The Spiritual Distortion | Amber Hawken Dip. Mindfulness CBT

If you lose the lightness of life, you are missing the point…

While the culture of spiritual growth and development has a beautiful centre stage in our lives these days, there are two major distortions we seem to be getting stuck in:

1. Spiritual Bypassing. I’ll let Robert Augustus Masters take this one…“When transcendence of our personal history takes precedence over intimacy with our personal history, spiritual bypassing is inevitable. To not be intimate with our past—to not be deeply and thoroughly acquainted with our conditioning and its originating factors—keeps it undigested and unintegrated and therefore very much present,”
2. Spiritual Reformation void of playfulness and joy. It’s ridiculous to suggest I am any measure of a go-to guru who can define spiritually. I’m sharing from experience here. After a few hundred clients, I’ve noticed a pattern of seriousness and rigidity within those who are on a *path* of growth or spiritually seeking. It almost a performance they don’t even realise they’re playing out. An assumed appropriateness required of them on this journey. A placating or appeasing of anything too ordinary or human-like….

I believe that self-evaluation and self-criticism are basically neurotic tendencies that arise when we are distracted by the idea of who we need to ‘become’. There is no relaxed openness about how we move through life. We can’t trust ourselves to take a compassionate look at what we are because each move is measured (despite thinking we are living the dream). Consequently, we believe we cannot for a moment afford to fully embrace what we find if turn to a mirror.

We get busy seeking spirited experiences while obsessively looking over our own shoulder to ensure we are meditating properly, circulating enough wealth, setting intentions, bowing our third eyes and greeting strangers as siblings, consciously fucking, eating vegan or living a liberated anthem.

This is the self-consciousness disassociation from life. A subjective observation that perpetuates distortion of self, that many people believe is a spiritual path.

There is no joy in this approach, no sense of humour, no vital energy moving through your being.

Could this really be spiritual? Really? I think not.

What I believe is this: how we think about spirituality is what takes us away from wholeness.

And that we’d be better off focusing our attention on embracing the facts of life with a relaxed openness.

And by fact, I don’t mean: During photosynthesis in green plants, light energy is captured and used to convert water, carbon dioxide, and minerals into oxygen and energy-rich organic compounds.

I simply mean seeing what and who we are and what is, objectively. Allowing the position of the observer and observed simultaneously flex and shift. And to let joy weave through the process.

I recorded a voice message for my SuperCharged container this morning called “It’s already yours”.

Simple, easy and four minutes long reminding you that this moment it what we have to work it.

It’s the thing we are looking for.

You’ll probably end up seeing it when you stop searching.

Enjoy,

Ambs