How to Know if You're Making Spiritual Progress

<p>All too often we focus on the ways we're imperfect instead of the ways we've made progress on our path. This happens for a lot of reasons, but also has to do with the fact that <strong>we often ignore the more subtle - yet important - parts of our progress.</strong></p><p>You may have heard me say that we know we’re spiritually progressing when our reactive self shows up with either less frequency, less duration, or less intensity. But there are other signs as well.</p><p>When we think about gauging spiritual growth, it’s pretty subjective in some ways, which is still valid, because your suffering and happiness are subjective experiences, too. However, for this conversation, I’m talking about signs that we are awakening to our truth, our purpose, and our true self; and the degree to which we’re cultivating our wise mind and heart; and our level of awareness and presence in our daily life. Plus, magic, of course;)</p><p>I’ll drop a few of the main ones here, but listen to the pod for the full list.</p><p>Ultimately, I think we can say most people agree that “spiritual growth” in almost all traditions encourages us to more fully embody our “highest self,” in whatever way we define it.</p><p>But what does that mean? How do you define that for yourself?</p><p>One sign is we may notice <i>we aren’t as attached to life being exactly how we think it should be</i>. This can show up in a couple ways. One is that we aren’t as thrown when obstacles arise. We see them as opportunities more easily. That doesn’t mean we aren’t emotional or moved when something like a canceled flight or a sick loved one happens. It just means we are experiencing it from a place of more alignment and possibility.</p><p>Included in this may be that people piss us off less often (not <i>never</i> piss us off - just less often ;). We might notice we have more capacity to tolerate characteristics that irritate us, and that we have more capacity to understand others. As a result, we have less judgment or self-righteousness. This helps us also have