In today’s world, it takes courage to think for yourself instead of blindly swallowing what others want you to believe. It’s up to you to hold yourself to the path with a heart and to follow it wherever it may lead, regardless of how others judge you for it. In the end, your spiritual practice must be immensely personal and consciously chosen.
As you progress along your unique spiritual path, you may experience periods of prolonged confusion lasting several weeks or longer. During such times, you may feel distant and disconnected. Reality suddenly makes very little sense to you, and you become uncertain of everything.
This dark night of the soul is a time of massive cognitive restructuring. Your mind is reconsidering its previous model of reality in order to complete the jump to a new level of understanding. Unfortunately, there are times when your old patterns are scrambled beyond repair, but new ones haven’t yet taken shape. When this happens, it can feel extremely unsettling. There isn’t much you can do except ride it out. Fortunately, once you complete one of these leaps, you enter a period of incredible clarity. It’s like your whole mind has been returned to a new level of truth.
I (Steve Pavlina) recall going through one of these periods a few years ago. I was trying to reconcile my high-level personal spiritual path with the practical realities of running my business. On the one hand, I was very dedicated to helping people grow. On the other hand, I was a successful entrepreneur running a business. However, I lacked an overall spiritual philosophy that brought these two parts of my life together in a way that felt good to me. I was experiencing a conflict between running a business to generate income and wanting to help people as selflessly as possible. For many weeks, I lingered in this place of inner darkness and uncertainty. Eventually, my mind was able to perceive a new underlying order that made perfect sense to me. I realized that we are all cells in the same body, and that the health of the body depends on the health of the cells. This made it clear that if I wanted to effectively serve others, I had to make sure I was also meeting my needs, or my work wouldn’t be sustainable.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina