When our highest spiritual experiences become our greatest barriers

Most of us on the spiritual path have had our share of challenges. Indeed, choosing to open up and do personal growth work and explore the spiritual side is often a direct result of it. We are trying to find solutions to what we face, a better way to live, and the experience of lasting authentic happiness.

But sometimes, our biggest barriers to personal freedom isn't the hard stuff we've faced, but our attachment to the good stuff we’ve experienced. Those moments of transcendence, where we may have had a real glimpse of freedom, or love, or happiness. Times when it felt like we were really “in the flow,” and we were being the people we most wanted to be, or reaching a new height in our potential.

Maybe it was at a workshop, or in a situation that called something forth from within us that we didn’t know we had.

Or even some of us may have had powerful mystical experiences in meditation. Of breaking through the veil of this reality and experiencing the vaster reality that lays beyond. Sometimes even just reading a book on the subject can inspire in us a real sense of what that's like.

And while all these experiences are beautiful and meant to show us something of who we really are, the tendency of our human ego is to attach to these experiences, and try to hold on to them, recreate them so we can feel good. It’s that attachment that can throw a real wrench in our soul’s awakening journey.

What happens when we form attachments to the feel good, amazing experiences we’ve had is that then, we start to compare every other experience we have to it, using that peak experience as the new bar of who we think we should be, and when we don’t meet it, we judge ourselves.

When we erect a wall of self-judgment through comparing who we think we should be and want to be to who we actually are, and measuring the gap in between, we are divided inside. And that division completely paralyzes us from being able to move forward at all.

Eventually, our entire train comes to a screeching halt, because we are no longer living our life from an open authentic place of curiosity and creativity. We are just living in the loop of self-judgment, always trying to become who we imagine ourselves to be, based on our attachments to the past, while denying what’s actually here, right now.

People who have had really powerful spiritual experiences can very easily get caught in this loop. Having a moment of union with the bigger Reality is so ecstatic and healing and joyful, and when it’s over, it can feel like “I lost it. How do I get it back?” And we start chasing it, constantly trying to get back to that place of perfection, doing so many hours of meditation, sitting with every teacher, doing every workshop that comes our way. But the problem is, we are no longer living in Reality, we are chasing our memory of an experience, which is NOT the same thing as direct contact with Reality itself.

So we are living in a spiritual fantasy, chasing our tail, until one day, Life intervenes and breaks the cycle. Usually by causing us to fail miserably at ever achieving that which we have been so desperate to achieve.

There’s no simple equation for enlightenment, or inner peace, or personal success and happiness. It’s a journey, and every journey has peaks, and every journey has valleys. Both are equally necessary for our growth. To allow what we gain from the peak moments to be fully integrated and embodied into who we are in this moment, we have to let them go. Release our attachment to them. Bless those experiences as gifts from the Universe, and be willing to accept whatever we need to experience for our highest good right now in THIS moment.

As we release attachment, we no longer have an inner expectation we feel we need to live up to, so self-judgment can dissolve. As the wall of self-judgment falls, and we are no longer divided inside, we can just face forward in our life, and feel what is present within our heart, and express that, in whatever way it wishes. We begin to move forward, from a more grounded, humble, willing, and relaxed place.

There’s no way we are meant to be other than how we are right now. Right here, right now, is the only place Truth can find us, and reveal to us in time, the full beauty of our soul.

The "Why" Trap

Things can get very confusing on the path to become free from ego. He’s a tricky little bugger! And there are a lot of teachings out there about it, some that directly contradict each other, and it can all get very complicated very quickly. I want to try and simplify things a little.

Our human ego is made up essentially of one thing – our identification with the reasons and meaning we give to the things that happen in our life. 

Reasons and meaning define who we think we are. It creates the script and story line for the character of “me” to follow. But the trap is that we believe the character we are playing is actually real, is actually who we are, instead of just an experience the limitless potential of consciousness is having. 

So we go from pure expanded consciousness, to experiencing ourselves in the most limited way possible, imprisoned by whatever our beliefs are. And these beliefs are all forged from the meaning we have assigned to life.

So Where does it all start? How do we start creating meaning to identify with, thus trapping ourselves in a limited egoic state of consciousness? 

It all starts the moment we ask one simple question: Why? 

“Why did this happen to me?” “Why can’t other people give me what I want and need?” “Why is life so hard?” “Why can’t I ever get ahead and be who I want to be?” “Why do I have to feel this way?” “Why won't that person love me?” 

It goes on and on. The ego lives on answering the “why?” question. It is reason-and-meaning super-food. 

Let’s take an example. Say in your childhood, you felt like your parents never really listened to you or cared about how you felt. The natural question to ask is “why don’t mom and dad listen to me or care about what I feel?”

Then automatically, the mind starts coming up with possible reasons like: “Maybe I’m not worth listening to.” “Maybe they just don’t love me.” “They listen to bobby, but they don’t listen to me, maybe they just love him more.” And why is that?  “I guess I’m not as good as bobby. I guess I’m just unlovable.” 

…You see the pattern.

So the conclusion the child mind comes up with is “I’m not lovable” as the most logical answer to why mom and dad don’t listen to him. (As children, this is a common assumption, because we see the world as all having to do with us at the center of it, we don’t have the capacity to think about how mom and dad are really feeling, etc.) 

So now without even realizing it, that person has created identification with a thought that gives meaning to the rest of their life. 

Every relationship they enter into, that thought will color their experience, and they’ll feel not listened to, only to confirm their belief that they are unworthy of love. It becomes their personal prison.

And they’ll harbor all kinds of bitterness and hostility towards their parents, and project that hurt onto other people who trigger that core wound. Welcome to ego land!  

Or, sometimes it gets really tricky, and we start learning about spirituality, and then start coming up with spiritual reasons to the question “why.”

“Why did that person leave me?” 

“I guess he wasn’t my twin flame, or our astrology was off.”

“Why did I spend all my money on these cloths I can’t return, now I’m short for my rent payment!”

“I guess because I’m learning to be more abundant, so to have abundance, I have to act abundant, by buying the things I want!”

And it becomes a bypass from just experiencing the truth of how we feel (hurt, alone), or of facing the reality of our situation (needing to be more disciplined with money), or letting Life show you something deeper. We just create a spiritual ego with spiritual reasons to overcompensate for the lousy self-hating one we had before.

So how do we get off the ego-affirming reason and meaning merry-go-round?

We start by letting go of asking “why.” It’s so hard for the mind to do that! Because that ego is always wanting to know how it measures up, where it stands, am I good, or am I bad. It is so used to gaining its value and substance from the meaning it gives life events, and thoughts that enter it’s awareness that not doing that any more can feel like a death.

It’s like letting all the air out of a balloon, in the same way, the ego is only as inflated as we are attached to believing the stories the mind comes up with in answer to the question “why”.

When the balloon of ego is deflated, we can finally see clearly the Truth of our Divine Essence that is there in the background. We can rest into it, and let it guide our life in a whole new way; Effortless, Joyful, and Free.

The simplest solution to letting go of our attachment to knowing “why” is responding to the mind that wants to know with, “I don’t know.”

“Why did this happen to me?” “I don’t know.”

“Why doesn't anything work out the way I want it to?” “I don’t know.”

“Why doesn't that person love me?” “I don’t know.”

Instead of being so concerned about why it happened, we start to simply acknowledge that it happened. The reason "why", isn’t as important as just accepting what is.

We live in a mysterious and complex universe, and we can never really know why anything happens. We can only make assumptions that may or may not be true, and ultimately only lead us to be more caught up in the fictional story of who we are, and missing out on getting to know the Reality of who we are.

Admitting “I don’t know” allows us to be open to whatever Life may be trying to teach us in any given moment. Our cup is empty, ready to be filled with the Truth that can be given to us, instead of overflowing with our own ideas, assumptions, reasons, and meaning.

There’s a humility to it, to “I don’t know.” It instantly deflates the ego that is filled with thinking it knows best, that it’s in control and has it all figured out. Inevitably Life comes to let the air out of it. Tragedy, challenge, and failure are Life’s main tools for doing this.

The sooner we just accept “I don’t know” and bow to the mystery of life, the sooner our hearts are freed of the burden of having to serve the false identity as it’s master.

Our heart longs for freedom, to live wide open, to love fully, to play and create, and the only way to experience that is to let go of our reasons, our meaning, by letting go of asking “why.”

Accept that we’re not meant to know, we’re just here to marvel at the mystery of it all. When we stop judging it, we see how truly miraculous it all is. When we let go of knowing, of controlling, of believing and assuming, then we can have instead, the birth of true wisdom.