How I Strengthen my Spiritual Health

Today is the final episode of season four, and I am so grateful to each of you who has shown up and been brave enough to get in the arena.

In this episode, I talk about spiritual health. What spirituality is, how I went from being religious to being spiritual, and the things I do to keep my spirituality strong.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

1. Learn about the eight drivers of spirituality.
2. How I got to the place where I can say I’m a spiritual person rather than a religious person.
3. What I do to strengthen my spiritual health.

Episode Highlights

What is spirituality 

• When I was looking at ways to explain spirituality, I came across a great article on liveanddare.com that does a perfect job breaking it down.
• The author asked hundreds of people what they believed spirituality meant to them.
• He found that those interested in following a spiritual path are looking for one or more of the following outlined eight drivers.

1) Purpose and direction

• Whether you are on the top of the wheel of material life or at the bottom, there is an underlying sense of dissatisfaction, limitation, and emptiness.
• There is some form of existential anxiety.
• Spirituality is a search for meaning, purpose, and direction in life.

2) Love connection

• We seek connection and love, either in a community, being one with the universe, or connecting with the divine.
• We crave to receive and give unconditional love, which brings a sense of total acceptance and happiness to be alive.
• This search can also manifest as returning to the source, God, or a sense of sacredness. 

3) Growth

• There is an innate drive in many of us to evolve, improve, push the boundaries, and reach our full potential.
• The drive to continuously improve, learn, and live a life authentic to our truth.
• To develop our minds, cultivate virtues, and expand our consciousness.

4) Answers and truth

• We ask questions like who am I, and why are we here?
• A drive to understand how life works and to learn about ourselves.
• For some, this takes the form of understanding, absorbing, and becoming one with the absolute truth.

5) Happiness, peace, and overcoming suffering

• Suffering is the initial door of spirituality for many people, usually in the form of anxiety, grief, or fear.
• When our minds depend on external things for happiness, the experience of joy will be unreliable and impermanent, just like external causes are.
• Spirituality helps us gain balance, independence from external causes, and a greater appreciation of life.

6) Transcendence and enlightenment 

• Different traditions describe enlightenment differently, but the common theme is that it’s a state of transcendence from the human condition beyond the possibility of further suffering.
• There’s a radical, permanent shift in our perception, experience of the world, and moving beyond the sense of being an individual.
• It’s the urge to experience ultimate peace or freedom, find the ultimate reality of who we are, transcend the ego, and merge with God.

7) Exploration in mystery 

• Diving into one’s consciousness and exploring other aspects of reality speaks to our thirst for knowledge, experience, and adventure.
• Learning the mysteries of life and nature, exploring the sacred, and living with a sense of wonder.

8) Serving 

• The urge to serve people on a deeper level.
•  Making a big difference in their lives and helping the upliftment of humanity. 

Religion versus spirituality 

• My spiritual journey continues to evolve and grow, and one of those ways it has is thinking about my upbringing in religion versus being spiritual.
• I was raised as a practicing Roman Catholic, and I loved it.
• When I went to college, I stopped attending church regularly, which continued into my forties. It just wasn’t a priority.
• In moments of suffering, I’d question and get angry with God.

Your mess is your message, and your pain is your purpose

• In my moments of suffering, when questioning God, I heard someone say, ‘your mess is your message, and your pain is your purpose.’
• Something inside of me woke up at that moment, and there was a reason I was experiencing these challenges.
• That was the beginning of my insatiable desire to know more.
• This journey of learning more has led me to a place where I’m comfortable saying that I’m a spiritual person rather than a religious person.

Finding God within myself

• I resonate with the idea of wanting to find God within myself rather than a predefined set of beliefs from the scriptures. 
• I still fully believe in God, but I don’t feel the need to find him or her in a church.
• I am beginning to trust my inner voice and use it to guide my decisions and choices.

Making decisions using my core values

• When I’m faced with a decision, I always look at my core values first: love and kindness.
• If what I am making a decision on doesn’t feel like these two things, it’s not happening.

How I strengthen my spiritual health

• I want to give you some insight into four areas I focus on to improve my spiritual health.
• Below I discuss spiritual mentors, meditation, breathwork and angel cards decks.

Spiritual mentors

• I’ve had three spiritual mentors along my spiritual journey.
• They are Bree-Anna Vincent, Isabeau Maxwell, and Rebecca Campbell.
• I highly recommend finding two to three people you deeply resonate with and learning from them.
• Going through a spiritual awakening journey can be an exciting experience, and it’s comforting to know you’re not alone as others have come before us and can guide us.

Meditation

• If you’ve ever met me, you know that I take on way too many things at once and have a squirrel brain.
• The first time I tried meditation, I quit after two minutes, there was no instant gratification, and I was bored stiff.
• When I first experienced a deep meditative state, I came out of it with tears. I connected with my soul, with my higher self.
• A fantastic resource to use is Zen12.

Breathwork

• This is an area I have not excelled at, but I am working on it slowly.
• I was scared away when I took a deep breath in class and felt like I had a heart attack; the class was far too advanced for me.
• Some of the benefits of breathwork include improved mental clarity, increased performance, and reduced stress.
• I recommend Pause Breathwork with Samantha Skelly.

Angel card decks

• The main purpose of an angel card reading is to receive nurturing guidance from the angelic realm.
• You can find out more about your current life situation with angel card readings and receive encouraging wisdom from above.
• I use mine at least once a week and can recommend anything Kyle Gray has done.

What I’m grateful for 

• I am so grateful for everyone brave enough to get into the arena. You are proof that when you get vulnerable and use your voice, others will hear you and get inspired to do the same.

 

3 Powerful Quotes from this Episode

10:17 – “And then I heard someone say, your mess is your message, and your pain is your purpose. And something inside me woke up at that moment.”

11:44 – “Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected, by a power greater than us. And that our connection to that power, and one another, is grounded in love and compassion.”

22:23 – “You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher, but your own soul”. -Swami Vivekananda

 

Resources

EP 15 – My Spiritual Journey, Including a Visit From an Archangel!

EP 22 – The Power of Working With A Soul Coach – with Bree-Anna Vincent

Cracking Open: Adventures of a Reluctant Medium by Isabeau Maxwell 

Light Is the New Black: A Guide to Answering Your Soul’s Callings and Working Your Light by Rebecca Campbell 

Zen12: An hour of meditation in just 12 minutes.

Pause Breathwork: Experience Breathwork Online

Kyle Gray 

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Thanks for listening,

Tiffany