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.