Your Spiritual Path

Ernie off the blocks at an earlier race when it was still warm enough to run outside. Are you working that hard?

My son, Ernest, ran in the high school Mid State Invitational indoor track tournament on Saturday (1).  While he was warming up for the 300 meter sprint I walked over to the t-shirt vendor and bought him a t-shirt.  You know, been there . . . done that . . . and I’ve got the t-shirt to prove it.  The back of his t-shirt has a great message, “You don’t get what you wish for; you get what your work for.”

Is your spiritual practice helping you change the world?  Is it helping you wish for a better world or work for it?  The world is always changing, it never stays the same.  It is either getting better or it is getting worse.  The world gets a little bit more peaceful every day or it becomes a little bit more chaotic and violent. Sometimes the change is so slow that we don’t notice it and then we wake up years later and ask ourselves, “How on earth did we get here?” 

Most spiritual traditions, at least at one time, taught that everything manifests in the spiritual realm before it manifests in physical reality (read the creation myth in Genesis and if you read it carefully I think that you will even see it there).  This is really important today because our thoughts change our perceptions and our perceptions change our reality.  We create our own reality with our thoughts and our dreams.

I think that there is something that is even more important than what we dream, think and perceive, and that is who we are becoming.  It is who we become that changes the world today and in the future.  My kids have told me that their friend’s parents have told them that I’m just an old hippie and that means that I still live by the dictum, “Think global, act local.” 

If your spiritual practice is helping you change, helping you become a more peaceful, more loving, and more compassionate person and if it brings you joy then for you it is a good path.  How do you change the world when you change?  Think local.  Is your family better?  Is there more unity and love at home?  If your children feel more unity and love then how will they treat their friends?  And your change starts to ripple outwards.  If your children feel more unity and love how will they parent and how will that affect future generations?

The kind of person you are today matters now and in the future.  Follow a spiritual path that helps you become your ideal of what you can and should be.
 
Be Well  . . . Live Well,

Dr. Dave
 
 
(1) If you are curious, he was seeded in the middle of a group of 75 runners for the 300m and he won his heat and set a new pb.
(2) Guilty as charged.  I was born in the early 50s and am a product of the 60s.  

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