One of the biggest challenges of starting a spiritual path is finding room for it in our everyday lives.
We are just so busy.
When are we supposed to contemplate the immortality of the soul when we have bills to pay, kids to feed, jobs to do, houses to clean, cars to fix, bodies to wash, and so, so many other things demanding our attention?
Life doesn't exactly leave much room for the soul, does it?
But let's say you've had a spiritual awakening. You've realised that life is more than your everyday activities. You feel that there is something deeper to this existence, something you want to explore, something within you that wants to be realised. And you decide to make some room for it.
You buy a course. You find a mentor. You attend an event, then a retreat. Slowly, you start dedicating whatever free time you have to this path. Every spare moment becomes an opportunity to learn, to practise, to get a little closer to something you can feel is true.
And yet, somehow, it still doesn't feel like enough.
During your spiritual practice, you touch something real. You get in touch with your soul's deepest desires, with your true essence. For a moment, you feel connected. You feel alive in a way that's difficult to explain.
And then you go back to your real life.
Back to your job, which takes up 80% of your time. Back to the emails, the meetings, the responsibilities, the office politics. Back to the same old patterns, the same old stories, the same reactions you thought you'd moved beyond.
And, almost without noticing, you find yourself far, far away from your soul again.
So you start craving that feeling you had at the retreat. You want to go back. You want more of it. You want to spend more time in that space where everything feels meaningful, where you feel connected to something greater than yourself.
And eventually, a thought begins to emerge.
Maybe I need to change my life.
More specifically, maybe I need to change my job.
I've noticed this tendency among people who start exploring spirituality and self-development. After a few courses, events, or retreats, they begin thinking about becoming therapists, spiritual guides, healers, shamans, constellation facilitators, or teachers.
The reasoning seems simple enough: Maybe if I make spirituality my job, I'll finally be able to dedicate more of my life to the spiritual path.
But I've been wondering about something.
Is this a true calling, or is it a mental construct we've created to avoid facing the real issue?
Because if changing our profession were the answer, wouldn't we eventually end up with a world full of therapists, healers, spiritual guides, and self-development teachers?
Who would fix our cars? Who would grow our food? Who would deliver the goods to our shops? Who would build our houses, maintain our infrastructure, or fly the planes that take all those spiritual people to their retreats in Bali?
I'm not saying that becoming a spiritual guide is the wrong path. Not at all.
I know some wonderful teachers and masters. People who have genuinely been called to this work. From the outside, their stories might look similar: they left their old jobs, stepped away from their previous lives, and built something entirely new.
But for them, there was something deeper at play. Something they experienced as a calling, a Divine force guiding them towards a mission they could no longer ignore. It wasn't simply a decision to change careers because their old lives felt disconnected from their spiritual aspirations. For them, there was no other way.
And this is where I see an important distinction.
Copying someone's external actions doesn't mean you're embodying the same energy that moved them to act.
Two people can make exactly the same decision for entirely different reasons. One might be following a genuine calling. The other might be trying to escape a life they haven't yet learned how to inhabit fully.
The actions look the same. The inner foundation is completely different.
So, if your first step towards a spiritual profession isn't coming from genuine inspiration, but rather from the struggle to feel connected to your own life, how can you know that this is the right path for you?
If the starting point is the desire to run away from your life, what are you bringing into your role as a leader, a guide, or an example for others?
Can you guide people towards their own realisation when the foundation of your path is your inability to be present in your everyday life?
Can you guide someone back to their soul when you haven't yet learned how to find your own while answering an email, navigating company politics, or dealing with an ordinary Tuesday?
No. Not in the way you might imagine.
Because before you can become a guide for others, you have to learn to guide yourself.
Before you can lead others, you have to become the LEADER of your own life.
And you cannot lead a company if you're never present in it.
Imagine trying to manage a big company without ever showing up. You leave your employees to figure things out on their own. They make decisions based on their own assumptions, follow their individual interests, and steer the company in whatever direction seems right to them.
Eventually, the company becomes something you no longer recognise. Not because the employees are necessarily doing anything wrong, but because the person responsible for leading it is absent.
And I wonder how often we do exactly the same thing with our own lives.
We leave our bodies to go through the motions. We let our minds run the show. We allow old patterns to make our decisions, familiar fears to determine our direction, and external circumstances to dictate how we feel.
Meanwhile, the deepest part of us, the part we are so desperately trying to connect with, is left waiting for us to come home.
And this isn't only about those who want to become spiritual teachers.
Even if you never intend to guide another person, you still have a responsibility to yourself. A responsibility to bring yourself fully back into your own life. To bring your soul, your essence, your presence into all of it.
Not only into the meditation room. Not only into the retreat. Not only into those beautiful moments when the world seems to fall away and everything suddenly makes sense.
Into your actual life.
The one you're living right now.
Come back home.
Be present in your life. Learn to enjoy waking up in it. Be excited about the adventures waiting for you, even when the adventure is figuring out how to pay the garbage bill.
Feel the blessing of being here. Of having a body, a home, responsibilities, people to love, problems to solve, and ordinary little things that make up the experience of being alive.
What if your spiritual path wasn't something you had to squeeze into your life?
What if your life itself could become your spiritual path?
What if the realisation you've been searching for at every retreat was waiting for you in the very place you kept trying to escape?
What if God is hiding in the most ordinary things, quietly waiting for us to become present enough to notice Him?
Not somewhere else. Not in another course. Not in a different profession or a more spiritual version of yourself.
But here.
In the middle of your life, exactly as it is.
And this brings me to what I want to begin today.
I'm starting a personal project. A commitment to come back home into my own life.
I'm not here to guide anyone. I'm here to guide myself. To learn how to lead my own life with presence, to reconnect with the blessing of being alive, and to discover what it really means to make my everyday existence part of my spiritual path.
Recently, I learned a new system from my spiritual teacher, a way of approaching the process of bringing something you want into reality.
The first step was to contemplate what I truly wanted.
Not what I thought I should want. Not what sounded impressive. Not what I could achieve to prove something to myself or anyone else.
What do I actually want?
And this was my realisation.
I want to fully feel the blessing of my life.
I want to learn, practise, and realise how to make every tiny detail of my life part of my spiritual path. I want to stop separating the moments when I feel connected from the moments when I feel disconnected. I want to discover how to bring my whole self into the life I'm already living.
Not by escaping it, but by showing up for it.
And so, I'm going to start taking steps every day towards making this a reality.
I'll document the process here. The things I try, the things I discover, the things that work, the things that don't, and the realisations that emerge along the way.
Not as someone who has figured it all out, but as someone who has made a commitment to find out.
This will be my project journal.
A record of what happens when I stop looking for a more spiritual life somewhere else and start learning how to live the one I already have.
Today was Day 0.
I wrote this text. I put my thoughts into words, explored the reasoning behind this project, acknowledged the realisation that brought me here, and made a commitment to follow through. I created this personal journal, a place where I can share the process with the world.
And I talked to my partner about my intention, bringing this idea out of my own head and into my actual life.
Nothing extraordinary happened.
This is where it begins. The first step doesn't have to be a grand transformation, a dramatic change of career or a decision to leave everything behind. It can be a simple, conscious choice to start showing up differently in the life I already have.
Today, I began.