As we awaken our spirituality, we may be buzzing with questions, full of mixed emotions, unsure which direction to go in. How can we develop our spirituality with all its gifts and challenges in ways that are as surefooted and true to ourselves as they can be?
Can a spiritual teacher help us?
When we start any adventure, be it a walk in the hills or a new job, we usually prepare, gathering as much information as we can. We don’t want to end up having to be rescued from a mountainside because we weren’t wearing appropriate clothing or didn’t know the weather conditions; we don’t want to blunder around the workplace needlessly making mistake after mistake because we didn’t follow the guidance we were given. How much of this holds true for our spiritual development?
The first thing to say is that our spirituality is innate. It doesn’t need anyone else to make it happen. As it says in Welcome to Planet Earth:
Our soul will always express itself in our lives as fully and freely as we allow it.
That is not the same as saying we wouldn’t benefit from someone sharing their experience and insights, giving us their support and guidance in the ups and downs of our spiritual travels. This practice is to be found anywhere from the cunning folk of rural communities to the spiritual seekers in ashrams. Much depends on our personality, the stage we are at in our lives, what kind of spiritual teaching we receive, and above all, how we use it. What follows is a case study based on my own experience.
Encounter with a spiritual teacher
When I was in my mid-twenties, I was ambitious and outwardly successful. Inside, however, I was in turmoil, full of unhealed trauma and self-destruction. A colleague had told me of a spiritual teacher, which initially I was only mildly curious about. It was not until my life reached crisis point that I became seriously interested in him.
This was Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, a Bulgarian mystic. He turned out to be one of a handful of beings that seem to live on this planet at any one time that are rightly called ‘Spiritual Masters’, though he never used that name about himself. They are spiritual teachers of the very highest level, someone who has achieved not only self-mastery but mastery over the four elements. But for me, the sense of a great Master is primarily intuitive. They are beyond being charismatic, or having an aura of holiness around them. They radiate an astonishingly powerful, uplifting spiritual light that marks them out.
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
I followed Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov for nearly ten years during which time I experienced an intense spiritual awakening and learnt so much. Yet at times I also felt deeply conflicted and needing to be someone other than myself in order to become a ‘good’ disciple.
Looking back now I can see there is much I didn’t understand about the role of a spiritual teacher. First, they are not and cannot be infallible. Though Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov had access to the highest realms of spiritual knowledge, it inevitably filtered through an increasingly dense atmosphere as it reached earth. There was also the influence of the environment into which any teacher was born, in his case into a rural community in 1900. Secondly, a teaching may be appropriate for one era but as humanity is constantly evolving spiritually, the teaching needs to be updated too. Thirdly – and this is something he himself said – we should always test out what a spiritual teacher says. For me he was the right person for that stage in my life but in the end, I needed to go and explore for myself. Just as if you break your leg, you need to put it in plaster, I needed the structure that his teaching provided. But there comes a time when the bone is healed and you need to take the plaster off, otherwise the leg muscle starts to waste away. And I needed to do that too, and spiritually stand on my own two feet.
Intuition and the ‘inner teacher’
Valuable as I myself found the experience of having a spiritual teacher, we all have different spiritual needs. It is said that increasingly souls are being born with more direct access to their inner knowledge, whether a spiritual wisdom from the divine realms or past lives. It is more about listening to the ‘inner teacher’ and less in the way of outer guidance.
So we can use the words of a great sage or sacred texts to illuminate our journey, rather than have them dictate its terms. Sometimes a saying or piece of writing will resonate with something deep inside us and it will enlighten or inspire us. Then it is up to us to act on them and make those words our own. And we can check out ideas that we come across, thinking them through to see if they make sense or seeing how they work out in practice.
We can also develop our intuitive senses which can guide us through life. Especially when we start, we need to learn to use our discrimination not to confuse it with purely emotional reactions or wishful feeling. Intuition can often be best heard in silence and we can set aside a little time each day just to be still.
This brings us to the key issue of staying linked to our spiritual source, whether we understand it as something within, like our ‘higher self’; or from the divine realms above. This can be done through practices like meditation, prayer, chanting and quiet reflection. However we maintain a connection, it is a relationship we must always keep alive if we are to stay true to our spiritual path.
Whatever approach we take, we can be mindful that we can all delude ourselves and hear what we want to hear, so sounding out our ideas with people who we respect is always wise: especially those who are supportive but unafraid to challenge us.
Finding our own path
Whatever route we choose, our spiritual development will always be our responsibility, no one else’s. In the end it doesn’t matter how many mistakes we make: it only matters that it is us that makes them. We have been given a gift, to make our own original canvas out of the colours of our life. We cannot live other people’s lives, however holy, or even usefully seek to imitate them. To do that would be to miss the point of our own unique being.
By Simenon Honoré
You can discover more about developing your own spirituality in Welcome to Planet Earth
To find more about the teachings of Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov: Editions Prosveta
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You can also explore our website: Spirit of the Rainbow.
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