As liberating, worthwhile and extremely valuable the paths of spirituality, personal development and any other path of ‘growth’ are, they also come with their own fair share of self-imposed restrictions. A sort of spiritual bondage or personal development bondage, depending on what your goals are.
I have written before about some of the things that they don’t tell you about personal development, and I suppose that this post is similar in a sense. Obstacles are inevitable on the path to freedom – whatever that particular path looks like for you and your individual personality. Yet, there is one common obstacle that seems to arise on every single path towards freedom. A stumbling block that hides in plain sight because it seems to be taking you towards your goal, but is actually taking you further away.
It is that these journeys are meant to be fun, exciting and seen as a wonderful opportunity to experience more of life, not an arduous task.
There is no denying that there will be countless challenges and difficulties on whichever path you choose – even the choice of no path – but that doesn’t mean that you have to suffer through them. It doesn’t mean that you stress over missing a workout, or not waking up early one day, or forgetting to meditate.
When we begin to take our path and ourselves too seriously, too strictly, too rightly or wrongly, the life begins to be sucked out of life so to speak. Tirelessly seeking happiness we become unhappy because we aren’t progressing as fast as our expectations said we would. Tirelessly seeking fulfilment we make fulfilment into something that we will achieve in the future when a criterion is filled, not something that is always here waiting to be noticed. Seeking freedom we wrap ourselves in incredibly restricting routines and positions, only doing something if it is for our ‘betterment’ and not just for the fun of it. We become slaves to becoming better – a far cry from the freedom that we set out to achieve when we started.
This is what I call Spiritual or Personal Development Bondage.
Of course, the answer isn’t to throw away your beneficial routines. It isn’t to stop working at something that is benefitting both yourself and other people. It is to simply stop obsessing over the path of becoming better or spiritual or whatever it is that you’re pursuing. It is to give up the “What should I be doing that isn’t this?” thoughts that seem to arrive whenever you are just starting to relax and enjoy yourself. It is to stop asking “What would a spiritual person do in this situation” in every single encounter. A spiritual person would probably just relax, leave the mind questions aside and have fun.
Every time you are unhappy or suffering on your path, you’re doing it wrong. It’s that simple. No matter what great religion, tradition or philosophy that has stood the test of time over thousands of years you want to consult – from Buddhism to Stoicism – you will see that suffering and unhappiness aren’t key parts of them. In fact, they aren’t parts of them at all. As the great spiritual master Adyashanti puts it: “Suffering is how Life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true.” Therefore suffering and unhappiness are great ways of showing you that you aren’t doing something quite right. They tell you that you might be on the right path, but you are taking it or yourself too seriously. As Ram Dass once said, “When you begin to realize that suffering is grace, you can’t believe it, you think you’re cheating.”
Sometimes, the path is to simply give up the path. A path used incorrectly or obsessively can be a form of bondage that we unknowingly strap to ourselves like a badge for the ego. It’s not needed. Living the pathless path from time to time, despite what the controlling and deceiving mind might tell you, actually brings us closer to the life that we seek, not further away from it.
Sometimes, the idea of a path and what the path should look like is what is holding us back from living freely, happily and spontaneously in every moment – which is all we ever wanted in the first place.