Very often we are brought to the spiritual path by the unexpected forces of life. We are spiritual beings living a human life, but we all forget it the minute we incarnate in our physical bodies. We all enter into life on Earth as souls, totally enlightened and are given physical limits. The baby that we become has to understand the world, has to please it in order to be loved and accepted. The minute we start complying to the demands of those around us, we start listening to the orders and laws of society and we begin to forget the voice of our soul.
The baby needs love in order to survive, so it needs to please. So we all develop traits designed to help us fit in with the world: we build an ego. Our ego blocks our communication with our inner self. As we deal with the daily demands around us, we stop listening to that inner voice that connects us to our true self, we do not hear the voice of our soul and so we all live life in such a way that our inner-voice is not our true guide. Very few of us give much importance to our inner being, to our intuition. But that is the key to the soul.
Choosing to live life cut-off from our soul creates a struggle inside us. Very often this is not conscious, not understood. But this inner battle sets the terrain for dissatisfaction, for frustration and feeling low. We all feel this frustration without understanding it, we want to fight these feelings - and we do. We are brave warriors. We find intelligent ways of dealing with them, but they lack true vision. We find answers through the tools of our personality, the demands of our ego. We find a path to success in the competition and struggle in the world without listening to our true feelings inside ourselves. This is the problem. We battle on regardless, when we really need to ask:
Am I on the right path? Am I doing what I love to do?
We all live many years complying with what the world asks of us, fighting for what it wants us to fight for. We struggle and forget about our intuitive nature, our caring feminine side: we forget to listen to the flow of life. We construct our lives around the personalities we create for ourselves, around the demands of our egos. We are all ego-driven. We become bulimic with outer success, with the accumulation of laurels and material goods in order to feel the meaning of success as defined by the world. We want our peers to admire us, to love us. Behind this race, the soul is speaking. It tries to communicate with us, relentlessly. But few of us pay attention.
The soul is so patient. It definitely let me become a good student in business, then a banker, then a broker, all parts of my life's experiences before I could hear it express itself. Our experiences bring us all nuggets of wisdom about life and ourselves that we certainly need to earn in order to progress. But all along the way our soul will keep trying to talk to us, through that inner voice; through sending messages. These messages might come through visions, dreams, coincidences, or beautiful events happening in front of you...in so many ways. These are the soul's soft way of communicating. We need to be open to understand what it's trying to tell us. If we receive insights, we take them as dreams. Are they important in your life's race? Not when you are blinded, not aware of your spiritual existence
There is a right time for all of us to wake up from this misunderstanding regarding our true nature. In all stories of spiritual awakening you will hear about different ways the spiritual wake-up call arrives. The soul acts almost like a mother-father to the being. It will watch patiently until it is really time for us to live the life of the soul and not the fabricated life we've built to please the world. The timing is different for each one of us. It all depends on the agendas of the soul that we cannot understand but we can definitely feel. I am sure of that!
My spiritual call came to me in different phases. I began to be attracted by all the different spiritual traditions, reading books about them, going to churches, temples, listening to enlightened beings who would show up along my path. Then I felt a physical call: I was compelled to listen to my inner voice. It acted like a magnet in me. There is no technical explanation but nothing could stop the strong feeling inside that I had to listen to that voice. I couldn't deny it - me coming from a very Cartesian background! I started to lose interest in my job that monopolized all my time and interests. I began to have new habits in my life: organizing retreats for myself during the weekends, whereas before they were all about socializing and having fun. My definition of fun shifted so much. I could not wait for my moments of solitude to get to this inner call!
So there is a time when your soul will call you back onto your real track and tell you 'please try to live your own life': that's the life of your soul, not the life of your ego. And your soul will communicate that message until you get it. It might start with soft reminders but as you continue to ignore it, it will communicate in stronger ways and eventually go to extremes. There is no judgement to be had about this. No right or wrong. All is perfect. Life brings what a person needs to understand, if the extreme experience will bring knowledge and healing - that will be the way.
But remember, before extreme events occur, the soul has been trying to talk to you.
The funny thing is that my soul called me and I answered at a time when I started to really wonder why my life was becoming less of a heaven but more like a torture. So I moved from one way of life to another. I quit my job to write and study. I became a writer, without even knowing that was my goal. I just had faith in the path I was stepping out on. I knew something big was happening to me - but that is all I knew.
So you want to enter your spiritual path? Just start listening to your inner self. You are called to it, as it is your true nature. You are in essence a spiritual being and simply reading this text is already opening the door to your inner reality and honestly how wonderful to connect to your deep nature, to your true self, to an immense reality! How great to listen to your soul, to gently get into the flow of life and be in tune with it, expressing the gifts of your true self, without being bombarded by harsh wake-up calls. Start to pay attention to all little signs that life is bringing you. Take a pad and keep a journal about your new sensitivity to the invisible, to the coincidences, to the surprises, to the dreams or visions. As you give it more attention you will become increasingly conscious of your inner voice. You will develop your gift of intuition, of reading the signs of life: you will connect more to your deep self, you will feel more connected to the flow of life and then you will enter the dance of life with more rhythm - and with harmony.
Take your soul messages like gifts to you, listen and enjoy your life.