Becoming Ourselves

One of the notions concerning meditation and prayer is that by practicing both meditation and praying we will automatically become better people. We will achieve instantaneous bliss. In the process we will make others happy or, at the very least, get them off our backs while we nobly inform them of our good deeds.

That’s nowhere near the point of prayer, meditation or any other spiritual practice.

Washing the car, mowing the grass, doing the laundry and a host of other mundane tasks are as spiritual as we are willing to let them be.

To become a deeply spiritual being we must become more deeply ourselves.

To become effective in living our daily lives we must become our true selves. And that can be one tough nut to crack.

For a lot of us it comes down to looking at all the years we were told who we were supposed to become, how we were supposed to behave and what we were supposed to do both as children and adults. When we reflect on all the many times we have seen parents pretending not to place expectations on their children, it’s not all that unusual that eventually we see their adult children living lives they did not entirely chose for themselves. Nor would they have. The same is true for employers with employees, and on and on.

How many times did we follow somebody else’s plan for our lives when it was nothing we had ever wanted for ourselves? How did that go for us?