How can spirituality contribute to your personal growth?

Many people confuse spirituality with religion. Religions began to evolve long ago, when man sought a way to bring himself closer to the divine presence he sensed flowing through and around everything he experienced. A religion is a set of beliefs that attempt to explain the unexplainable, and practices that are designed in order to relate to the Great Spirit. Spirituality is that the connection; it is the relationship to the Great Spirit.

It is that awareness of the divine presence within ourselves and in the world.

That awareness can have a tremendous affect on a person’s growth and development. It doesn’t matter which religion one may practice, or if one doesn’t practice a religion at all. Spiritual people all embrace universal principles that transcend religion, creed, gender, age, race and culture. Those universal principles are what empowers a spiritual person and aids one in personal growth and development.

First and foremost, spirituality helps one form a relationship with the Great Spirit. It doesn’t matter how one personally views Spirit, or through which set of beliefs one gets to know Spirit. Spirit has many different names and many different faces, and only appears to us in those which we can understand and relate to on a personal level. When we have a relationship with Spirit, we can find inner peace. That inner peace can become a safe port in any storm. Through this relationship with Spirit, we learn that there is a spark of the divine within each of us. We learn that we are worthy of the joy, happiness and beauty life has to offer, and we begin to seek it.

Spirituality also helps one to cultivate one’s relationship with others. We realize that every other person on the planet also contains a spark of the divine within them. This improves our ability to have patience and compassion for our fellow man. They too are sacred beings with ageless souls. We learn that we are all heading up the same mountain, even though we may be taking separate paths. We are all children of Spirit, we are all part of the same family. Understanding that connection helps one realize that by helping others, one is helping oneself.

Spirituality also teaches us that we have each been blessed with our own unique spiritual gifts. We merely have to discover what they are to use them to our advantage. We can discover these gifts by considering what we are good at, taking aptitude tests, praying for guidance, and trying different things. Once these gifts are revealed to us, we can cultivate them and use them with confidence in order to help ourselves and others.

Spirituality gives us the knowledge that life is a gift. Whether you believe we live one life on this planet, or many in succession, you know that the opportunity is too precious to be squandered. If you are a spiritual person, you must realize that you were given this gift for a reason. The knowledge of this is a huge motivating factor in how we use this time.

The gifts of Spirit are many; as a spiritual person, take advantage of those gifts to aid you on all aspects of your life’s journey.