A love-centered spiritual practice should help you become more connected with yourself and others. While some spiritual seekers eschew the modern world and withdraw into solitude, there’s no reason you must adopt such a lifestyle. It’s possible pursue spiritual development in isolation, but the principle of love suggests it’s at least as important to do so by interacting with other people. If we’re all spiritually connected anyway, then why not explore that through direct interaction?
Quiet reflection and meditation can be powerful spiritual practices to help you connect within, but it’s best if they’re combined with abundant social interaction. Allow yourself to gain spiritual lessons both from your inner world and your outer world. Sometimes your answers will come from stillness; other times they’ll come from direct communication. Listen to both channels.
A sound spiritual philosophy must be firmly rooted in truth. This requires that we strive to perceive reality as accurately as possible. How exactly can we achieve accuracy when trying to perceive the true nature of reality? We can’t just use our eyes and ears to look up the meaning of life.
A practical solution to this dilemma is to view reality through multiple belief systems in order to seek the big picture. Your beliefs act as lenses that cause you to focus on different aspects of reality. A Muslim, a Buddhist, and an agnostic may all view the world differently, yet there are clearly areas where their perceptions overlap. When we dismiss the incongruencies, we find there are areas of consensus. What’s most notable is that the commonalities consist of the universal principles of truth, love, and power. To the degree that various spiritual philosophies agree with each other, they all encourage their practitioners to seek greater alignment with truth, love, and power. In the areas where they don’t agree, you’ll typically find falsehood, disconnection, and disempowerment. Despite the wide range of spiritual belief systems, it’s wonderful to see that the common denominator is that we all inherently value these three fundamental principles.
The word spirituality refers to your collection of beliefs about reality, including your understanding of how reality works, as well as your personal role in the universe. Whether you participate in a popular religion or take an independent path, whether you believe in divine creation or adhere to strict physical objectivity, your beliefs about reality define the overall context of your life. In this sense, all of us are spiritual beings because we all have certain beliefs about reality. Even to believe nothing can still be considered part of a spiritual belief system.
Your spiritual growth is an integral part of the process of human development. The principles of truth, love, and power don’t dictate a specific spiritual philosophy, so there’s plenty of freedom to explore a variety of beliefs. However, the principles do establish that the highest ideal for your spiritual philosophy is intelligence. If your beliefs don’t fulfill the requirements of intelligence at the very least, they can’t be considered spiritually sound because they’d be in violation of universal principles. If a spiritual philosophy succumbs to falsehood, if it disconnects you from life, or if it weakens you, it runs afoul of the principles and will only lead you astray.
Do your best to build authentic relationships with other people. They won’t ever turn out perfectly, but perfection isn’t necessary. The wheels on your car aren’t perfect circles, but they still roll just fine. Similarly, none of your relationships will be perfectly aligned with truth, love, and power, but they can still provide incredible growth experiences.
One of the best things you can do to attract new people into your life is to focus on your own creative self-expression. By expressing yourself authentically, you draw others to you, making it easier to form compatible new relationships.
Courage plays a variety of important roles in human relationships. First, you need courage to initiate new connections and overcome the fear of rejection. Second, you need courage to intimately connect with people. Third, you need courage to face the truth about relationships that have gone awry. And finally, you need courage to end those relationships that no longer serve you.
If you want to bring new relationships into your life, don’t wait for others to come to you. You must take the initiative. In the long run, waiting causes too many missed opportunities and leads to regret.
You’re in charge of your own destiny. While chance encounters may play an important role in your life, you’ll get the best results by consciously deciding what you want and taking action to get there. Taking command of your relationships doesn’t mean controlling or dominating other people. It simply means holding yourself in high enough esteem to know you deserve to experience the connections you desire.
Because of the inherently personal nature of this area of life, you can’t simply delegate it to someone else. If you want to be effective at connecting with others, you must strive to become your own relationship authority.
When we want to reach out and develop new relationships, we need to remember that everyone else is already connected to us. We’re all individual cells in the same body, and the notion that we’re all separate and distinct beings is nothing but an illusion. Technically we don’t have to build relationships with other people from scratch. We need only tune in to the fundamental connection that’s already there.
The reason this mind-set is so effective is that when you assume a preexisting connection, people tend to pick up on your openness and respond in kind. Apparently, the best way to break the ice with someone is to assume there never was any ice to begin with. This is especially true of those who are very conscious and self-aware. Such people naturally respond to friendly overtures from like-minded individuals, and hurtful rejections are rare. If you approach someone from a mind-set of oneness and are rejected harshly, it’s a safe bet the other person isn’t aligned with this principle and would therefore be incompatible with you anyway. The nice thing about oneness is that it naturally attracts other who feel the same and filters out those who don’t. The more you resonate with oneness, the more oneness-oriented relationships you’ll attract, thereby further reinforcing your experience.
The best relationships serve to increase your power rather than diminish it. The point of entering into a relationship is to increase your alignment with truth, love, and power, thereby experiencing greater wholeness. If a connection pulls you further out of alignment, it isn’t worth maintaining. The longer you cling to disempowering relationships, the weaker you become. Your best relationships will help you meet your needs, fulfill your desires, gain clarity, and feel more connected. They’ll add value to your life in ways that are important to you.
If you succumb to relationships that weaken you or make you feel trapped, you’re giving your power away. It’s your responsibility to remedy such situations, regardless of the circumstances. Realize that you can choose to leave at any time. There may be negative consequences to doing so, such as loss of income if you leave an abusive partner, but such problems are temporary. When you drop disempowering relationships, you can expect to regain your power soon enough. Unfortunately, the very nature of abusive connections is that they undermine you to the point that it’s hard to even imagine being strong again. If you find yourself in a situation that weakens you and you don’t choose to leave, then you’re choosing to stay, which means you’re choosing to abuse yourself.
