Spiritual People Sometimes Have the Biggest Challenge When They Do The Work
It’s kind of funny.
In one sense, spiritual people actually have an advantage. Spiritual people are used to letting go and moving on when things get stressful. And that’s all The Work really invites us to do anyway.
But on the other hand, spiritual people often have another challenge. Spiritual people often have more intellectual understanding of spirituality than most folks. And this can be a disadvantage. Because it’s easy to get lost in the clouds, instead of being real with yourself in inquiry.
What I mean by this is that it’s tempting for spiritual people to rely on intellectual concepts that they have learned–and spiritual sound bites–to answer the questions of inquiry.
Spiritual Sound Bites Get in the Way
This happens a lot when giving examples for the turnarounds. Just know it as a tricky way the mind has of sidestepping inquiry. True inquiry is asking a question and waiting for our inner wisdom to emerge with something genuine for us.
But sound bites short circuit the process.
Instead of asking ourselves if the opposite could be true, and then waiting for our own wisdom to enlighten us, we jump to something we once read or heard from some other spiritual person. And we miss inquiry.
Inquiry Is Meditation
Though it uses the intellect, it is not intellectual. Inquiry is more akin to listening to the heart than to trying to figure it out.
The heart’s wisdom seems to always bring an angle that the intellect alone cannot see.
The heart’s wisdom may even sound just like the things you’ve read in books, or heard great spiritual teachers say. But I invite you to find your own quiet wisdom, and voice it in your own words to reflect what you are feeling in your heart in that moment. And avoid the shortcut of borrowing the words of someone else (even your own words from your own previous experiences).
Each Inquiry Is a New One
Maybe you’ve already worked something similar, and are tempted to copy and paste your answers from last month, or last year, into your inquiry now.
You could do it. Others might be impressed. But it probably won’t touch the small stuck place you’re in now. To get out of that hole, you have to find your own genuine, internal answers afresh in this new stressful situation.
It’s Easy to Be Wise in General
But can you find your wisdom in this stressful moment? The moment that you wrote about on your Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet?
In my experience, that’s the only way inquiry can open my heart. Only when I forget all my spiritual learning and experience from the past, and start fresh with me as a newbie in this stressful situation. Only when I listen to myself as if I were stuck for the very first time. Only then can I take the small step of understanding necessary to release this particular stress I have in this moment.
Have a great week,
Todd
“Nothing outside you can ever give you what you’re looking for.” — Byron Katie, Loving What Is, p. 206.
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