All relationships have seasons. When you first fall in love there is an incredible expansion an overwhelming desire to unconditionally love and frolic with your new found love. This is a season of festive joy when your senses are heightened and being with and serving your new love is your intention and the focus of your attention. You are lost in a high vibratory state where love abounds and the cares of the world grow strangely dim in the presence of such great love.
Then the seasons change. That high emotional state of unconditional love and servitude fades into a season of love recession and you start to look at life, love and your relationship differently. You begin to see the condition of the world more clearly than when you were lost in the throes of love’s overwhelming abundance. You begin to see how you fit into a world which exists outside of your relationship, and you might even feel as though this relationship, which was so utterly amazing not long ago, is now starting to feel restrictive. What was once a free-flowing celebration of love is starting to feel claustrophobic or even prison-like.
These emotional seasons of recession are a necessary part of growth. These recessions are what moves a relationship built on mutual enthusiasm to a higher, more mature and satisfying form of love. For the couple who can maintain and grow through the recessive stages of love, they can achieve a substantial and authentic love-filled life which dreams are made of. Those who only seek to follow their feelings, looking to recapture the excitement of new love, will never know the unbound possibilities of lasting, true love.
The same is true for your spiritual relationship.
Spiritual Recession
In the beginning of your spiritual journey, everything is new and exciting. You find joy in the expanding process of learning and growing in your spiritual practices and you can’t think of anything you’d rather do. The diligent pursuit of your expansion, taking the necessary steps to embrace new ideas and pushing through to the next level of advancement or evolving as a spiritual being comes easily and feels so good in this season of expansion.
As is true in most, if not all things, seasons of expansion are followed by a season of contraction, or recession. So, don’t be surprised when you find your enthusiasm for your spiritual practices begin to wear thin. In the times when you’re “not feeling it” like you once did, there is an underlying harkening for your attention to diligently continue to pursue if you are to truly experience growth and evolutionary expansion.
In these times of spiritual recession, the immature weak-kneed spiritual seekers, look for something exciting to capture their attention in hopes of rekindling the flame of their enthusiasm, while others eject themselves from spiritual pursuits altogether, embracing any other activity which might prevent them from feeling unenthusiastic or bored. Pleasure seekers, such as these, are commonplace in our society, and you see many of them come and go while you are on the path of your spiritual journey. There is no judgment of those who choose to do so. That is their journey, and maybe it has been your journey before, but at this time, in this place, now you are aware and ready to accept the sacred invitation to diligently push-through your spiritual recession to break through to a higher evolutionary level of your spiritual expansion.
If you are actively keeping a spiritual journal, you will know when you are heading into a spiritual recession if there is nothing exciting to report for two weeks. Knowing this, you can prepare for this phase of your spiritual journey.
In these times of spiritual recession, stay focused on what is happening in the moment. When you are in the expansion phase it is easy to look into the future and get excited, during the recession it is important to turn your attention to the “now” and look inward. Now is the time when you are able to see things from a different perspective (not necessarily more clearly) allow these thoughts and images to flow over you, and take the time to seek inside yourself for answers, integrations, or ideas about how you might be able to affect change in these areas, by adjusting your thoughts, ideals, beliefs, or ask yourself,
“Are these images or ideas calling me to serve others in some way?”
It is not uncommon for those who are on a spiritual journey to receive an awakening, quickening, or receive a calling to pursue an evangelical effort to help others look at something in a different way, or to be enlightened with a solution to a problem which faces the spiritual community, or the greater community at large.
The greatest ideas and breakthroughs in science and spiritual expansion come in these times of spiritual expansion, if not just for yourself, potentially changing the world and making it a better place, because you took advantage of this special time of spiritual recession to engage in a different type of doingness than you might have been engaged in during the expansion phase.
While the season of spiritual recession is not limited to a specific period of time, fear not. Your diligent persistence to advance during these times leads you to the season of expansion, and you will have achieved another, more beautiful and fascinating level of life because you did not bail out when the feelings weren’t there.
I can’t wait to see how you emerge from your spiritual recession.