What is Spiritual Growth?

Do you think there is more to life than what you see and touch? Do you look for greater meaning and significance? Do you want to grow spiritually?

What is Spirituality?

Spirituality means you sense something beyond your physical senses and thoughts. How Does Your Spirituality Reveal Itself?

Possibilities:

Connecting with other people.
Feeling a sense of oneness with nature.
Giving compassion and care to those who suffer.
Dedicating yourself to a cause that is important to you.
Sensing a personal connection with the vast universe.
Focusing on the universe source of love.
Feeling loved by a divine creator and upholder.
Being taught and guided by an inner source of wisdom.

In whatever ways you experience spirituality, you will find a life of genuine and lasting reality. Pursuing spirituality can lead to living in two worlds at once—a world of higher ideas and ideal values, as well as a world of physical things and thoughts.

What Is Spiritual Growth and How Can You Grow Spiritually?

Spiritual Growth often begins with spiritually rich questions which arise in your mind like:

What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of life?

Have I accomplished anything worthwhile?

What am I doing in my life that really matters?

Is it even possible to achieve something in life that is lasting?

Is there a spiritual realm? A spiritual world?

What is spiritual growth? Spiritual development?

Your deep, meaningful questions arouse doubts about merely living for material success. Perhaps wealth, power, fame, and sensual pleasure have no lasting value. That insight itself is a sign of spiritual growth.

What Is Spiritual Growth

Growing spiritually pushes your inquiry forward into the unknown—but spiritually discoverable. When you feel an urge to seek answers to your questions, you can progressively discover a spiritual world which provides answers to what is real, meaningful, and lasting.

Sooner or later, you will feel a definite hunger for meaning. Seemingly unrelated to that hunger, the urge to act unselfishly arises. If you choose to make unselfish, fair, and even generous choices, you begin to experience meaning, purpose, and satisfaction.

When you follow through, acting unselfishly, you see that caring actions work to produce goodness. You are reassured by feelings of rightness, joy, and fulfillment.

You Will Have Your Own Spiritual Experiences

Paying attention to your own spiritual inner life expands your ability to have spiritual experiences:

Feeling connected to the universal source of love in a warm friendship.
Finding your yearning to be loved satisfied in that friendship.
Recognizing the desire to be kind and helpful to others.
Allowing unselfish love to flow through you to other people.
Enjoying satisfaction when you are loving, kind, and helpful.
Discovering new insights arising from your spiritual inner self.
Realizing the quality of your decisions is growing wiser.
Sensing a spiritual mentor and guide leading you.

All of these explorations produce spiritual growth.

Spiritual, because your experience confirms for you a dimension beyond the material or intellectual, a spiritual dimension where ideals are real, meaningful, and everlasting.

Growth, because you proceed into higher and higher ideals as you continue to function in that spiritual dimension.

What Happens If You Pursue Spiritual Growth?

Relatively few people attempt to pursue spiritual growth actively, because life pulls their attention toward careers, wealth, pleasures, and power.

Deep within yourself, do you feel that life is more than simply these material things?

Consider the possibility that you are a spiritual child growing in love. Before you lies the possibility of pursuing:

wisdom, integrity, courage

peace, generosity,honesty

empathy, forgiveness, joy

compassion, originality

creativity, loyalty, strength

truth, beauty, goodness

and much more.

Think of yourself as a spiritual being, living this life in a physical body. Life is an ongoing spiritual adventure in the discovery and experience of love.

Love Is the Grand Sum of the Highest Ideal Qualities

Some of these beautiful qualities may arise in your life almost accidentally, as a side effect of the life you live. However, you can choose to take charge of your own spiritual growth.

Spiritual growth is an adventure:

of becoming a person who cares about others.
of challenges far beyond ordinary existence.
of higher choices, made a multitude of times.
of satisfaction in doing something significant.

Choose to pursue your own spiritual growth and you will become more and more like the ideal self you yearn to be. And that will ensure that you live a meaningful, happy, and fulfilled life.

Seven Effective Ways You Grow Spiritually

Pursuing a spiritual life is often not easy; it can necessitate thought, decisions, action, persistence, and even courage. The benefits to you, however, are personally and deeply rewarding.

Look beyond the surface of everyday life. Search for the meaning of what you experience. What attitudes, habits, choices, and actions result in what occurs? If you do not like what is happening, look for the cause of what you dislike. This is the best way to contribute to changes, whether it is relationships, justice, education, economics, religion, government, or something else.
Consider the consequences of your own actions. How will you help? Who might you harm? How can you do the most good?
Decide what is important to you. What do you care about? Who do you care about? Where do you want to spend your energy and time? What makes a difference in the quality of life? This is not a quick choice. Take your time and enjoy reflecting. Return to the question repeatedly over weeks or months until something begins to feel right to you.
Imagine the kind of person you want to become. Pursuing spiritual growth will change you, no matter your age. Look at people you admire. People you know. People you have heard about. Real people. People in movies, books, legends, and history. Let these individuals spark your own imagination.
Look for others who share your interests. Explore and learn together, work together, and encourage and support each other. The connections you make will enrich your life tremendously.
Draw on your desire to progress. You have an inborn yearning to move forward, to become a better person, to make a difference in the world, and to contribute to the quality of life. Let this sense of future possibilities energize and motivate you.
Pay attention to your values. The qualities you admire and want in yourself are your values—wisdom, enthusiasm, creativity, integrity, courage, patience, and compassion, to name a few. The list is long and inspiring. Be active in recognizing the values that are important to you. Pay attention to which values are particularly effective in your challenging moments. The ideals you value and make a commitment to become a part of who you are. You will repeatedly grow stronger in each value. Your values are a dynamic blend of beautiful characteristics and commitments. Growing in values is a large part of growing spiritually.

About Us

We are a group of spiritual adventurers sharing our ideas about how to grow spiritually and experience joy in a world that sometimes feels so difficult.

We offer ideas based on our own experience. We do our best to give you simple descriptions, explanations, examples, and exercises.

We promise: no obligation to us on your part, no cost, nothing to join, nothing you must profess to believe, no attempt to convert you. We simply want to share what we have discovered; you can use whatever works for you.

May you grow in the joy of living!

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