current challenges can inspire us to rise up and envision a better – a much better —world.
What kind of future do you want to live in? To answer this all-important question, here’s some help. Fill in this sentence:
“I want to live in a more ____________ world.”
Now imagine your personal journey through this awesome future.
The more you can craft an optimal future, the better for you and for the world. Your optimal experiences can reverberate in wonderful, unfathomable ways.
If you are a holistic-minded, heart-centered person, you have certain priorities. You want to make the world a more connected, loving place.
What you contribute, how you live your life, can make the difference. So as you elevate your life, the world around you grows and flourishes too. As you rise to greater vibratory heights, your perspective expands.
As you seek more freedom, meaning and depth in your future, you integrate this awareness into your present. Hence the future shapes your present.
For your exciting, future life, where do you want more freedom?
Check out our new Podcast: Soulful Living Show.
If you are interested in engaging information you can use, join us for this show on transformation for coaches, healers and holistic-minded, heart-centered people.
Each week. we share a key soulful success and prosperity tip for you — to focus on to uplift your week.
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What’s often the missing ingredient for love, healing and manifestation? Gratitude.
Gratitude is being thankful and appreciative, and more… Expressing it in your life is a game-changer. Gratitude can bring you up when you’re down. It can create a wonderful view alive, keeping you strong and flexible.
Learning how to express gratitude is a key to a wonderful life. Let it transform you. Here’s how…
Gratitude can get you through the morass of life, in all its uncertainty and confusion. It can help life make more sense.
When you use gratitude, it become a magic elixir for an empowering, transcendent life. It redirects your attention to goodness, even amidst the bad. It gives you a fresh outlook. You connect with others and yourself more. As research shows, you become healthier, happier and can even live longer.
You realize you are fortunate in so many ways. As you focus on your good fortune, it grows into 
abundance and prosperity, too.
Providing a backdrop for your life, gratitude can help you better handle loss and overwhelm. It provides a way to becoming a more open, humble person.
To make gratitude grow with all its wonderful benefits, you must plant the seeds. How? By practicing it. Include gratitude in your journal and meditation.
Also, gratitude and wonder arise from appreciating nature; the sky, the earth, the water all around us. It just takes an intention to do so.
