Practices From the Inside Out: Building Our Own Spiritual Life

Building Our Own Spiritual Life

We went out for pizza the other day and immediately faced many choices.

Before the sauces and topping options, before we told them how thick we wanted our crust to be. We needed to choose between a pizza designed for us by professionals or a pizza we built for ourselves.

While the pre-determined pizzas all sounded fine, we decided to build our own.

Deep dish or thin crust. Spicy or regular marinara sauce, or garlic pesto. Mozzarella or gorgonzola, goat cheese or vegan cheese. Bacon or chicken, meatballs or pepperoni, Italian sausage or smoked ham. Black olives, mushrooms, bell peppers, spinach, tomatoes. Onions? Zucchini? Pineapple?

We can choose whatever we believe makes our pizza better.

Our pizza was excellent! Now we look forward to trying something new the next time.

Pizza has a lot in common with spiritual life. Our first choice is either taking something designed for us or building our own spiritual life.

It can be intimidating to build our own spiritual life. We could make spontaneous choices we might regret later. There may be flavor combinations we try and discover they do not taste as good as we hoped.

We may build something delicious by accident only to forget how we did it.

Some of us could be afraid to try something new. We may have been taught to believe it is wrong to have both onions and pepperoni. Building our own spiritual life could create problems for other people. It might make us uncomfortable.

We may have less anxiety just taking what someone else makes for us. It can feel safer to let other people do the work, but we might miss something fantastic. We will never know how amazing something can be until we try building our own spiritual life.

What Are Our Choices?

Unfortunately, spiritual life does not come with a menu which lists all our choices. We cannot see the ingredients spread out on the counter in front of us. There is not even anywhere we can check online to find what we can or cannot choose.

We are building our own spiritual life as we discover what our options are. Seeing our choices is part of the challenge.

Choices can be intimidating when we have always been told what we can or cannot have. We may assume the only choices are what other people tell us we can have. It may be hard for us to realize we could even try building our own spiritual life.

We forget the tremendous potential of spiritual life. It is easy for us to assume some things belong in spiritual life and other things do not.

We do not begin to see what our choices could be.

I was taught to believe I understood the rules of spiritual life. It was not about building our own spiritual life, but about choosing from a list. These ingredients, these choices were available and those were not.

I was taught spiritual life was about making the right choices. Some options were infused with spiritual life while others were beyond the lines. Spiritual life was about doing what was expected of us.

I see spiritual life differently now. It is difficult for me to see a line between what is spiritual life and what is not. Spiritual life fills us and the world around us. Choices which I was told were outside the circle of spiritual life are central. Answers which appeared at the top of the menu have faded into the background.

We have almost unlimited choices for building our own spiritual lives.

Making Choices for Building Our Own Spiritual Life

Building our own spiritual life is often more complicated than building our own pizza.

The ingredients we choose are more than momentary flavors. We need to be open to discerning what spiritual life is drawing us to do. As we reflect and see ourselves more clearly we begin to glimpse choices we need to make.

We do not build our own pizzas to be bland and tasteless. The spices, the flavors we choose help our pizzas taste more interesting. In the same way, we are not building our own spiritual life to be boring.

The ingredients we choose to include make our spiritual life more uniquely our own.

Spiritual life is not about always being safe and secure. We choose to try things which stretch us and challenges us. As we become more intimately connected to ourselves we realize what we want to try.

Spiritual life is not about staying inside a circle or not crossing a line. There is no requirement we need to take what someone else gives us.

We are building our own spiritual life and we get to make our own choices.

When we build our own pizza we do our best to make it a good one. There are ingredients we include because we know we enjoy them. We may try something new to learn from the experience.

There are lessons we can learn from what other people tell us, but we make our own choices.

Building Our Own Spiritual Life Like We Build Our Own Pizza

First we choose to make our own choices, not blindly accept the choices of other people.

We consider each layer of spiritual life we would like to build. What is the basis of our spiritual life? What ingredients have we already tried? Which do we like and which would we like to set aside? How does each flavor draw us into more intimate spiritual life?

Would we like spiritual life to be more spicy or more meaty? What are the flavors we would like to taste next?

As we take each step in the building process we learn the lessons it has for us. We set aside what we have been told we will probably like as we discover what we actually do.

How are we building our own spiritual life this week?

What ingredients would you like spiritual life to include today?

[Image by spikenheimer]

Greg Richardson is a spiritual life mentor and leadership coach in Southern California. He is a recovering attorney and university professor, and a lay Oblate with New Camaldoli Hermitage near Big Sur, California. Greg’s website is StrategicMonk.com, and his email address is [email protected].