It’s good to know this from the start. Contrary to several New Thought schools, the spiritual journey is not a skip down a rosy path collecting buckets of bliss along the way as we magically evolve.  Evolution is hard work.  Spirit guide Spotted Eagle says, “The harder you work, the harder it gets”.  He also suggests that bliss is overrated, perhaps because in terms of evolutionary growth, we get more mileage from encountering the challenges of life.

The spiritual path is difficult because rather than protecting you, it will drive you right into the heart of your issues. This is your opportunity to evolve, and it requires you to face, not run from, your issues.  During this process, be prepared to watch a part of yourself get torn to threads. It’s useful to understand that this is, in fact, the inauthentic part of you, the part comprised wholly of the beliefs/ideas/opinions/fantasies you have nurtured most of your life, but it will be painful none-the-less.

If you want, you can wait a few more lifetimes. But why wait?  Here are some guide posts and tools to help you along the way.

For those of you who are at a difficult juncture, just a little farther up ahead (oh, all right—after you trudge over Mt. Everest) you will discover something interesting about “difficult”.  It’s a perception. Something is difficult only if you perceive it as difficult.  Any “obstacle” on the path is only an obstacle if you perceive it that way. It all depends on what thoughts your mind is feeding you. You cannot change the event, but you can change your perception of it. You can change how you are going to dance with it. Experimenting with your perception will alter your experience entirely. No event that the universe places in your path comes with a Do Not Remove tag that says “DIFFICULT–OBSTACLE”. It is only your mind that puts that label on it, and you can remove it anytime.  The first tool then is to grant yourself the freedom to experiment and change your perception of what crosses your path.

By the time you’ve trudged over Mt. Everest, much of your story, your belief system, your ego, and the thoughts you identified with all your life have been torn to threads. It’s OK if they’re still hanging loosely all around you. Gather those torn threads and put them in your pocket, because even though the fabric of your old self can never be restored, it will probably be too painful to throw the threads away just yet. You will need to grieve each one, so take your time. Some pieces you can part with easily. Others, you’ll need to swim through what feels like an ocean of grief. There’s no way of short-cutting this process.  Allow each thread its due. You must swim through your grief carefully, mindfully, lest you fall into self-pity or blame or guilt or shame or outrage during this process, and then have to begin all over again. Simply grieve what is lost, without going into a story. After you grieve cleanly, each thread will gently drift away. There is no hurry. The second tool then, is to grieve each belief, each agenda, each fantasy that your trudge over Mt. Everest has rendered useless and torn to threads.

When you are presented with your next mountain and look carefully at your perception of it, you will discover something else that will help you travel your path. Seeing it as “difficult” is not only a perception, it can also be clouded with judgment.  Your judgment takes you out of the present moment and puts you inside a small box where you are blind.  Trying to view the outer world through the narrow and distorted lens of your judgment will never allow you to clearly perceive what’s on your path and how you can best respond to it. Your judgment sits on top of a mountain of resistance. This mountain of resistance is of your own making, and it can loom larger than the ‘mountain’ the universe has put before you. When you resist what the universe has already created, you are taking on the universe, and that is a battle you will never win. It will tire your spirit and deplete your physical energy reserves.

What to do? Let go of your judgments born of your agenda, your time schedule, your beliefs, your fears, etc. Give up your resistance. The universe has put a mountain before you—there it stands. It has already happened, so there is no point in resisting it. It is what it is. Until you learn acceptance, the spiritual path will wear you out. It is not the path that must change; it is you that must change. The more you relinquish your resistance to it, the lighter the going gets. All mountains are opportunities to lighten your load. The third tool is to give up your resistance.

In the final analysis, is the spiritual path difficult?  It depends on where you’re standing at any given moment, and from which mountain you are looking. Just make sure you’re not standing on a rock that pretends it is easy. Difficult is a good place to start.  Then practice changing your perceptions, grieve what needs to be grieved, and lower your resistance. The path may not be easy, but you can learn to travel it with more ease.

We have a deep-rooted belief that if we let go of judgment, society will fall apart. But just what are we holding together?  Perhaps the fabric of society that our judgments hold together is the most toxic part of a society. What would happen if we loosened the grip of judgment in our lives? What might a society look like if over half the judgments we indulge in were scrapped away?

For starters, we’d be giving ourselves and each other a lot more freedom and a lot more space. We’d stop butting into everyone’s lives. We’d stop judging other people’s life styles, their affairs, their actions, their choices. We’d learn the difference between being interested in what others are doing, and judging what others are doing. We’d learn the difference between laws that are truly necessary in a society, and fear-based judgments disguised as laws, that in fact inhibit the evolution of a society and shackle parts of the human experience. Many of our fears masquerading as laws turn into a crime what we find discomforting–or else what we find profitable, such as the criminalization of  drugs.

The freedom and space we give to others to live their lives as they wish equates equally to the freedom and space we give to ourselves to live our lives as we choose. With less judgment and the peering eyes of those around us, we’d experience a human journey that contains more ease, more alignment with our evolutionary purpose, more authenticity, and we’d have greater energy available to focus and direct toward useful and satisfying life experiments.  We’d understand that the human journey is just that:  a journey, always in process and always an experiment, and for the most part, completely beyond human judgment.

Why is this so? Spirit guide Spotted Eagle points out that we are all ancient spiritual energies. This ancient energy that is you and I is individuated and differentiated. It has been personally “us” for a long time, and we each are unique according to the different dimensions we have chosen to experience with our spiritual energy. Since we know that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is an understatement to say our journeys have been long. We have been journeying and experimenting and evolving our energy for billions of years and beyond. Our human lifetime is a small, quick flicker in the total scheme of who we are. We do not know what any soul or spiritual energy may be working on in this particular lifetime, so it is hubris for us to attempt to judge any human life. Instead of judging, it is more accurate to understand that everyone, without exception, is on a sacred  journey of evolution.

When we begin to understand that there is a much bigger picture at work, we can more easily extend to each human being who has chosen to experience this quite difficult earth plane, a large amount of respect and honor. We can give them a wide berth to journey as they are called, knowing that no matter what their circumstances, or how they appear, there is more going on than meets the human eye. When we look at others, we can know that they are incredibly powerful to choose and change and evolve their journey at every moment. (For an insightful blog on extending compassion to others instead of judgment or pity, visit channel Jennie Marlow’s blog on Compassion).

Judging is a peculiarly human thing to do–it does not exist in any other dimension. We will drop our judgments the minute we drop our physical body. But while we are here, we can learn from our judgments and keep them under supervision.  Judgment unsupervised entangles our spirit and leaves us living lives trapped by the conditioning of society. Examining our own judgments will give us clues as to what that conditioning is, how it works, and the assumptions upon which we and our society run. Which assumptions are we ready to change?  How do we wish to evolve ourselves and our society? When we drop our end of the judgment rope, we are learning to be responsible with our energy, and we free ourselves to move in creative and productive directions that truly enhance our lives and bring us joy.