Spiritual Growth and Self Improvement

Aside from the self-transformation you get from having a spiritual awakening, there are a number of benefits that you can get out of the same experience. Soul awakening and self-development leads to a balanced life. Eventually, the same balanced life will lead you to a happy and fulfilled life. But don't get me wrong, the ending is great but even the process can quite a rewarding experience. What spiritual awakening can do for you is more than just the physical benefits. You might not see it now but when you reached that state of spiritual enlightenment, you'll be glad that you've gone through the whole thing.

In reaching spiritual awakening you need meditation. And meditation itself has lots of benefits. Meditation can relieve stress for one thing which is highly ideal especially in the busy lives we have today. Working in the city and a highly stressful environment can bring a toll to the mind and body. Having daily meditation time can help relieve the stress and can in the long run make you healthier and your life longer. It will lead you to finding your true self and determining your real potential.

The effects of meditation might not be felt immediately. Some might even feel a little stress from the exercise but eventually when you do this on a more or less regular basis you will start to feel the effects kick in. It might take some time before you feel a certain level of calmness and peace but it will come. You will start to feel happier with yourself and with your surroundings. You will start finding the best out of a situation and not feeling depressed or angry all the time. You will become more patient and you can connect with other people more now. And not only that but you will find that you have a better understanding of who you are, a better understanding of your own consciousness. You will find that not only did your physical body improved, become healthier but your overall emotional and spiritual state have grown to some extent.

There are different meditation techniques. In fact, there are numerous schools of thought that provide different styles and approaches in finding your true self. Some would insist on having a mantra, a word that you have to repeat in order to calm your mind to begin the meditation process. There are some who would find having someone guide him or her through the meditation process as the most effective way to reach a calm state of mind. They seem to find it difficult to do it by themselves. The goal in meditation is to get to that place where you are totally relaxed, where nothing, including your mind interferes. It is a level of consciousness where you don't have unnecessary thoughts, or no thoughts for that matter play a role. Imagine yourself in a pitch black room. Even if you don't see anything you are aware that you exist. That is very similar to what we plan to do during a meditation process. You look into yourself and become aware of what or who you are without thinking. It is a higher level of awareness that we're looking for.

Okay, I do hope I am not complicating things nor making things ambiguous. But the truth is spiritual awakening cannot be described by simple words or in my case series of paragraphs. It is more than just words, it is more than just an experience. The important thing is that what spiritual awakening can do to you is more than you can hope for.

You open your eyes and started looking around. Everything seems to be in the same order as you left it a while ago but there seems to be something different. As you slowly stretched your arms and legs, you have this feeling of a relaxed or calm disposition. You feel refreshed, energized and, well, happy. It was a good meditation session. But sometimes you ask yourself what is a real spiritual awakening and if I have already attained such an experience. Some would argue that the experience of spiritual enlightenment is so profound and life changing that it is just impossible to miss. Still, when one achieves spiritual awakening, knowing the signs might help them realize that they are already in the place. Spiritual awakening is not a constant thing, I can come and go. Thus it could actually be better if you know if you're getting closer in achieving it or not.

Now, if we base our definition to the Buddhist and Christian approaches, we have a spiritual awakening rooted on the enlightenment or awakening of the consciousness and knowing their true or their original self. It is a higher form of awareness where the consciousness is able to see past the more obvious physical self. It is being aware, sensing and feeling one's very existence that accounts for a spiritual awakening.

Perhaps among the more obvious signs of enlightenment is having a certain level of calmness. People who have awakened spirits have proven to be more focused in attaining their goals. They seem to have reached a degree of calmness where experiences, memories, events, issues, problems, and even desires are no longer causing confusion and interruptions. It is like, every distraction have been set aside and stored away resulting to a having a clear path from the start to the finish line. And just like the song: "I can see clearly now, the rain is gone, I can see all obstacles in my way. Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind."

Among the signs of spiritual awakening is having self control. When one reaches the level of spiritual enlightenment, he not only exercises free will but knows what bad things need to be cast aside and choose only the right path based on proper wisdom and good judgment. Those that offer temporary pleasures are no longer entertained since these acts or things often lead to suffering in the long run and only provide momentary and earthly happiness.

Humility and selfless love are other signs of an awakened spirit. Part of having an awakened spirit is the eagerness to learn, understand, and work for the well being of not only one's self but of others as well. Pride and arrogance are not really marks of a good person to begin with what more a person with an awakened spirit. The same thing goes with unconditional love. With an awakened spirit, people will begin living in harmony with both nature and other people. Compassion and love would be equal regardless of race, nationality, culture, and the like.

Genuine happiness, non-attachment, having the right intuition and feelings of non-attachment are other signs of spiritual awakening. If you find any of these signs present in you when and after you accomplished a session meditating, it would be prudent to ask consider that you have actually experienced this deep, philosophical enlightenment.

When we are dealing with pain, whether it is physically or emotionally, we are unable to think clearly. Having clouded mind would mean that we are having difficulty getting in touch with our inner self, spirituality and ascending to enlightenment. Without spiritual awakening, we are in constant search of the meaning of our lives.

We need holistic spiritual healing to deal and attain spiritual awakening. Spiritual healing can be a bit weird coming from an age of modern medicine and technology. But it is difficult to ignore the fact that there is a Supreme Being, God or Allah, that are behind every things' existence.

In a survey published by USA Today last October 8, 2008, 55 percent of American adults regardless if they are agnostic, atheist, or religious, believe that there is a guardian angel or similar entity that protects them from harm. This only shows that spirituality and its acceptance has significant importance on a person's life.

In spiritual healing, it is said that physical healing depends on how the spirits heals. With spiritual healing, it treats not only the body, but the mind and the spirit as well. Spiritual healers, uses the concept of "light and love" to relax the body. Aside from relaxing the body, it also has several benefits like it releases tension and anxiety. Relieving these negative thoughts would increase the stimulation of self-healing.

The basic principle with spiritual healing is that you would get a connection with God and at the same time, secured and safe feeling. Patients would get the strength from the fact that they are not the only one who are experiencing what they are feeling. This would teach or give patients security and confidence to seek somebody for help. In a nutshell, spiritual healing is about paying attention to life and the living.

So what are the methods of spiritual healing?

Spiritual healing can be performed in different religions. It can be performed through prayer, visualization, devices that transmit healing forces, concentrations process and advance levels of it, and personal spiritual realization. These kind of methods would help patients recover from illnesses or slows down the effect of illness trough self-healing.

Counseling sessions are reinforced with spiritual healing. Spiritual healing is done with full rational understanding of its principles and not by blind faith or superstition. Undergoing spiritual healing with full understanding would provide you the awakening and enlightenment that would benefit you in the future.

The Kabbalah is a school of though concerned with the mystical aspect of Judaism. According to Kabbalistic teachings, the body is the vessel or the ship for the soul's expression and if the connection between the soul and the body is broken, diseases and disorders can happen.

To maintain the connection between the soul and body, here are some tips that can be done easily:

* Eating a balanced diet and regularly exercising
* Express yourself.
* Feel your surroundings.
* Never give up.
* Do not be afraid to ask for help.
* Spend time with friends and family. They would provide you the support and intimacy you would need to heal.
* Make sure to remember that you have a purpose and you are the one who create the meaning of your life.

With the help of a spiritual healer, not only would you attain a holistic better health, you can also dig deeper to your feelings and start your journey to spiritual awakening. With the help of breath work, creativity and experiential mind and body, your body can release the pain and start its journey to healing.

Spiritual awakening is not tied down to a religion as some people might think. People read the word spiritual and they immediately conclude that this is something for the religious or for the highly spiritual people. The spirituality of the self through spiritual awakening refers not to the religion of a person but to the consciousness or awareness of being, the realization that one exists. Various religious beliefs do have their own versions of spiritual awakening. Most are rooted on their own sets of religious doctrines and principles. Some have come to a spiritual enlightenment through meditations and self actualization. To them spiritual awakening is the removal of whatever layers or walls we have that cover or hide our true selves. It is having the experience of peace, the calmness, the fulfillment, and completeness. One person has so eloquently put it as waking up through a big bump to head. That of course is a too simplistic way to describe the experience.

Spiritual awakening is not the end of the end. It is in fact can be seen as just a stepping stone where you can provide change to other people and the environment you live in. In some religions, spiritual awakening is the pre-requisite to spiritual healing. If spiritual awakening is the finding of your true self, the spiritual healing part is the part where you collect all the positive physical, emotional and spiritual elements and use them to live a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. It is important that this person pass to other people these positive energies to promote spiritual healing to all. There are religions that would suggest or even require people to accompany spiritual healing with prayers and going to their church. They insist that prayers will provide or reinforce the guidelines they need to reach, repeat and maintain spiritual awakening.

For Christians, spiritual awakening is also attained upon realization that they are sinners and begin to repent. They have this enlightenment that God is the only true path and going to back to him and being faithful to the doctrines of the Church is the way to spiritual healing. This is, of course, only one religion interpreting the essence of spiritual awakening. One cannot say that their interpretation is wrong for the experience is really a subjective one based precisely on interpretations of what should and should not be.

Now those who are far less attuned to religious influences believe that spiritual awakening can be achieved through meditations. Through proper meditation, inner peace and serenity are attained. Healing can be achieved as well. But meditation is only a step towards spiritual awakening. One has to go deeper into the process to achieve the true enlightenment as some people would rather believe.

Meditation can come in different forms and techniques. There's the mantra meditation where you need to repeat a certain sound which appeals to your mind before you reach that meditative state. There's the trataka meditation technique where instead of sound, one has to focus his attention or mind on a particular object. This technique has been used in the past by a number of religions. Chakra meditation on the one hand is more of energy based mediation where the goal is to open the chakra points in the body to achieve a higher level of awakening of the consciousness.

Religion and spiritual awakening are connected but depending on the religion as well as the approach and techniques, the interpretation of spiritual awakening varies. But one thing is certain, achieving spiritual wakening results to having a positive outlook in life making living in this world happier and more content.

Spiritual awakening and enlightenment seems to be part of religious practices. Spiritual awakening is a religious experience where the person who is enlightened had contact with the divine and supernatural. It has been part of different traditions and practices, encompassing different religions.

Enlightenment is subjective since it fits on the individual's perception and understanding divinity and religion. It is also something which other people who do not share the same views may find different and sometimes frightening. Even though, different religions have different understanding of the divine and supreme being, awakening experiences seem to have commonalities, as well as their differences.

Different religions and traditions share that spiritual awakening and other religious experiences includes the person to detach from the world and unite with God or gods and goddesses. The person would have deeper connection to the world after the awakening. They would also attain innate knowledge and understanding of the world and other people.

Spiritual awakenings are not only experienced through religious activities and methods. It can also be experienced through peak experiences, life and death experiences and situations, psychic openings and past life experience. Those who have awakened would say that they would experience physical, mental, emotional and spiritual changes and difficulties. But the awakening, even with its turmoil and difficulty, has bee called blissful by some people.

It is a personal transformation and the awakened can experience different changes on their actions, habits and way of life.

William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, states that a spiritual awakening brings certainty and insight to truth which is unfathomable by usual sensory and intellectual means. The experience can change the outer behaviour, attitude, character and outlook of the person who have experienced the awakening.

For example, people who have a spiritual awakening would experience sudden waves of emotions. Food intolerances and allergies develop after the religious experience. Some traditions say that because the human mind and body is opening to the divine and the spiritual, it gets more sensitive. Getting more sensitive means that your body can have lower tolerance level to some things compared to how it was before the religious journey and completion.

The senses are in a high and can be extra-sensitive. Enlightened people would see auras around living things and some glittery particles. The colours would appear more vivid and even see shapes and brilliant colors with eyes closed. Hearing is also sharper than before. But some would testify that they would experience a decrease in hearing since they would hear different kind of sounds and have difficulty identifying the different sounds.

Smell, taste and touch are also enhanced. Which is why, some would be sensitive with food and smell. Rashes can happen on the skin that can happen in the same time with healing moments or completion of some memories or anything that could have happened in the past.

There would also be moments when the awakened person would feel a sudden rush of power. Some people would say that they would experience hotness running from their head to toe, while there are others who would say the feeling was cold.

Just to stress on the point, the transformation that a person undergoes upon a spiritual awakening depends on the how they see and understand divinity and religion. Not all of these personal transformations could happen to everybody who has experienced enlightenment. In some religion, some of these transformations are not acceptable while other traditions and religions would foresee these transformation essential.

Meditation is often visualized as an Eastern tradition where the person sits in a circle surrounded by candles and saying mantras or humming. Currently, meditation and its benefits are recognized and is far from what we had in mind before. Aside from the calming effect that it could bring, meditation are often said to be a path to awaken the spirit and start the journey towards spiritual awakening.

Meditation has different schools. Each school would have its own thought about meditation. There are also different techniques for meditation and it can also be classified based on their focus. There are meditative techniques which focus on a field or a background perception, while there are others which focus on a specific object.

Meditation is used to calm the mind and relax the body. Tension, stress and anxiety can be relieved by performing simple techniques. Aside from the inner peace that meditation brings, it can also improve the body's total and general health. It is also a great way of improving your concentration. There are studies showing the relation between meditation and other concentration exercises with the performances of athletic and sport professionals.

Health benefits of meditation would include better circulation, deeper level of relaxation, increase in exercise tolerance among heart patients, regularizing blood pressure, reduces anxiety attacks and muscle tension, helps against allergies, arthritis, and shows significant help for those who are recovering from operation or surgery.

With this concentration process, you get to listen to the inner self and separate from the pressures of daily life. Understanding the inner self would lead to understanding of our higher self. This would increase our knowledge and understanding how the higher self unites with the universe. In meditation, you get the chance to tap into your inner self and get in touch on how it sees your life. Getting in touch with the inner self will provide guidance towards our happiness and fulfillment.

There are religions which advocate the use of meditation to reach enlightenment. As mentioned, there are different schools of thoughts and focus that each religion adapts. But the method or the technique used is not as important with the underlying concept that behind meditation.

Meditation is about listening to the inner self, therefore it has something to do with controlling your attention and focusing. There are so many distractions that it is very hard for some to focus their attention into what it is important and keeping the attention on a fixed object. When focused on a fixed object or field, one-pointedness could be experienced and could take the person to a completely different state. This one-pointedness is not that easy to achieve though, there are some who would need to meditate for years to achieve it.

When one-pointedness is achieved, the person would experience bliss. Bliss is referred to as a natural state of the soul which cannot be experienced easily in daily lives. During this meditative state, spirituality and also the mind expands its consciousness and understanding of nature and the universe. Destructive thinking and behavior brought about by the materialistic and fast-paced world can be flushed away by focusing more on the your spirituality.

A deeper understanding and knowledge would be felt and the body would be in one with the universe. This they say would be what would link us to the Supreme Being. Attaining this one-pointedness could somehow be compared to a spiritual awakening, where the body and the mind can fully understand what cannot be seen or touch in the material world.

People at times refer to it as a great realization. Sometimes it is known as a state of enlightenment. Whatever it might be called, the state of spiritual awakening is something that people realize. Some will offer guidelines and by following the steps for spiritual awakening will you only reach that state of enlightened spirit. And through these steps, people will soon realize or reach that level of awareness, enlightenment or spirituality. Some will argue, otherwise, saying that the awakening is a deep and often philosophical experience where man realizes his own true nature and finds ways how to maintain a balance life relative to his environment and thus only happens unplanned and often unexpectedly.

Depending on the line of thought, the approach, and the kind of book you're reading or the teacher you're following reaching spiritual awakening follows several rules or much more like guidelines. Some require complicated steps while others just require several kinds of meditations and the awakening you're seeking will come eventually. Nonetheless, there are times where people need some guidance for attaining an awakened spirit. May it be specific steps or generic principles, people find it easier to reach a state of enlightenment.

Preparing yourself is a very good way to begin. Whether you believe in a step by step process or you only accept the fact the spiritual awakening happens only in a natural and more spontaneous way, preparing your self brings you closer to that goal. How? Believing truthfully that a certain level of awakening is possible is surely something that you should accept first. One should look deep down into oneself and recognizing your shortcomings and problems and identifying how they can relate to you and your environment.

As you discover more of yourself, take the opportunity to understand reality as well. Place yourself in the world you live in and see how you relate to it given all the things that you learned about yourself so far. Attaining an awakened or enlightened spirit comes from understanding the nature of the world and how you react to it and how you can impact it.

Learn the process of healing. Once issues and problems have been clearly identified, take the path of healing not only focusing on healing oneself but also promoting healing to others as well. This is an important aspect of reaching an awakened or enlightened state. Achieving balance is another. Balance with both the physical body and the spirit is the ideal state that we should aim for.

These are merely musings of what and how I think we prepare ourselves for that awakening of spirit. Like what I mentioned earlier, how your reach that state is relative. We can go on arguing for a whole day on the various steps or approaches on how enlightenment can be achieved and we forget that the whole point is having reached that level of consciousness. For me following steps for spiritual awakening is okay as long as you reached that state. Having received a sudden gush of spiritual enlightenment is also fine with me. The important thing is reaching that level. It doesn't really matter anymore how you managed to do it, but rather what you can do now that you have reached that level. That I think is the more important issue that we need to address.