Spirituality is meant to make us whole, complete, and full. Physically, when we feel that peak health is diminishing, we can always go to the spa. Spas are places where people go to deeply relax, detoxify, and reinvigorate themselves in the hope of becoming the healthiest they can be. That is their aim.
Spiritually speaking, wanting to be the best I can be involves similar activities but on a spiritual plane. The aim of a spiritual journey is to fulfil our potential. For this I must revisit my aim and check if I am still on track. This keeps me refreshed.
The biggest obstacle to a sense of true spiritual well-being is the ego. Gross ego is often quite easy to notice. The ego that comes in more subtle ways is very pleasing and spiritually very dangerous. This expression of ego emerges as we start to make spiritual progress and see that we are beginning to develop lovely qualities.
To protect the self from the ego in its more subtle forms, we must take the soul to a spa – a spiritual spa – and soak in the core qualities of the soul.
To soak in the core qualities of the soul, I sit and examine to what extent I have become full of them. The core qualities of the soul are love, peace, happiness, purity and power. To see to what extent they are emerging in the way I express myself in my daily life, I need to check:
Love – how generous, kind, benevolent, and accepting of others have I become?
Peace – how calmly accepting, quiet, detached from expectations, and patient have I become in situations?
Happiness – how much contentment, inner joy, and appreciation of the beauty of small things have I accumulated?
Purity – how much am I living with simplicity, innocence, genuineness, authenticity, and humility?
Power – how spiritually strong am I? How much determination, willpower and stamina do I have?
My spiritual aim is to become completely full of all these core qualities, as I have felt them diminish over time and several lives.
The thing that is almost impossible to bear is the feeling of being empty inside. What usually happens is that we try to fill the void with anything we can find. This usually involves bad habits, addictions, and behaviour that ultimately makes us feel even more empty. Ego rushes in when I lack power and puffs me up while putting others down, or puts me down as a way to control the self.
If ego corrupts love, then we become attached, if ego corrupts happiness, then we become extroverted, if ego corrupts peace, then we become passive doormats. If we spend time in a spiritual spa of soaking in and experiencing all the truth of the core virtues, then we are able to shrink the gap that we have been trying to fill with behaviour that causes us sorrow.
We are souls, not bodies. We are consciousness, spiritual beings. However, the soul lives in the body and experiences the inner qualities through the body – the memories of the core qualities are stored in the body. Through meditation, a time of quietness and introversion, we can use the senses of the body to experience the core qualities more deeply. Here is a little exercise that can be done to access the core virtues in a different and enjoyable way. We can play with these ideas and experiences to fill in whatever emptiness we may feel from time to time, until we can complete our journey and become full and powerful once more:
Sit quietly and ask the self the following questions. Take your time and answer the first word that comes to mind. We can do this every day when we feel a little depleted, and the answers may change each time:
What does happiness look like?
What does love sound like?
What does peace taste like?
What does purity smell like?
What is the sensation of power?
“May you light up the world with the brilliance of your inner truth, spiritual love, and pure joy.”
“Focus on creating a new world with the power of your good wishes.”
Judy Johnson coordinates the activities of Brahma Kumaris meditation centres in Atlantic Canada.
