Walking the Spiritual Path Pt.II
Walking in the most extraordinary ordinary thing
Hello. Welcome to part two of Walking the Spiritual Path, part one can be read here. Come with me for a stroll on a path known for its solitude and loneliness. Friends aren’t always the easiest thing to find on this particular path so the company is appreciated. I hope you enjoy this post!
A quick side note before we get started, I’m away on retreat from tomorrow (21/06) and won’t be around until 27/06. If you like this post then please do me a massive favour and restack it, it’d go a long for me. Thank you very much. I look forward to telling you all about the retreat soon, it’s a special one!
Regan x
It may not seem it, it probably doesn’t, but walking the spiritual path is hard. To tell the truth it’s not for the faint of heart. That’s not a humble brag on my part. People who find themselves on the spiritual path find themselves on it because it’s the only path left for them to take after all other available paths have failed in spectacular fashion. It’s easy to see why people think it’s a lovely, relaxing, peaceful thing to do. You know, the photos of people sitting in full lotus quietly meditating. Effortless yoga poses. All those healing crystals, tea leaves, and tarot cards. Peaceful, right? That’s a funny joke, isn’t it? Show me a person who didn’t end up on the spiritual path because of either an external or internal crisis and I’ll show you a whole horde of people whose everything blew up in their faces leaving them with questions no friend at the pub after work could answer, only laugh at.
In my world quiet, relaxing meditations are often a reward for agitation, pervasive thoughts, invasive memories, physical pain, persistent difficult emotions, tears, and questioning my sanity. I’ll have a couple of lovely sessions, either sitting or walking, and then off I go with seemingly never-ending crazy making for an indefinite amount of time. It’s intellectually easy to know what to do while meditating, but anyone who’s ever put it into practise knows. You just know… Grounding yourself when you feel like the floor is lava generally has zero appeal to anyone, no wonder spiritual bypassing is something we’re all guilty of from time to time. I would love to give the impression of a yogi in the mountains at one with the Universe, but that’s not true. It’s far removed from it. To be honest, meditation isn’t an exciting part of my day, especially recently, it takes discipline because I do strongly believe and have faith in its benefits, that’s what allowed me to keep it as a daily practise otherwise I would’ve binned it a while ago. It’s the faith that I have in my practise that compels me to stay at Buddhist monasteries to deepen my practise for a short time and attend retreats. What normal person is really into noble silence? I’m not normal and nor are you if you’re reading this.
A common form of conditioning received by children is one that shuts down the heart to the world. For most children, unfortunately, it works a charm. For some children it’ll mostly work until everything becomes too much at a certain point in their lives, usually as adults. One day that child who became an adult will be sitting in a room at home on their own. Their head will be spinning and their mouth will feel numb after too much booze, but they’ll be halfway through drinking a double helping of scotch, a nightcap, and they’ll wonder why everything feels so shit in their life. They’ll ask if there’s more to life than eat, sleep, work, repeat in the larger cycle of born, school, get a job, meet someone, marry, kids, retire, die. They’ll feel like they’re sinking in absolute ceaseless despair. Maybe they’ll remember how as a child they wanted to be a vet or even an astronaut, how as a teenager they wanted to start a band and travel the world partying, and how now as an adult life feels like a massive lie. As a consequence they have developed a deeply cynical approach to the world around them, feeling hurt and betrayed by nigh on everyone and everything. The anger that they don’t register in themselves comes out as passive aggression. The tension they don’t recognise, along with the stress that caused it, appears as migraines. They feel extreme jealousy when they see someone doing what they want to do even though they’ve forgot that they want to do it, at that point in their life they’ll wonder why that person even thinks they’re good enough for such things. One day, completely random, out of the blue, something will happen. Little by little they’ll start to remember who they once were and they’ll realise what went wrong. The heart starts to open again. The heart opening again sounds lovely, and it is, but it’s not without its price to pay. A person whose heart starts to open will never be able to live the same life ever again. Everything must change. You start to feel some things, then you feel more things, then you feel everything at all times and don’t know what to do with it. Those TV programmes that you liked? The horror movies? The local news that you never gave a flying fuck about? You feel that, you really feel that. When The Witcher first aired on Netflix I couldn’t get enough of it, now I can’t believe how violent it is and that we call it entertainment. Apparently watching people be run through with a sword is a pleasant way to pass the time. That aside, these days I cry so easily at things I would never have noticed before. I’ve cried at Star Trek and Clarkson’s Farm to give some examples. In summery of this paragraph, walking the spiritual path really opens you up to the world whether you’re ready for it or not.
I spend a lot of time on my own. I’ve mentioned that several times in several posts now, but it’s just a fact. I look at some of the spiritual publications here on Substack and everyone seems to be effortlessly one with everything and I wonder where I’m going wrong. It seems that on the outside these spiritual practises, the meditations, the contemplations, the non-doing, the silence, etc, are all so easy to do. Let me tell you, based off my own experiences, that’s mostly not the truth. While I enjoy solitude, I hate being on my own. Believe or not, there’s a difference. The other day I got very scared while meditating to the point I couldn’t keep my eyes closed any longer and I had to focus on a candle. The reason? I was frightened of being abandoned and the darkness behind my eyelids was all too much. I wasn’t exactly on my own, the cat was in the room with me snoring about 4 feet away from where I was practising. As a practitioner of Buddhism you could say to send myself Metta, but that’s very difficult to do when everything in your body is screaming at you to run. It was enough that I managed to remain sitting for the duration of the session staring at a candle and trying to investigate and be with what was going on. Why didn’t I get up and walk you ask? Because I knew that given how I felt it wouldn’t have made one jot of a difference. I imagine that for many practitioners of the spiritual path out there that my experience isn’t an unfamiliar one. If anything I imagine that something similar happens fairly regularly. It may not be meditation, not everyone meditates. It could be that the even though the planets are aligned a certain way none of it seems to be happening for you. It could be that the cards make no bloody sense at all. It could be that your Tai Chi practise feels more like wanting to Karate chop someone in the windpipe. Maybe God has done a moonlight and left you with the world of shit to deal with at the worst possible time? Perhaps you got the opposite of what you wanted to manifest and you feel picked on by the Universe? I’m very of the slightly unpopular opinion that these spiritual subtackers, youtubers, business owners, gurus, guides, etc, all have to make some sort of a living, in other words they need to make money, and saying that they feel like a complete mess quite often and that their practise feels like a fucking minefield isn’t what people want to pay money for. When people pay money for these things they’re paying for wanting to feel all “zenned out” and a little less stressed. They don’t want to know that the person who they’ve went to for guidance lost it because they couldn’t find their housekeys before popping to the shop or the blow-up argument they had with their neighbours over their cat crapping where it shouldn’t.
Money and spirituality. That’s a difficult topic. Quite a controversial one too. I think we can all agree that money is a non-negotiable fact of life. Wherever you look there’s money and things cost money. Are some things grossly over-valued? Yes. Are some things so valuable they’re priceless? Yes. Do we all get our knickers in a twist when it comes to money? Yes. Guilty as charged. I’m not 100% sure where I stand on the topic of spirituality and money. It’s a complex one. A new age spiritual teacher who I’ve followed for a while and whose work I deeply respect went on a tour through Europe last year and I thought I might go along to her London workshop. It was at a small-ish venue, nothing special. My jaw dropped when I saw the price of the tickets. To sit at the back where you could see no one or nothing nearly cost three figures. To get a front row seat cost just over four figures. Like the majority of spiritual teachers she’s on a mission to help people, but going by the price of the tickets it seems that the people who she wants to help have a very healthy bank balance and no money problems whatsoever. Should she be charging the prices that she does? I don’t know. By the time you factor in travel, accommodation, food, venue and equipment hire, team members, insurance, actually paying yourself too, etc, I can only imagine that just to say you’re holding a workshop somewhere incurs a huge cost before a ticket is even sold. Does that justify front row seats costing four figures? If people will pay that just to sit at the front then I suppose it does, just not in my world. On the other side of the coin I don’t pay a penny for staying at Buddhist monasteries or attending retreats. These are all freely given. Monasteries do ask that you bring some form of offering, whether that be in the form of food or something else that’s needed, but you’ll never be turned away for the lack of an offering if you don’t have anything to give. None of it is means tested either, which is to say that your judgement as to your situation is trusted. So who’s right? It depends on how you look at it. Both. Neither are wrong. Personally I feel more inclined to make offerings and donations to places like Anukampa or Amaravati than I do to pay for an event by the aforementioned new age teacher. But that’s just me. I’m of the opinion that a person who charges four figures for a front row seat doesn’t need my money as much as someone whose work is freely available. Morally I don’t feel like spiritual teachings should ever be locked away behind a paywall, but the new age teacher in question has well over a decade of weekly videos on YouTube which don’t cost a penny either which she has mentioned several times when people have complained about the price of her events. Also, there is non-dual teacher who I follow whose organisation is a not-for-profit. The cost of retreats, events, etc have tiered pricing, pay it forward options, and scholarships available for those who can’t afford to pay for it. This a platform I have a lot of respect for, but I can only imagine that day-to-day practicalities have to be supplemented via other streams of income. Energy companies and supermarkets (feel free to add to the list) don’t care that you run a not-for-profit so that no one is excluded from potentially life changing spiritual teachings… Circling back to the beginning of the paragraph spirituality and money is a difficult topic.
Spirituality is a difficult topic to be honest, never mind the money. The thing is the path that we tread looks so different for everyone. There are no two paths that are the same. What I do is different to you, and what you do is entirely different to the next person. I think that’s what makes it a very lonely path to tread. The road ahead is long, rough, empty apart from tumbleweed, friendly faces can’t necessarily join you for the journey and if they can then they often can’t join you for very long. We turn to spirituality as a coping mechanism in a sick and crazy world hoping for some kind of sanctuary. We might find that sanctuary, we might not. The sanctuary might be fleeting, the eye of the storm, rain in the middle of a heatwave. No one turns to spirituality because they’re ok, but at least those who do are clear headed enough to know that there’s so much more to life than what they’ve been told even if they don’t realise it. They start off stressed and in need of a break, they then end up angry at a hidden hand with a nefarious agenda, they then give up the fight and feel even more lost than they were to begin with, they then have a breakthrough moment and see their part in the workings of the world and the Universe at large, they then feel even more lost, and then another breakthrough, then lost, then a breakthrough. It goes on and on. Trying to explain to someone who isn’t spiritual mostly makes you sound like a nutter. Is it ok? Yes, and no. Some people are ready to hear it, and many aren’t. That’s ok. I remember searching about how to deal with unconscious people in 2020. I find the idea laughable now, you deal with anyone and everyone exactly where they’re at. It doesn’t matter if someone is conscious or not, no one is a lesser being because they don’t have a spiritual practise. A good question to ask yourself is are you really conscious? Are you really a fully awakened being? I doubt so, I very much doubt so. Hardly anyone is. Most people’s pets are more awakened than they are. My cat is far more clued up about the secrets of the Universe than I am. The thing with the spiritual path isn’t that one has reached a certain point, it’s that one keeps moving forward regardless of where they’re at. There are no laurels to rest on, there is always work to be done. I hate quoting suttas but the Buddha implored the monastics to strive ceaselessly as he lay there dying, he knew what he was talking about. All these things can be incredibly difficult to explain to someone. That doesn’t mean that you don’t explain it, although sometimes it’s better not to (discernment, people!), it means you that if you do try to explain it that you have meet people where they’re at. You never know, what you have to say may be the very thing that changes someone’s life for the better. The Buddha after he attained enlightenment wasn’t going to teach anyone, he felt that what he came to understand was too subtle, that no one would understand it. It took for the Brahma Sahampati to appear in front of him and beg him to teach saying: "Lord, let the Blessed One teach the Dhamma! Let the One-Well-Gone teach the Dhamma! There are beings with little dust in their eyes who are falling away because they do not hear the Dhamma. There will be those who will understand the Dhamma." Can you imagine a world where the Buddha didn’t teach or where no highly attained being ever said a thing?
Does anything I’ve written today make spirituality worth it? If it’s so bloody hard then why do we do it to ourselves? Show me one person who says that despite everything it’s not worth it and I’ll show you an entire horde of us who say that despite everything it’s the most worthwhile thing that they do, including me. When you start to see the workings of the Universe and the part you play in it, how you keep the cycle of Samsara turning, suddenly things start to make a little bit of sense. It’s in those moments of peace and stillness, of feeling rooted to the Earth and grounded to existence, that you realise you’ve been chasing the extraordinary when really it was the most ordinary thing all along. It’s in the silence that you start to see the beginning and end of everything over and over again and the magic inherent in it. You start to understand that it’s not happiness that we’re searching for, it’s contentment and those brief moments of contentment are the very air that you breath, air that feels like a cool forest after a gentle rain in the middle of spring. You realise that time is just there to make us do things. This is why people who turn to the spiritual path stay on it. This is why you stay on it. This is why I stay on it. This is why people dedicate their entire lives to it, some in larger ways than others. The hell that you go through in the meantime is merely a reflection of the mess that we as humans have got ourselves into by looking in all the wrong places and by craving after that which has no power to bring us ease.
Thank you for coming for a walk on this spiritual path with me today. I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to add your own thoughts about the topic in the comments. I find other people’s experiences deeply interesting.
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