In this episode, Anandi discusses the 7 everyday struggles people can encounter on their spiritual path. If you are on your path of spiritual growth, this will resonate with you and give you some insight into where you are on your journey, what roadblocks you have put in place for yourself and how you can move forward.
Transcript
(00:00):
Welcome to the Anandi Sano podcast and welcome to this episode. Today I wanted to talk about the many common spiritual struggles that people can encounter on their spiritual path. And when I was writing these and reflecting on my journey, there was some things that became very, very apparent as to what I was looking for and what I was struggling with. So I wanted to go through what to me are like the seven main things that I struggled with. So maybe this will resonate with you and, and can give you some insight as to where you are on your journey and how you could possibly move forward.
(00:55):
So the first one is feeling disconnected. So this can refer to feeling disconnected from yourself, from others, from source, god, universe, a higher power, whatever you choose to call that. And it can manifest as a sense of emptiness, low loneliness, or perhaps even a lack of purpose or maybe all three. And I know that is something that I definitely found for myself that even though I was doing particular practices and I was doing meditation and I was doing Buddhism and yoga and [inaudible] and I was trying different things, I still felt disconnected from myself. I felt really shut down. I felt like I couldn’t open myself up to others and be vulnerable. I always felt like I was going to be attacked or hurt. And I always had this sense that I never had this true and pure connection to source God cuz potentially I wasn’t good enough or there was part of me that wasn’t pure enough.
(02:30):
I don’t even know if that’s the right word, but that’s what it sort of felt like. And that is what we are told in some way as we grow up or if we go to church or we’ve done other sort of practices, it’s bad of having to work on yourself because you’re not good enough. You’re not seen as good enough in the eyes of this higher power. And that really holds us bound it. It makes us feel lost, it makes us feel and become disconnected from the world and from that deep place within ourselves. So how can we ever become whole when we have this constant feeling of disconnect and that we can truly never really connect with someone because we’re always scared or worried that we are gonna come off second best? And that was something that was huge for me. And now the second thing is struggling with negative emotions.
(03:42):
Oh that was a biggie. And I know you know a lot of you either that are already on the path or have started out or you know a little way on their journey, we can all relate to struggling with those negative emotions, you know? And those negative emotions can include feelings of anxiety and depression, anger, frustration, guilt isn’t guilt and absolute beauty that can literally ignore at you day and night. And you make decisions from that place of guilt and then that holds you bound as well. And that feeds back into the feelings of disconnect that you have because you can’t express what you want for your life because someone in your life may be holding you back or may not understand what you want to do and how you want to do it and say that you can’t do it. So these negative emotions also build up.
(04:52):
This feeling of disconnect also builds up. We lose ourselves in a sense, and these emotions may be really difficult to manage and will definitely interfere with spiritual growth. I think when we are so deep in it, we’re so deep in these negative emotions, which as I’ve explained before, are really a charge, an energetic charge that is in our layers of self. And when I talk about layers of self, I don’t talk about um, the aura or the layers that are in, in yoga or anything like that. There are specific layers of self within peiec and that’s what peiec stands for. The physical, the emotion, the intellect, the energetic and core. But these are not the mind, the heart, the physical vessel. They’re energetic components of who we are. And so if you can imagine these layers, like
(05:56):
Layers a cake and within those layers we have energetic, low vibrating clusters of energy. I’m not gonna say that they’re memories because then people will think of it as something else, but it holds every moment. So people talk about memories as being this thing that happened. This is the story that I had. What we failed to realize is that in each moment that we have, there is more than just the conversation. There is more than just the eye contact that you had with the person or the way that things were said or the way that you physically responded to something in that moment. There is also the colors of the environment that you’re in. Every single object that is in that space with you in that moment is also in the energetic layers of self within what I call life moments. So they’re not just a memory, it is far more than that.
(07:11):
And everything holds a charge. So when we have these feelings of anxiety, depression, anger, frustration, guilt, and we feel disconnected from self, the reason why we feel that way is because of these energetic clusters, life moments that are vibrating within the layers of self. And often they sit in the mud and they’re just waiting to come up. And as soon as something triggers them, they come up through the mud so to speak, and they present themselves and they start vibrating away. And this vibration is the thing that activates the body and the mind causing the feelings of anxiety, depression, anger and frustration. Now if you were to take those words away, if I did not know or I’d never heard of the word anxiety, depression, anger and frustration, if I could present to you the vibration and frequency of that, it would be easier for you to understand what it does to your mind, your body and your reality.
(08:37):
So it’s not necessarily negative emotions that we are dealing with, but it is a low vibration which is expressed in a certain way by your body, your mind, and definitely your nervous system. You can understand then how you yourself can start feeling disconnected when you are vibrating at this low vibration and frequency because that is not who you are in the depth of who you are in the core of self. You are an extremely high frequency and vibration. But we block that off with a wall, so to speak, because we live in the lower layers of self. Yeah. So that may be a little bit hard to grasp. But when we are in pure presence, when we are in totally in the now, not even thinking about where we are now, but being in core or being in presence, being in the now is actually being in core spanning the energetic layer of self and being in the physical, which means in the body the other layers, which is the physical vibration, the emotional and the intellect layers which are not heartened mind are calm.
(10:10):
So you could imagine those layers just being undulating like a beautiful lake. Yeah, they’re not like the crashing ocean that goes on. If we were to use that analogy, you could imagine that your feelings of anxiety and depression and anger and frustration and guilt are like the crashing waves of the ocean hitting the sand. Imagine that being there in your layers, in your energetic layers every single day. And that sensation of crashing of the waves causes the physical vessel, your body to express it in a certain way, which we then have named anxiety, depression, anger, frustration, guilt, sadness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So as we go on our spiritual path and our spiritual growth, we wanna try and change that so that as we become more calm and create more space within ourselves and calm down the nervous system and calm down the thoughts, we can start getting rid of those negative emotions. And on my path I really struggled with those negative emotions and self-talk of not being worthy enough and not liking myself and the way that I looked, what probably everybody else has as well. Even though we think that this is purely our own
(11:52):
Self talk, that surely nobody else feels like this. Cuz you look at someone else and you go, oh my god, they’re really attractive or this and that, or oh my god, they’re so good at that and you can’t reflect and go, well I’m really good at that as well. No, we have to berate ourselves and part of that is because we’re feeling disconnected to self. So for me, struggling with those negative emotions was something that I battled with and I was very, very quick to anger because I didn’t actually want to feel because that was part of my disconnection from myself. Cuz if I was vulnerable or if I opened myself up, someone was bound to hurt me, somebody was bound to leave, somebody was bound to talk badly about me behind my back. And so it was self perpetuating and that was something that as I did the work with peiec started to shift actually really, really quickly because as I was calming and then releasing the energetics of everything and releasing the charge around these life moments, these negative emotions started to lift.
(13:22):
And the way that I thought about myself changed and it wasn’t, it wasn’t me sitting down and self-reflecting or self-analyzing. This just happened naturally as there was more of an energetic shift and a calmness within my layers and more and more was energetically released, it just became a natural thing. And so when I was able to reflect on moments in my life that may not have been positive, there was no negative emotion that was attached to it anymore. And so these moments that had held me bound started disappearing, not because I worked through them, it’s just because they didn’t matter in a sense anymore because the charge was gone. And that was amazing for me and my life and my growth because the anger and everything else can just hold you bound. It can stop you from spiritually progressing. And that is such a huge factor on people’s journey.
(14:43):
I think they get so caught up in that. The third one that I wanted to talk about was feeling stuck or stagnant. And this can refer to feeling like one is not making progress on the spiritual path or that your growth has plateaued and it can be accompanied I guess by a sense of boredom or a lack of motivation. And for those of you who’ve just started on the spiritual path, this will be definitely something that’s going to hit you and it may come out of nowhere. Or if you haven’t been consistent in a practice and you stop doing it for a while, then this lack of motivation starts kicking in because our old self, like our muscle memory, wants to kick in again and tell us that that is the right way. That our old way is something that we know that we are comfortable with and that we should stay with that.
(15:52):
And stuck for me was I had been doing all these things and I think one of the things that we do as humans is that we like to put lots of shiny things in a basket. And what I mean by that is that we have a nibble of something and we learn a little bit and then we throw it away and then we try something else. And I know for me that taking a bite of a particular apple, but they’re not delving deep enough into that, I think was part of the reason that I started feeling stuck. Or maybe I didn’t really understand the teachings or I didn’t resonate with a teacher or I didn’t have time or I wasn’t consistent. Maybe I got a little bit lazy, maybe I didn’t see enough progress, but then I didn’t know what progress looked like. I didn’t know if I’d been making headway.
(17:11):
I didn’t have anybody really to go, you know, every time this happens then you react and I see you going through this cycle of continuously doing this when that happens. And it would’ve been really good to be able to have a teacher that could talk you through that and go, wow, you can see what I can’t see for myself. And that’s one of the big things that I really wanted. And I guess I started looking for that teacher to go, I need help with this. I feel really stuck. I don’t know if I’m making any progress. I’m, I’m probably am, but I don’t know what this progress is meant to look like. And so on my journey, it was something that really started to frustrate me and I didn’t know where to look. And so I think then those moments of feeling stuck and stagnant started to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
(18:16):
And then the lack of motivation would kick in. And I think sometimes because the practice was so repetitive and maybe, you know, like chanting or whatever else or reading scriptures, it was like this repetitive thing over and over again. And clearly from what I know now, I definitely wasn’t in the right space. I wasn’t in the deep space of myself where chanting or reading scriptures would’ve been very, very different. It maybe was just like an intellectual exercise, I just keep having to do this cause I wasn’t told anything else. I wasn’t told that you need to connect with yourself first before you do any of this. You know, it’s not just the act of chanting and hope that something changes and maybe people did say it and I didn’t listen. So there’s so many different things on this journey where we sabotage ourselves. But then I think if we don’t have guidance and a lot of people will say, you don’t need a teacher, you don’t need this and you don’t need that. And you know, to be honest, I think, I think you do. I mean I don’t know why it is in spiritual teachings or spiritual practices that people have such a distaste for teachers. Whereas if you look in personal development or you look in anything else, any, any course that you’ve done, any program that you’ve done, the teacher has the knowledge base, they’ve come from somewhere. So in a sense they are your guru, right? And guru just means teacher.
(20:04):
But in self-development, or even if you were going to do, I don’t know, in, I don’t know if, if you were do medicine right, you were gonna become a surgeon, maybe a brain surgeon. The person who teaches you is literally your guru. They have been there, they done that, they’ve seen all sorts of brains, they’ve operated on all sorts of brains and they can teach you and they can guide you. And that is the same in the fields of spiritual development. And maybe a lot of people have an issue with it or very hesitant because they’ve heard so many things about people not being honest or truthful in this field. And for me, I think on my journey, that was something that I was always very, very wary of.
(21:10):
And it’s a shame really isn’t it? Um, because I think then that stops people’s progress as well and it gives them an excuse I think as well it may give them an excuse. So the next one after that is lacking direction. And I think I touched on this just now, this can refer to feeling unsure about what your spiritual path should look like or feeling lost or confused about which practices or teachings to follow. And that was a, a big one for me. And I’m just reflecting back and even within Buddhism, you know, there, there are lots of different types in a sense. And I tried quite a few and some of them just did not resonate and others did a little bit more and you’d think, oh they’re pretty much be pretty much all the same. And I guess it’d be the same in in other religions as well.
(22:16):
And you could say that for anything, you know, it could be having a PT and the PT does things completely differently to the one that you really liked who has gone on maternity leave or has gone on holidays somewhere. So for me, going on the spiritual path, I got utterly confused with what I should be feeling, what should I be doing? What are the signposts to show that I’m actually progressing? And if I don’t feel those in the way that maybe they were described in a book or somewhere else, does that mean I’m not doing enough or that I’m not good enough? I know I got to a point where I started feeling incredibly confused about what I should follow, what I should be incorporating. And like I said earlier, it seems like there is this common practice of just doing lots of things and it’s like you can do lots of things but you are the master of none.
(23:30):
And so how can our spiritual progress accelerate when we are constantly eating off different plates and you never taste the meal in its totality off one plate and you’re mixing it with, you know, there’s a bit of curry here and I’m gonna have a bit of spaghetti over here and then I’m gonna have a bit of fish over here and then I’m going to you know, have a bit of cake at the same time and your mouth is trying to distinguish all these things and it can never quite understand what it’s actually eating. There’s such confusion but it seems like pupil’s paths are not progressing the way they should because they’re constantly looking for the next thing.
(24:26):
And it could also be is that we live in a society where we like instant gratification. And nowadays if you want something you can pretty much have it straight away. Spiritual growth is not like that. Spiritual growth is not linear. Spiritual growth is a journey and it’s an unfolding of who you are and it’s in that unfolding of who you are that you come to realize who you are and the power that you hold within you and how you respond to the world. And that’s the beauty of it. It’s not the end point of enlightenment. We may have never reached that, but it’s that forward progression on our journey of revealing ourselves to ourselves. And that’s the point of it. And so if you’re continuously flitting from one thing to the next, of course you’re gonna start feeling lost, of course you’re gonna start feeling confused. And particularly when you start mixing things together, right? It’s like making a cake and you’re making a cake and then all of a sudden you’ve decided to put in, you know, some curry powder or something or you’ve started to put in, you know, some, I don’t know, spaghetti bologne sauce into the cake mix.
(26:13):
The teachings that have been given over the centuries to help with spiritual growth have been given in a certain way. And I always say that, that the purity of teachings and I can only reflect on the teachings with peiec because I already see it now, the teachings that have been given in the past, whether it is for meditation or for energy healing or for
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Yoga have been diluted because we know that when a person tells somebody else or gives a teaching or something else and they are not the principal teacher of a modality or a technique, as soon as it is passed on and someone else teaches it or someone else explains it to someone else, those teachings are tainted. How do I know this is because with peiec what I teach is what has been given by God. I have not changed it, I have not changed the wording, I have not changed any technique in the way that it’s been given. But when I hear other people explain it, they’ve already tainted the teaching because they explain it in their own way or change the way they teach it ever so slightly. So the technique is never the true technique anymore.
(27:45):
And so over time we have these teachings that have been diluted. And so in a sense, do they lose their power? Do they lose their efficiency? Do they lose their intent perhaps? But then if we start mixing that with other stuff together, it dissolves or dilutes it even more. And so I think that’s the thing that has been as these teachings get handed down, and you have to think about it, if I were to do a talk about peiec, and this has happened right with with Chris, I’ve described something and I’ve taught something in the way source God has told me to teach it, then when I’ve described it to Krys and she’s written it down, she’s written it down in a completely different way because her understanding of it was different from what I told her. And so I reflect back on teachings that were potentially written down from the initial master of whatever was out there and maybe they weren’t able to write and someone else wrote the teachings down, were they then already tainted in a certain way? And that’s a horrible word I guess, but how were they written? Did they reflect exactly the way that the master taught them?
(29:40):
And the more that I’ve taught peiec, the more that I’ve had this understanding of going wow, the teachings of anything that has ever been given, unless it was written word for word for word. And even then when somebody reads it, they can interpret it in their own way. Once they’ve done that, they tell someone else, it doesn’t become the original teaching. So we sort of digressed a little bit, but I thought that was really fascinating cuz I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And in that sense, do we really understand the full teachings of what has been given? Because if they’ve been passed down over maybe centuries, how much of the true teaching is actually left and how much have they been adapted from less, say from from eastern culture, how much have they been diluted from the original teachings?
(30:54):
And so maybe we start feeling lost and confused because we are not seeing the results because we are not getting the depth of the teachings for me. And I’ve only just reflected on that. And also there are so many practices out there and everything is valid, everything has been given for a reason, whether it is positive or negative, everything has been given for a reason. But there’s so much stuff out there and there’s so much noise that it’s really hard for us to focus on one thing and the next shiny thing comes up and we go, Ooh, that looks interesting. And it’s hit all the key words to make me, you know, have an emotional response to it and I’m gonna try that now but seems to be human nature. But we get lost and then we start feeling confused and then we start losing our way on the spiritual path. Now that was a very long explanation about lacking direction, but I think you get my point. The next one is with dealing with past issues, some people would call it past traumas, but the things that have happened to us in our past or even in our present can create obstacles on the spiritual path as it may be difficult to fully connect with yourself or others
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While you are carrying the weight of unresolved emotional pain. And it goes back to the struggling with the negative emotions that I was talking about earlier. How can you fully connect with yourself and others when you have these waves crashing within you all the time and there’s no quiet lake or those moments of the quiet lake are when you’re at the beach or in at holidays or on holidays or your partner’s gone away f o again or you’re by yourself for a little while. All this low vibration literally drags us down. It makes us feel like we have the weight of the world on our shoulders. It’s like walking through mud and we need to understand that that is a low vibration but it’s something that we can shift. But again, we need to be consistent and that is one of the hardest things that people have because they’re constantly jumping from one thing to the next.
(34:02):
The next one is struggling with self-doubt or self-criticism. So negative self-talk and self-criticism are definitely barriers to spiritual growth as they can create a sense of unworthiness or a belief that you are not capable of achieving spiritual progress. And I guess that goes back to feeling stuck. For me there was huge self-doubt and there was huge self-criticism. And in the last podcast I spoke about, you know, my my Buddha Chanting practice and how often I meditated and how much I just did and did and did and did. But it came from the wrong space within me. And then there was the self-doubt and then there was the self-criticism that I wasn’t doing enough and I wasn’t achieving enough and maybe I should do more and, but if I did that thing, maybe that would do it. So there was constantly me beating myself up for not being good enough or believing that with all my karma cuz we’re all filled with karma that I couldn’t achieve spiritual, that I couldn’t achieve spiritual progress, that it was purely for other people that were more lucky than I was. And that is something that
(35:36):
So many of us struggle with. It’s negative self-taught as soon as something becomes a little bit hard and particularly on the spiritual journey, right? And I’ve talked about this before, it’s not just about growth. You cannot have growth 24 7, 365 days a year. You just cannot do it. And so as soon as life becomes a little bit hard and you may be going into a contraction phase or something happens in your life, so many people give up or they go, oh it’s gotten too hard, it’s gotten too hard, I’m having, I’m having the wobblies or something’s happened in my life, this doesn’t work. But they never realize or they can’t see it. That as you energetically shift and start releasing those low vibrating life moments in the layers of self, you are never going to go back to the place that you were before.
(36:37):
It’s just physically impossible unless of course you start abusing alcohol or drugs or whatever else. But as we progress when there is a speed bump or we hit a wall, we automatically think that it’s the end of the world. We, we just seem to do that as humans. So instead of berating yourself and going, you know, it doesn’t work, I’m gonna stop this, I’m gonna do something else. I always say to my students, all it is is life moments in your layers that have come up if you can’t see them for yourself. Cuz the analogy that I give is when you’re in those moments of, in the mud so to speiec, it’s like you are just driving on street level and all you can see are the lights and the traffic lights you, you are not able to fly in a chopper and get a bird’s eye view of everything that is going on in your layers. And so what I tell my students is that when you start feeling like that, you feel like there’s a hand break coming, coming on and, and you’re going to going in the self-doubt or hitting the wall, you need someone else to be able to get into their chopper so to speak and see what is going on. They can see the lights of the city, whereas you can’t see that all you are doing is just driving a street level and everything looks dark.
(38:17):
So that is such an important thing cuz as soon as you start doing that, that negative self talk and the self-criticism starts to disappear. But in order for you to do that, you also need to have community because the spiritual path
(38:34):
Is so hard to do on your own. And what I love about Peiec is that it’s able to balance out those highs and lows. So very quickly, and it took me a long time to figure that out, that it was given to accelerate our spiritual path and to balance out the highs and lows even of kini awakening and kini awakening. Everything that you’re experiencing in the physical vessel, the overwhelm and everything else that’s going on, it’s because the life moments are coming up in the layers of self to heal. And so if we can go in or we can get somebody who does the work to go into our layers and to release that, it calms everything down. It’s magic. It’s absolutely magic. And the next one is balancing spiritual practice with daily life. It could be challenging to find a balance between spiritual practice and the demands of daily lives, such as work, you know, family and you have social obligations.
(39:53):
And I think for many we start out and we are literally driving that car and we are going from first gear and we hit it into fourth and we are going at a hundred miles an hour because it’s a new thing. It excites us. We sense changes within ourselves and it’s those times we make time for ourselves because it’s a new thing. And then we find that things start encroaching. I mean obviously particularly if you have kids and have young kids and you have family, you need to give time. But having your own practice is so important so that you can maintain more of a balanced emotional state at work for your kids, for your partner, for your pets, pretty much everywhere.
(40:56):
And there’s always this thing about having to do for everybody else where if you don’t do for self, you’re gonna run out of energy and then you’re gonna start feeling stuck again. Then you’re gonna start lacking direction, you’re gonna struggle with self-doubt, all your past trauma or things are going to literally come up and create a reality for you that you don’t want to be in. And then you start taking that out on everyone around you, your people at work, your boss, your coworkers, your partner, your children, your friends, your animals. And then you become more and more disconnected from self, you become disconnected from you. You become disconnected from the people that you love. You become disconnected from the universe, from source, from God. Everything that you were searching for and wanting is are the things then that you disconnect from. And so in a sense, everything then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(42:06):
Ugh, I knew that wouldn’t work. It’s not for me. I don’t, I don’t believe any of that spiritual stuff. So it’s balancing the spiritual practice with daily life is so important. If you can only do 10 minutes, then do 10 minutes. If you have to get up 10 minutes earlier in the morning and work through your layers, then you do that because source in that moment knows that you’re giving to self, you’re giving to source God, but you are also giving to the world and the global consciousness. It can start there. If that is all you are able to do and to begin with, then start there. As things start shifting for you, you will be able to create more time for yourself and over time you will be able to set better boundaries for yourself as well. Particularly if you have maybe a partner that is not supportive, you will find that you will get a voice because you will find that you will need to and want to speiec up for yourself because that is also part of your path and part of your journey.
(43:33):
So the spiritual path and spiritual growth is about healing, but in such a different way than what people believe healing is. Healing is not, oh you know, I didn’t have any trauma in my life. Um, so I don’t think I have anything to heal. Healing is about growth. Healing is about understanding ourselves. Healing is obviously also about potentially healing things in our bodies. Everybody has something. So if you don’t like using the word healing, just use growth because there’s always growth. This journey never ends. It is never about an end point. It’s about the unfolding of the path
(44:31):
And becoming you. The gentle version of you that is able to speiec out the gentle version of you that is able to be creative, the gentle version of you that is able to live life in a very different way and in a way that you want to live because it aligns with who you are. So if you start addressing these struggles that I’ve just talked about, it’s very likely that you’ll become motivated again to pursue your spiritual growth and find the support and guidance that you need to overcome these obstacles. So I hope this episode has given you something to think about and definitely go back and listened to this podcast again and maybe think about what roadblocks that you have put in place for yourself. What excuses have you made? What things have you put into your life that has stopped you from going on the journey for yourself in this lifetime? And for me, the spiritual growth is about how far can we get in this lifetime until the moment of the last breath and that we can have spiritual growth whilst we still have the demands of daily life. And you will get to a point where you’ll find a balance in that and then you’ll find that your life will completely change. Cuz as the growth within occurs, then the growth outside of you occurs as well. And then that flows on to everybody in your family. And it’s beautiful and it’s why we are here. Thank you for being with me here today and we’ll talk very, very soon. Many blessings.
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