6 Spiritual Practices That Light You Up From The Inside
A therapist shares six non-religious ways to engage your spirit to heal and ignite your life.
vorDa | Canva Take a few minutes and make a list of what’s not working or is missing in your life. Look at the items on your list and ask yourself:
- What’s preventing me from getting what I want in any of these areas?
- What’s holding me back from creating what I want in life?
- What’s stopping me from doing the things I want to do?
- What’s preventing ne from moving forward?
As you answer these questions, you might blame something or someone outside of yourself as the source or cause of your problem. Or, perhaps, you’re blaming yourself. Thinking about all this probably also brought up negative feelings. It isn't easy to hold onto positive feelings when your mind is focused on what’s not working.
Instead, let's turn inside and look for a spiritual solution in order to find solutions.
Here are spiritual practices that light you up from the inside.
1. Practice remembering authentic happiness
Neither blaming external situations nor blaming yourself is likely to guide you in the direction of a more positive and desired outcome. Learning to light yourself up from the inside is something altogether different. You could almost consider this simple remedy a real miracle maker. And there’s more. The only thing required for consistent, more positive results is practice.
Photo: Sun OK via Shutterstock
Here's how:
Wherever you are at the moment, decide to create an imaginary bubble around you to prevent you from responding to any “distractions” that might threaten to interrupt these next few minutes.
Set the intention for no distractions, then feel yourself sitting in a chair with a straight back and your head held upright on your neck, neck supported by an aligned spinal column, allow your eyes to gently close and take in a deep breath to the abdomen, and notice the belly rising on the in-breath. Then, very slowly, let your breath out through your nose more slowly than it took to inhale that same breath. Repeat the breath, inhaling through the nose, into the belly, and then release the breath through the nostrils more slowly.
Next, with closed eyes, remember a time when you were really happy.
Allow yourself to remember sensory stimuli as vividly as you can. What were the smells, tastes, and sounds as you allowed your memory to be infused with the scene? What does it look like? What does it feel like? As you remember the sensations, notice the feelings of happiness as they spread throughout your body and mind. When you are fully immersed in the sensations of happiness, think about opening your eyes and coming back into awareness, then do just that, open your eyes. Notice your happy feelings.
Wasn’t that easy? How long did it take you to intentionally bring forward sensations of happiness? Probably less than 5 minutes? You allowed yourself to create an in-the-moment awareness of materializing a desired feeling. Bravo! Excellent work. Excellent imagining. Remember, all things originate from the imagination.
What did you notice about how you were feeling before the exercise? During? After? Presumably, your feelings switched to feelings of happiness during, and you were still able to notice happy feelings after. Who noticed these feelings?
2. Recognize you are the experiencer of an emotion, you are being the experience.
As you can notice and label the experience, you are distancing or separating yourself from the experience. Now, you can think different thoughts and in the process, change the experience to thoughts and feelings of happiness.
Whenever you notice yourself thinking, you take an important first step in choiceless awareness. You now can see you are not your thoughts. You can witness yourself having thoughts and as the observer/witness of your thoughts, you do not have to identify yourself as your thoughts.
You can also see, using the exercise we just walked through, that you can think of different thoughts and immediately change how you are feeling by prioritizing different thoughts.
Now, you have implemented two small practices rather than what probably seemed like only one. This is lighting yourself up from the inside! You are intentionally choosing to feel a particular way, in this case happy. And you are distancing yourself from being a feeling different from happy and noticing that when being the observer of a feeling you can consciously choose to feel differently.
Now let’s consider the meaning of spirituality. This refers to an internal sense of connection with something greater than our sensory and bodily sensations, greater than ourselves. It’s a process of discovering our true nature or true self. “Knowing thyself” can be described as a way of knowing that goes beyond what we can experience with our five senses. Spirituality is based on love and unity. It is cosmic. It is divine.
3. Meditate on "The Interrelatedness Between All That Exists"
Spirituality can be imagined as a sense of connectedness to something greater that includes all beingness, a sense of unity with everything that exists outside of the individual.
If we try to blame somebody or something outside of ourselves for what is happening to us, we’re walking down the wrong path. If we blame ourselves, it’s just as bad. What we need to do is recognize that everything happening to us is a reflection of the story we tell ourselves. It’s a mirror reflection. To accomplish change, we need to rewrite the story and tell a different story.
The universe can be seen as a blending of duality and the holy trinity. Duality is the law of opposites, where we are a combination of those opposites. When paired with the divine, we are a trinity and this can be seen as a world we both inhabit at all times and the worlds that we move between in our imagination.
4. Look inside and accept all that is happening
This gives us a different interpretation of what is going on in our lives. Once we can view it through a different lens, like a game, we can change it and co-create the world we want to inhabit rather than the lot we presume we’re saddled with. Rather than being trapped in a programmed, habitual pattern of existence where we’re essentially “sleepwalking” through our day-to-day activity, once we begin to wake up and expand our conscious awareness, we are allowed to discover the much more beneficial aspects of framing existence as being about perception and perspective.
Photo: Oleije Abigail via Shutterstock
5. Notice synchronicity where it happens
The more you can notice, journal about, and search for the personal messages of these meaningful coincidences, the more likely you will experience these messages from the universe more frequently. There is also the likelihood that by paying attention and interpreting these personalized messages, you will become more aware of being guided by a larger and more mysterious force than the day-to-day habitual nature of existence in this 3D world bound by linear notions of time and space.
6. Utilize the 'magic' liminal periods just before falling asleep and just after waking,
These periods are called hypnagogic and hypnopompic. There are other methods of tapping into a creative opportunity for capturing a universal connection. There are different techniques to wake yourself up just as you fall asleep. If you keep a notebook next to where you’re dozing, you can capture the imagery and thoughts that appear after waking yourself from the liminal state.
If you use automatic writing and write first thing each day immediately after you get out of bed, you will be able to capture the gems that appear once you establish a regular practice of this activity.
What do you imagine will change in your life as your desired outcome blossoms into being? Try these simple spiritual practices that light you up from the inside, and begin to find out.
Dr. Liz Zed, Ph.D., MCC, RCC & is a Lifestyle Design & Spiritual Coach who helps clients connect with their intuitive inner wisdom to unlock inner guidance. She is the author of Family Business Blueprint and creator of the Master Coach System.