7 Master Keys of Spiritual Growth

Spiritual growth and personal growth happen slowly... unless you take charge.

The universe is a machine designed to grow souls by exposing them to an incredibly wide spectrum of experiences, both positive and negative. It is constantly in the process of evolving you as a human being.

So why do some people seem to grow and mature quickly, and others not so much?

The secret is conscious engagement in the universal process—showing up, doing your part, and being grateful for the chance to be alive against nigh-impossible odds.

These seven tips will help you to fully work with the current of evolution and accelerate your own spiritual growth. They're certainly not the only ways to grow spiritually, but they're among the best.

• Turn Off Your Mind.

  Meditation is the core of any spiritual practice—most everything else is window dressing. Just like you need to do cardio and lift weights to get physically fit, you need to meditate to get spiritually fit.

  More than that, you need to meditate correctly. There are lots of meditation techniques available on the open market, most of which are essentially guided visualizations or fluffed-up feel-good techniques. Forget this stuff. The core of meditation is learning how to turn off your mind. Consistent practice in single-pointed awareness—for instance, by focusing your attention on the point between your eyebrows, or a visualized shape—for at least 30 minutes a day is what will build you mentally and physically. Perhaps no pursuit on Earth holds as much net positive benefit in strengthening the mind, maturing the emotions and hastening your spiritual growth.

  To get the fast track on learning how to meditate correctly, and save yourself years of trial-and-error of trying ineffective techniques from the broader spiritual marketplace, check out my class on Raja Yoga—the original, true, ancient technique of Vedic meditation.

  Do this, and you can throw out 99.9% of the watered-down techniques you'll find marketed in New Age, personal growth and religious books and seminars.

• It's Not About You.

  Wei Wu Wei, one of the greatest writers on Buddhism in history, wrote this profound truth about the nature of suffering: “Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.”

  Most suffering comes from our internal narrative about our own life: Our rumination about the past, our feeling of inadequacy about the present, our anxiety about the future. Staying in these mental states uses up a LOT of mental processing power.

  There is an easy fix for these mental agonies: Realizing that it's not about you, and focusing on other people, instead of yourself. The more you can show up for other people, facilitate their experiences, and work for their happiness, the more of that positive energy will come back to you—and in the mean time, you won't be stuck in your own head and in your own entrapping story about your life.

  Note: This does not mean sacrifice yourself or ignore your own self-care! Boundaries are important in all things, and finding a good balance of helping others and helping yourself is crucial.

• Gratitude.

  It's been said by many of the great spiritual teachers: Staying in a state of gratitude will fully open you to the incredible blessings that are all around you. By opening to what's right in front of your eyes, you get out of the feeling of lack or inadequacy that haunts so many people. You realize that we truly do live in a world full of incredible blessings that we so often overlook in our quest for the next big thing. It gets you out of the mental loop of focusing on what you feel is wrong with your life, or with the world, or what latest catastrophe was in the news that day. Cultivating gratitude isn't masochism: It's revealing the truth, which is that we have an incredible chance to live, to be conscious, to draw another breath, and to savor the life we have already lived in this brief moment of time we have to be alive in this strange corner of the universe. This, right here, is one of the most profound keys to spiritual growth we have.

• Let Go.

  Life comes at you fast. So fast that it is often literally impossible to control, and the more time we spend tying ourselves in knots trying to control it, the less we actually have control.

  Life is a bewildering, exhilarating, often terrifying psychedelic trip. The secret is to let go. That doesn't mean give up—it means to relax and understand that, at the end of the day, you have no control. Enjoy the ride.

• Active Dreaming.

  Most people sleep eight hours a day, and if they have dreams, they probably forget them within a few minutes of waking.

  That's 1/3 of the day—every day—that's lost. Over time, it's 1/3 of an entire lifetime.

  What if you could get 1/3 more lifetime?

  You can, if you open up your sleeping life to active dreaming, which means better dream recall, and even lucid dreaming or controlling your own dreams. You can have access to a virtual reality better than anything that will ever be on the market, in which you can come to an incredible sense of radical self-understanding and self-awareness by exploring your own unconscious mind. With 1/3 more life, you get 1/3 more life experience, and 1/3 quicker maturity.

  The first key to active dreaming, and using your dreams for your own spiritual growth, is simple: Write your dreams down in a dream journal every morning upon awakening. Even if you don't currently remember your dreams, this simple practice will change that. The more you write down your dreams, the more you will become aware of them—and in them.

  To master the art of lucid dreaming, check out my Introduction to Lucid Dreaming class now!

• Become Who You Truly Are.

  You will never be happy becoming somebody else's idea of who you should be.

  Ever.

  Instead, you've got to take the hard road: Becoming laser-clear about who you truly are, and what you truly want for yourself, and then committing to fully becoming that, even if there's no safety net, even if it will bring the judgment of the people around you, even if it will take years or decades.

  That's the way to true satisfaction, true self-confidence, and true happiness.

  The first step on this journey is getting perfectly clear about who you are and what your goals in life are. This often isn't easy, but I've made it a lot easier for you: Check out my Adept Initiative course to tap in to powerful techniques for unveiling the core of who you really are!

• Balance.

  Life is about balance. The I Ching and the Tao Te Ching, two of the oldest books in human history, are master courses in understanding balance, and how all dualities equalize over time. What goes up must come down, what goes down must come up—and to all things there is a season. Understanding life's natural rhythm is the key to everything from emotional health to managing work/life balance to making money on the stock market. Understand balance, and you will understand life.

  With these simple but effective tools and philosophies, you can build an incredible foundation for real and lasting spiritual growth!

  To leverage all these techniques and much more, and put rocket fuel into your spiritual development, check out my online school for spirituality, Magick.Me, where you can learn about everything from meditation to lucid dreaming to flowing with the Tao and lots, lots more.