Wow, is this important for spiritual practice and inner development.

Give yourself permission to forget.
I repeat.
Give yourself permission to forget.

Forget what?

2 things…

your daily demands
and
your inner demands

When you focus on your inner development, give yourself permission to forget the demands of your daily life.

When you focus on your daily life, give yourself permission to forget the demands of your inner life.

If you do this you will find guilt, shame and anxiety fading out of your life. Without guilt, shame and anxiety, life happens joyfully.

I am going to interrupt myself because I have a burning, just now crystalizing, insight to share.

There is a big difference between spiritual practice and spiritual development. Lots of people have a spiritual practice but don”t spiritually develop. A spiritual practice is something one does to maintain a relationship to spirit. Spirit can be an external being/god or an internal state. Prayer, contemplation, meditation, sacred movement, and sacred reading are all active forms of spiritual practice.

Spiritual development, on the other hand, is a dynamic commitment to the healing, liberating and empowering of your relationship to your selfhood, the divine being within. Being dynamic means you will dwell in paradox in order to develop. You will risk the familiar in order to find the true. You will die in order to become. You will release in order to grasp. You will stop seeking answers in order to find questions. No matter what you feel, you will feel compassion for yourself. You will play. You will change tracks and directions often. You will see silliness in all things serious and something profound in all things ridiculous.

My Inner Year work is not about spiritual practice. It is about the practice of spiritual development. So if you are someone who “can’t” meditate, or someone who does meditate but wants more (as in spiritual hunger, not spiritual greed) then you will find support for your spiritual development in my work, the Inner Year.

Back to forgetting demands.

Most of us suffer with conflicting and nagging demands on our time, our energy and our attention.

I bet as you read this (and hopefully find yourself pausing to think about what you have read) you may be doubting the rightness of using your time, energy and attention this way. You have a list of to do’s and a picture of a life of order, design and completions. You have piles of stuff to take care of and yet here you are staring at the computer screen! Right now forget the stuff. It’s okay to forget the daily demands, when you are taking a few moments to nurture yourself.

Likewise, don’t worry if you get so involved with your stuff, that you don’t do your yoga, or sacred reading. This also goes for falling asleep without your evening spiritual practice of prayers or meditation because you are exhausted from doing so much. Give yourself permission to forget your inner life.

Just forget demands. Forgetting makes life less anxious and more manageable. Give joyful energy and joyful attention to what you are doing in the moment. Being responsible is joyful. Learn to feel joy and you will find order, design, and completion in your life, your daily life and your inner life. Joy comes first.

Now I will joyfully return to the work I was doing on developing facebook fan pages for the Six Christmases.

And please, joyfully comment or send me an email.

PS: Inner Advent is the work of spiritual development and the willingness to remember. It reveals how you spiritually and practically evolved as an individual and a member of humanity over the year. If you feel you would find benefit and clarity in working through a designed and orderly path of self-reflection over four weeks, do sign up for the Inner Advent teleseminar here.