SEVEN GREAT WAYS TO GET STARTED ON A PATH

    (1)  Keeping a Spiritual Journal is a wonderful way to record your ideas, break through mental barriers, clarify your thoughts, refine your goals, express your creativity, and provide an open channel for new feelings and intuitions to flow freely.  

      

     You may want to place a Title on the cover and write a short dedication (perhaps a sentence or two, or a prayer, or a favorite quote or sacred poem) as an initial entry: the first step is always the hardest, so start with something easy like this.  

      

    (2)  What do you find attractive about living a spiritual life? What do you find unattractive? In your Journal write a List of all the advantages of sleeping through life. (There are many! If there weren’t, we would all be awake all the time.) Then write a list of what you would expect to gain by being more alive and awake. 

     

    (3)  Write a Personal Prayer or Statement to meditate on that expresses your wishes, hopes, and dreams. Memorize it and repeat it silently as many times as feels appropriate and helpful, trying to make it a permanent part of your inner life.

      

    (4)  Drawing pictures, with crayons or colored pencils like a little child, can be an extremely useful way to get unused parts of our feelings and unconscious mind back into the game of life by bypassing the censoring parts of our brain. So take out your Journal and Draw a Picture of yourself! After you finish, you’ll want to contemplate the picture and see if any useful interpretive ideas arise via your intuition. Relax and give your imagination free rein.

     

    (5)  Are you angry at God? If so, tell him/her. Don’t be afraid s/he’ll be offended or angry. S/He can take it.

      

    (6)  Write your own Eulogy. What kind of person were you? What kind of son, daughter, wife, husband, parent, friend? What were your life’s values? What was most important to you? What did you accomplish? What did you fail to accomplish? On a scale of 1 – 10, where did you end up?  

Then give yourself a second chance. Write down what you will do differently if the eulogy is canceled. Where do you intend to be in one year? Five years? Twenty years? What will be different about your eulogy then?

    (7)  The art of Forgetting has become an essential part of our lives. By forgetting, we become comfortable with ourselves and our situations. We forget any sense of personal emptiness. We forget the sufferings of other people. This insidious comfort does indeed bring with it a certain form of happiness.

Have you experienced a basic, perhaps only semi-conscious, unsatisfactoriness running through your life? When you bring it up into the light of consciousness, what does it feel like? What is behind it? Write your thoughts and impressions in your Journal.