Nine Top Spiritual Terms Explained

Spiritual terms are confusing–especially in a yoga and wellness market bombarded with mixed messaging.

Enhanced wellbeing is experienced through spiritual growth, so it’s important to break through the lingo and be empowered along the way.

Here are my NINE TOP SPIRITUAL TERMS EXPLAINED:

1. The Great I/Self  The greatest reality, the oneness and truth from which individual experience arises and to which it returns. Known by many names including consciousness, the natural state, presence, the Great I is most profoundly experienced in silence. When we listen free of motive, we are within our multidimensional being. Here, the mind has no further assertions and questions are answered. The mind comes home once it discovers its ultimate purpose is to serve this Great I/Self.
2. The Individual I  The separate self as well as the birth of the individual mind.  We’re quite familiar with this separate identity: the one invested in its perceived needs and heavily identified with thought.  The individual I seeks outer approval, judges to reinforce a perception of superiority and suffers when outer circumstances shift.
3. Meditation  An immersion, or glimpse, within depth of Self/the Great I. When we enjoy what we do so much as to lose sense of space and time, we meditate. Singing, time with children and pets, surfing as well as the practices of meditation and breathwork are a few activities that invite depth of Self.  Meditation also reveals deep happiness. Happiness for no reason!
4. Self Inquiry Questioning the separate self, its thoughts and experiences as “truth.”  This self inquiry is called the Direct Path: Rather than questioning outer forms and objective experience, we turn inward and question the individual I and its understanding of “truth.”
5. Surrender As the mind learns to trust the Great I/Self, we begin to surrender. We start to rest the individual I within the Great I until the individual I is absorbed within Self. As the individual I arose from Self, it, too, returns to Self through a willing surrender. A discerning mind supports this coming home.
6. Spiritual Bypassing  A phase of spiritual growth marked by an inability to acknowledge or process the challenges experienced by the separate self. For example, early pre-verbal trauma can push us toward spiritual growth. Then subtle, expansive experiences can be so intoxicating that underlying trauma remains dormant. We become lost in subtle experience and even be attracted to cults.
7. Dissociation  The debilitating and distressing experience of being in a fog, confused and mentally scattered due to trauma. Dissociation is often described as zoning out, being disempowered, voiceless and out of the body.
8. Enlightenment  Reclamation of our natural state (the Great I), the fulfillment of the soul journey. All life is connected within the Great I and all forms are emanations of source. Enlightenment is not an event. It is the meditation, the remembering and stabilizing within the Great I/Self.
9. Spiritual One-upsmanship  The individual I/separate self asserting superiority or dominance over another by claiming greater spiritual knowledge.

Karuna shares that all adversity and trauma point to spiritual growth. She reads subtle energy to unravel the earliest origin of trauma and help clients reclaim the Great I. Book private sessions today.

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