Spiritual Growth and Development
Spiritual growth is the process of evolving our consciousness. What exactly does this mean? We can define spiritual growth in a number of ways:
1) As we grow spiritually, the way that we perceive the world should be changing for the better. For example, in the early stages of our spiritual development, we might take a relatively bad experience that we have and simply chalk it up to being bad luck, and possibly play a victim role in how events unfold. We react to the experience in a negative way and make little or no growth from it.
As we make spiritual growth, we can choose better actions to deal with such negative experiences, turning them into positive ones. Instead of playing a victim role when something bad happens, we can reflect and look for the deeper meaning, and try to see our part in how we might have brought such an event on.
2) As we grow spiritually, our attitude shifts for the better, in a number of ways. Spiritual growth isn’t so much about changing our world or our lives, but about changing ourselves and how we perceive the world. It is like waking up and seeing the world through “a new pair of glasses,” as it says in the AA big book.
One way that our attitude changes is in terms of pride and humility. As we make spiritual progress, pride starts to melt away as we realize that we really don’t know it all, and that every experience can become a learning opportunity for us if we approach it with genuine humility. People that we might have dismissed in the past come to have new meaning for us, because we know that each person might have a potential lesson to teach us. Pessimism doesn’t play well with this idea. Instead, we start looking for the silver lining in things
1 2