How to get rid of your spiritual to-do list

Ask to be shown

Learn to ask for what you need. Learn to remember to ask for what you need.

The path to here has been winding. See it. Look back. The sunset, the drizzle, the rain, the purge. The sunrise, the eyes, the swirl and surge.

Take a minute to marvel at the miracles that have gotten you to this moment, right here. Look up. Get some tea. Slow down. Settle in.

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Let’s start with some backstory.

I started my spiritual journey with lots of checklists and trust.

I didn’t want to get something specific necessarily. I just wanted to feel emotionally stable, happier, and more patient as a mother.

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But let’s peek in at who I was before the spiritual checklists materialized.

Mothering and nurturing has been in my blueprint, well before I birthed my children. That nurturance most often took the form of space holding and encouragement—though I didn’t fully know it at the time.

When I birthed my firstborn, the hormonal cocktail and birth trauma retriggered all the stories of abandonment, the motherless daughter identity, loss, loneliness, abuse—abuse which I don’t have full access to even to this day, unfurling at the rate of my growth and capacity to understand. I don’t desire all the details.

Full of rage, confusion, overwhelm, love + courageous surrender, I’d pray, Please help me not to pass this rage onto my children.

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And dipping in a layer deeper into this first pregnancy…

The internet searches I dialed up to, pregnant and astonished in Chilean Patagonia, included: Is it normal to be so angry in the first trimester? The rage I felt made no sense. I had an amazing partner; we were happy to be on this journey together. I didn’t know how to hold or contain or make sense of the level of fury and inner explosiveness in my system.

A decade later, a wise friend shared with me during a healing session, that the furor might not have been all mine. I may have been feeling the tempest of my baby. Maybe. It is a symbiotic dance. In any case, I was big bang mad. And feeling that level of anger is crazy uncomfortable (for all involved).

I judged myself terrible.

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All this to say, it wasn’t always easy for me to connect in, to hear—let alone trust—my inner guidance system, or to love myself.

Establishing a consistent (that means daily, as in every day) meditation practice, was the blossoming for me. It took me years to get consistent and to care enough about myself to show up for me daily.

Then, once I did show up consistently, I developed this niggling spiritual to-do list. The rat race persisted.

This meant 2 things:

• That I could possibly do it wrong (which translated internally to: that I probably wasn’t doing it right)

• That I should be doing more (interpretation: Another space in which I wasn’t doing enough, that I’d never be enough.)

Over the years, I’ve worked with so many people running the same programs of not enoughness.

But that’s just what it is: A program. It’s the operating system instilled in you as a wee one—from age 0-6/7—while you were a sponge absorbing the world around you, how it works, and how to be in the world, including the discrepancy between what people say vs. what they do.

You were once so in tune, you also knew what people around you were thinking (even when they weren’t aware of their thoughts themselves) and, so, aware of the gap between their mental images and their words + actions.

So how do we install a new program, a new paradigm?

First, trust the process. Learn to trust the flow of time. Slow down. There isn’t a finish line, and you don’t need to rush your healing, learning, integration, or growth.

Taking time every day or once a week to see how far you’ve come helps you to see your life and your growth clearly.

We have to celebrate the littlest things. Did you make that phone call this week, get the dentist appointments, make a new friend, have an uplifting interaction?

To celebrate requires slowing down. You’ve simply gotta take the time to notice where you are and how far you’ve come.

Cultivate your values. What are they? What’s most important to you? Why? What legacy do you want to leave behind? What stories and impressions would you want your kids to share about you? (Don’t let yourself go deep into self-negation here. See yourself through loving eyes.)

Now get clear on your daily spiritual actions. Why do you do what you do? Intention is so important, and if your intention is clingy, muddy, tit for tat, you’ll get that: Old familiar feeling of not being enough.

For me, meditation was the beginning, the entry point.

I still meditate daily. Early on, we do require discipline: Having the discipline to show up for ourselves daily.

But here’s the kicker. If we are meditating (or doing other spiritual practices) simply to get somewhere else, we are missing the point—the portal.

Meditation is a portal to our higher self, to connection to Source, to Self-Love, love of capital S Self. As we see ourselves as an expression of the unified Self, love naturally arises. When we love ourself, we can love others.

When we spend time in silence, alone with our innermost being and experience, on the threshold of Love, we tune ourselves. The channel becomes clear. We have a greater ability to hear and sense beyond our 5 senses.

This is when we can ask to be shown what’s essential. This is when we can begin to hear the answers and hone our trust. Trust that we are indeed hearing/sensing the guidance that is meant for us. We learn to trust, even when there is doubt. We give doubt and judgement and all the emotions our inner child brings a seat a the table. So, the innermost pieces of us learn to trust too.

The daily spiritual connection becomes a play of integration, juicy with life and realness, rather than a to-do list of hours-long check marks and sticker stars.

Some days, it’s 15 minutes seated; some days it’s longer. But mostly it’s a continual flow of communion. It’s not something you do to impress or to gain approval that you’re somehow doing enough. It is simply who you are: In communion with nature, your guides, and all who appear in your life.

What is non-essential? What makes your daily self-care practices feel like another to-do list hamster wheel?

Where are you doing things because you have to rather than out of self-love?

Offer it up to the Divine; ask for guidance. Slow down and listen. Trust the answers that arise.

Love,
Heather