6. Getting Started

It is time now to address the big question ‘How do I start?’. At this point it will be necessary to shift gears and slow down, to move from information processing mode to practical application or practice mode. This is an important part of what I am trying to accomplish with this book. Before we do start, I first want to make it very clear that this is not a method or a step by step guide. The process of engaging our spirit is something highly individual and very sacred, by which I mean it is a very personal matter between each one of us and God. At the same time because everything is governed by principles, we can apply these principles in order to create exercises which will produce consistent results across a large majority of people.

These exercises require a complete change of pace. Up until now you have been reading to consume information in order to better understand this topic to decide if it is something you want to get involved with or not. You are evaluating and investigating and forming opinions. At this point I am going to invite you to put th book or device down and engage in some exercises. I am going to encourage you to “camp out” with these exercises until you have had at least a decent number of tries and have begun to experience the reality of your spirit. The exercises are sequential, meaning that if you skip any, you will have very limited success with the exercises that follow. Everything I am going to say from here on will build on the foundation of this. I’m not saying don’t read on, but I am saying it is worth taking some time to stop and try it and to continue to practice. Development requires practice.

Exercise 1: Acknowledging our Spirit

The first exercise is to find a quiet spot, read the instructions, then put the book down and simply begin to acknowledge your spirit. It is very simple, all that is required is to start to turn your attention towards your spirit, and allowing yourself to notice it. This will give your spirit some space to stir and respond. As you start to notice it, try and get a sense of where it is and what it is doing. It doesn’t sound like a big thing, but it is most likely that we will never have deliberately engaged our spirit before, and therefore the results can be unexpected - especially if we are a little sceptical. When you do it, and your spirit starts to stir, you will quite likely begin to experience some strange sensations that can be a little uncomfortable for some people. You will begin to have a dialogue with yourself and ask yourself questions such as “am I imagining this?”, “Is this real?”, or you might automatically reject or filter out some of what you start to experience This is because a vast part of you that has been neglected for years will begin to stir - and it is quite likely that it will take us by surprise, because few of us when we start really believe it’s even there. And perhaps the biggest surprise will be how strongly it responds when you pay just the slightest bit of attention.

The results will vary from person to person. At one end of the spectrum, a person’s spirit will already be fairly healthy, active and close to the surface, and this simple exercise will produce an immediate reaction. At the other end of the spectrum a person’s spirit will have gone “underground” and will have become disengaged, so that it will take a little patience for it to re-engage again. This is especially true of a spirit that has experienced trauma and which has turned its face away from the world. If that is the case, with a little patience and persistence, a person will start to experience a feeling of something stirring or coming back from far away, or from the bottom of a deep dark hole. The good news is, that with a little work, a tiny bit of patience, and some perseverance, even highly a disengaged spirit can become responsive and the results can be quite amazing.

It is hard to explain how powerful the simple act of paying our spirit some attention can be. Our spirit is so used to being isolated that even the tiniest bit of genuine attention will be like water in a dry and thirsty land to it. If we continue to consistently pay attention as a regular practice, we will find that our spirit will begin to grow stronger and more confident, and will start to engage little by little in our everyday life, and we will know about it. In practice, I would build five to ten minutes a day minimum into your schedule to do this. The length of time is not important, the consistency of doing it day in and day out is the key.

Exercise 2: Making Time

While the first exercise was about politely acknowledging our spirit, this exercise is about taking the next step to deliberately allow our spirit some freedom to start interacting. The exercise is pretty simple: in order to develop our spirit, we will need to make some time for it, time to give it an opportunity to surface and interact with the world around us. Once again, this exercise requires you to slow down and work a little to understand what I am talking about, because it is not as simple as it sounds. It will require a bit of practice and determination.

What then do I mean by making time for our spirit? What I am absolutely not talking about is the traditional Christian “quiet time”, prayer time or any other devotional activity. Your spirit is not the religious part of you, it is a vital and real everyday part of you that is able to participate in every kind of everyday activity.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, making time for God and making time for our spirit are two very different and separate activities that we should not confuse. One is not a substitute for the other. Making time for God is not necessarily making time for your spirit, and making time for your spirit is not necessarily making time for God; we need both. If we think about our soul, we make time for God, and for other things. We continue to develop it outside of our formal time with God. Why should our spirit be any different? If we are going to develop our spirit and reap the rewards of developing it, we should be thinking about getting to a stage that we make significant time for it, just as we do for our soul or body and approach this with the same rigour.

The second reason why “quiet time” is sometimes not conducive to spiritual development is that many devotional activities are oriented towards our soul. It is a really common temptation in our Christianity to try to engage God, who we have seen is Spirit, at the level of our soul only. We stay at the level of the soul nature instead of starting with our soul and stepping up to engage God with our spirit as well. I see this as an attempt to negotiate God into dealing with us at the level we are most comfortable with. It is a very human thing to do.

I want to be clear her, I fully endorse the practice of setting time aside to be with God every day, and it is a key part of my daily practice. All that I am saying is that for the purpose of this exercise, this is not the kind of making time for the spirit that I am talking about. Ultimately, as our spirit begins to develop, our times with God will become a completely different affair as we begin to fellowship spirit to Spirit.

What then are the instructions for this exercise? It is as simple as intentionally setting aside dedicated time just for our spirit to be, experimenting with various locations, times of day, and environments. Our souls have become conditioned to want attention all of the time. If we aren’t working, we are reading newspapers, watching television, going out for meals, playing games, fiddling with our electronic devices, going for a drink with friends, or even just having fun with the family. All of this is about making time for the soul. The reality is that for most of us, our souls consume almost every waking minute of the time we are given on earth. Therefore the first part of making time is to carve out time away from activities that stimulate our soul to begin to discover what gets our spirit excited.

Once we have found a time and space that works for us, the next part is to give permission to our spirit to come forward and engage the world around us. If you have been practising paying attention to your spirit, this will come quite easily. At this point it is very important to note that just as different people like different things, the same goes for our spirits. Every single one of our spirits is designed differently, which means that your spirit will like different things from my spirit. Because of this, it is really important when we are creating time for our spirit, that we engage in discovery and pay attention to the kinds of things our spirit likes and does not like. This is actually easier than it sounds.

One of my favourite ways to make time for my spirit is to drive my car on certain types of roads through certain types of countryside. How did I discover this? Well, as I started paying attention to my spirit, I began to notice that my spirit loves being in motion. Secondly, I noticed that when I was driving, I experienced a desire to drive a certain route and to avoid another. I noticed that my spirit reacted strongly to the land I was driving on and the types of road. In other words, as I paid attention and created time, my spirit began to let me know the kind of things it liked and disliked. As a result I now make driving through certain types of countryside a practice. When starting out on a journey, I tune into my spirit (pay attention) as I drive to find out if it has any preference on what route to take, and I take some time, at various stages of the journey, to turn off all distractions (music, radio), and I allow my spirit to come to the front and interact with the land, trees, and countryside I drive through.

I want to emphasise that this is my practice, and the reason it works for me is because my spirit has been designed this way. I am quite certain that it will not work for everyone or even the majority. This is my thing. Our spirits are all very different. Some of us will find our sweet spot either moving or being still in the middle of a busy crowd in a city. Some will find it being near water. Some peoples spirit will like travelling in a certain direction, some will like certain times of day or night, some peoples spirit will especially like fragrance and quietness, some like noise. The good news, is that finding out what your spirit likes and making time for it, is not hard. Our spirit will start to tell us. However it is also important to know that we are not on our own. We have the Spirit of our Father to guide and coach us - and He is VERY interested in us developing this area and very helpful when we get stuck.

Exercise 3: Affirming our Spirit

The next exercise builds on the previous one, in that we take it one step further and that is that we begin to deliberately affirm our spirit. Making time for our spirit is one part of affirming it, but what I am talking about here is going a bit further. This is a very important step because many of our spirits have become so disengaged. At this point we will be pushing out past many people’s comfort zones, because one of the mysteries about how we were designed is that our natures can communicate with each other, which means we can communicate with our spirit. You can speak to your spirit, and it can hear you and respond, although in a cryptic way in order to translate the realities of its world into human language. Because most of what happens around us is soulish, it is not very interesting to our spirit and it slowly become disengaged; there is nothing to stimulate it or keep it interested. When I talk about affirming our spirit, I am talking about taking steps to establish direct communication with your. The choice on how best to communicate with your spirit belongs to you. What I am going to focus on are the messages to communicate.

There are three key messages we want to affirm to our spirit. These themes are so crucial to our spiritual nature that we will continue to develop them for years and constantly build them, because the world outside of us will constantly seek to erode them.

Light from Light

The first key theme is that God, who is Light, made our spirit out of His own Light, and has designed our spirit with great precision and care. God designed our spirit for earth, not for heaven. It is His will that Heaven is established on earth, and our spirit was designed according to that will. When Jesus said “you are the light of the world” He meant it in a very literal sense. We are the Light of God born into this world to tend it and transform it into a Heavenly place. Earth is not an inconvenience we have to endure - it is a core part of our mission and purpose. Practically speaking, affirming our spirit is about taking time to communicate this theme to our spirit, in whatever fashion works best for us, and allowing our spirit to chew it over until it begins to take root.

Timing

The second key theme to affirm is that our Father has placed our spirit into this world at a very precise time. In fact, at exactly the right time for what He has designed it for. He has not, for example, designed a special forces assassin and put them into a time of peace and plenty. No. Rather, He designed us not only for earth, but for a specific time on earth, and we were injected into the earth precisely when it was planned that we should be, regardless of any of the circumstances of our birth and what we believe about it. What this means is, that God has carefully designed our spirit for exactly the time we are living in, when the gifts and talents of our spirit are of most benefit. That is good news for us, and good news for the world around us. Once again, the practice of affirming this is to communicate this to our spirit, and allow it to sink in, over and over.

Not Alone

The final theme to affirm to our spirit is that God has not left our spirit alone in this world and abandoned it to fend for itself to see who survives. That is the exact opposite of our Father’s Way. He is in a very real way the Father of our spirit, meaning that He is absolutely committed to providing for it and developing its potential. Developing our spirit is part of growing into a relationship with God - a spiritual friendship that goes deeper than family or earthly relationship could. What that means is, there is no true developing our spirit without Him - it is not a task that we need to do, but rather an activity that we can share with our Father to get to know Him and what He has fashioned us to be. A great way to think about this is the concept of “easter eggs”. Easter eggs are hidden presents and surprises that are left for us to search for and discover. And God has hidden many easter eggs in our spirit for us to discover and share the joy with Him.

Looking Ahead: Spiritual Design

This book is about getting started, it is something of a teaser. My intention is to deliberately refrain from talking about later stages of the journey simply because they will not make sense now. At the same time, I do want to take a little look at the next step on the journey and lay out some basic practices we can do that will help to prepare for that.

Once we have invested some time in diligently practising the exercise outlined in this chapter, and we know that our spirit is engaged and active. The logical question will arise ‘where do I go from here?’. The answer is that the next step involves more detailed attention to discovery to understand a more about how your specific spiritual design. By this I mean firstly what type of spirit do I have, and secondly what are my spiritual talents? It is important to remember, that God did not make our spirit by saying “Hmmm, let’s make a blue one today - I’m in the mood for blue”. Rather, our Father as a Master of Design invested considerable effort into planning the design of our spirit. Only when He was absolutely satisfied with it, did He give birth to it, light from Light. Each and every individual spirit a masterpiece.

Perhaps an analogy will help. When we first attend preschool as young children, everyone is taught the same things. We we progress through the education systems of our world, we specialise more and more. This specialism is based on our “natural talent”. In the same way, if we are to fully develop the potential of our spirit, we need to discover our talents and begin to specialise. Let’s look at a few examples. Some people have a talent for mathematics, their brain is just wired that way. If they can discover this, they can develop it and become exceptional mathematicians. Other people have the talent and body shape for swimming. If they discover this, they can develop it and become an Olympic swimmer. If they don’t discover this and spend all their time trying to become something they have little talent for, they are not likely to very successful. A great example of this is musical talent - you either have it or you don’t, no matter how much effort you invest in developing this area, you will get poor results.

Clues

As with our soul and body, the first first area to start looking for clues in is what kind of things our spirit is drawn towards. A way to do this is to pay attention to the kind of things that recharge or energise us. When life gets difficult, what kind of things are we drawn towards in order to get back on our feet? I am not talking here about the kind of pain-killing activities which our souls immediately seek out. The key here is that we are recharged. In my case, one the things that recharges me is spending time around mountains. Once we have started to identify the kinds of things our spirit likes, we have taken a first step towards discovering our spiritual abilities, and we can begin to look at how to develop them. If we find that our spirit likes certain things, this is a clue that we probably have some interesting spiritual abilities in that area that we should think about how to develop.

The second area is to look for clues about what kind of spirit we have. Even though God designed each spirit to be unique, there are a set number of different types of spirit. If we work with our design, i.e. recognise the type of spiritual design we have, then we will get great results, and vice versa. But how do we do this? The process is fairly similar to the one outlined above. The difference is, that instead of looking at the types of things our spirit enjoys, we start to look for clues in our personality. It is in this area that our spiritual type will show itself more than any other. This is not about what we like, but what kind of being we are. It is important here not to confuse personality with spiritual type. Our personality is part of our soul. What we are doing here is paying attention to our personality to look for clues of a spiritual design that goes deeper than how our personality and underlies it.

Finally, for those of us who are parents, recognising design in our children at an early age can help us work with the design of our children to produce happy and fulfilled human beings that are able to go places and do things with their spirit that we may never get to. This is a big topic, and there are many resources in this area already.

Summary

This chapter has been a practical look at how to get a process started, how to take the first few steps. Once we take those first few steps, a whole new world will start to open up as our spirit engages and begins to guide us, under instruction by the Holy Spirit of our Father, who is committed to guiding and partnering with us on this journey to develop the full potential of our spirit.