The 5 Foundations of a Strong Spiritual Practice
Those of us who live in the West now have access to an abundance of wisdom teachings from the East, ones that have gradually evolved over thousands of years. Some had even been kept secret for the better part of that time.
Without a second thought, you can place a teacher’s name in the URL bar of your device. In mere seconds, you’ll arrive at their website where you can access a spectrum of free and paid teachings to delight your seeker heart.
If you pop in a a phrase like “non-dual teachings,” the highest teachings from an Eastern perspective, you’ll receive 78,400 possibilities in reply.
What a miracle! I’m deeply grateful for the wealth of spiritual teachings available to us in modern times.
But nothing is secret or special anymore. Basic teachings mingle with the most advanced on bookstore shelves. It can be tempting to skip the rudiments and go for the highest and the best, especially for earnest Westerners.
Is that wise?
Adyashanti is an American-born contemporary spiritual teacher who offers non-dual teachings to his students, and encourages them to pay attention to the fundamentals for the best outcome.
He’s delineated five spiritual foundations upon which, he says, the entirety of the teachings rest. Without these foundations, he says, you won’t be able to use the teachings efficiently, effectively or wisely. You might even misuse them.
Read through these five foundations and consider whether you have them in place.
1. Clarify Your Aspiration
Everyone’s aspiration is different. Perhaps you want to be a more compassionate person. Perhaps you want to become a great spiritual scholar. Perhaps you want to achieve awakening and no less.
Maybe you just want to suffer less. Many begin their spiritual journey with that desire alone.
Maybe your aspiration isn’t as well formed. Perhaps, it’s a yearning that’s hard to define. Or a wish to know “truth,” whatever that word might mean.
Clarifying your intention will help you stay oriented to what’s most important to you as you travel the spiritual path.
If you’re drawn to spiritual teachings, ask questions like these to clarify your aspiration:
What is spirituality for me?
What am I hoping to experience or discover?
What do I yearn for?
What’s calling me?
Why am I here—reading this spiritual book, watching this video, at this teaching or retreat?
Why am I doing this?
What compels me?
Adyashanti felt compelled to know, “What is enlightenment?” He didn’t know why. He also wanted to live a life of truth and minimize the suffering he caused others.
Clarifying your aspiration will help you pinpoint what you’re committed to, your goal in a sense. It will help you avoid wandering in wrong directions and thus will help you stay focused on your path.
If you don’t know your aspiration, don’t worry. Just ask the above questions from time to time and see what emerges in due course.
Clarify your aspiration, but don’t hold it too tightly. As you learn more through study and practice, your aspiration may evolve and mature.
2. Unconditional Follow Through
It’s not enough to want to embody spiritual qualities like love, compassion, and wisdom. It’s not enough to want to awaken.
To realize your aspiration, you must make your spiritual journey a priority. You must follow through with action. You must make time for spiritual practices like meditation and inquiry.
Sorry for all the “musts,” but this is how it is.
Although there are individuals like Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle who suddenly awakened with no spiritual preparation, that’s rare. Most people who awaken put in enormous amounts of time.
Adyashanti, who clearly had a propensity to awaken and become a spiritual teacher in this lifetime, still spent hours sitting on a cushion in daily meditation and in Zen retreats.
Your aspiration may not be quite as ambitious. Maybe you just want to become a better person. That still takes focus and time.
It’s easy to make a commitment, but it’s far more challenging to follow through. You probably have a job. You may have a partner and perhaps children too. Distractions abound in the form of friends, Netflix, or generalized busyness.
You don’t need to be a spiritual athlete from day one. Start with a realistic commitment even if it’s sitting 15 minutes a day. Once you’ve accomplished that for a month or two, consider increasing it to 20 or 30 minutes and see how it goes.
Structure can help you stay on the straight and narrow too. Consider sitting with a group once a week or even once a day if that’s available to you. Retreats are another way to strengthen your inspiration and resolve.
If you fail to keep your commitment, don’t throw up your hands, chastise yourself and decide to give up. Treat yourself kindly. Allow yourself some grace. If meditation was easy, everyone would already be a pro. Just try again, even if you need to restart with a smaller commitment.
3. Never Abdicate Your Authority
I followed a teacher who demanded obedience under the guise of “devotion.” The outcome was not good for him and his students, when his abusive behavior was revealed on a global scale.
I know from experience that things can go wrong with a spiritual teacher. So, I’m passionate about this particular guideline from Adyashanti.
Adyashanti says people sometimes want a spiritual authority to tell them what to do. They might relate to the teacher as a parent or want to be swept away into higher states without doing any work on their own.
But a teacher can’t do your spiritual work for you or give you something that’s not already inside of you. A teacher may be able to transmit energy or an experience of the nature of mind, which some believe possible due to the function of mirror neurons in the brain.
But it will still require years of meditation to stabilize your experience of the nature of mind—to extend the duration from just a few seconds to a continuous experience.
There are many stories in my tradition (Tibetan Buddhism) of students who received the introduction and then went to an isolated place where they sat under a cliff overhang or in a cave for six years or more until they stabilized their meditative experience.
So, be careful of how you relate to the teacher. And be wary of unscrupulous ones. In my tradition, it’s said you should examine a teacher for years before you commit to him or her.
It’s never healthy to abdicate your authority to someone else. At the same time, it’s important to be open-minded because you’ve come to learn. If you always insist you know better than the teacher, you’ll get nowhere fast.
Find the right balance between open-mindedness and blind devotion to truly gain on your spiritual journey.
4. Absolute Sincerity
Your ego will happily come along with you on the spiritual path, but it won’t help you become a true spiritual practitioner.
Adyashanti says we need the quality of sincerity to protect against the ego and its desire to use the teachings for its own purposes. He emphasizes these variations on the quality of sincerity:
Honesty with oneself and others
Intellectual honesty
Emotional openness
Sincerity
It’s easy to tell ourselves little white lies, isn’t it? Ask yourself, “Am I truly being honest with myself?” Then course correct.
5. Be a Good Steward of Your Life
It can be exhilarating to meet a teacher and the teachings. You might be so excited you want to drop your normal life altogether and become a full time devotee. I’ve known more than one person that separated from their spouse.
You may have a powerful spiritual experience or two and then, like a drug addict, want more and more. But awakening isn’t contingent about having extraordinary experiences. Experiences are transitory. If we cling to an experience, it can become an obstacle on our spiritual path
True spirituality is about being present, clear, and awake in the now. The way you are in daily life shows the depth of your spiritual awakening. It will quickly reveal precisely where you’re lacking in spiritual attainment too. E
Instead of running away from your responsibilities become a good steward of your life. Take care of the necessities and be kind to everyone. Aspire to be a positive presence in the world.
Every aspect of your life can become an element of your awakening so don’t abdicate responsibility for it.
Final Thoughts
Deeply contemplate these five spiritual foundations. Ask, “How are they working in my life?
Clarify your aspiration
Unconditional follow through
Never abdicate your authority
Absolute sincerity
Be a good steward of your life
If you find yourself lacking in one or more of these areas, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, make incremental changes until you feel satisfied with your relationship to each one.
Adyashanti says these five elements form the foundation upon which all other teachings rest. They are the basis for enlightenment itself.
Don’t hanker after higher teachings unless you have these five foundations in place.
TThank you for your presence, I know your time is precious! Don’t forget to sign up for Wild Arisings, my twice monthly letters from the heart filled with insights, inspiration, and ideas to help you connect with and live from your truest self.
You might also like to check out my Living with Ease course or visit my Self-Care Shop. May you be happy, well, and safe – always. With love, Sandra
