The Life Task

You, like everyone else, are here for a reason. The reason, or reasons, will vary from one person to another, but generally speaking, we are all here to develop ourselves, to become better individuals, from a spiritual perspective.

What does that mean? Spiritual development means purifying one’s feelings and motivations. We can, for example, use our will power to refrain from doing what we think might harm others. But will power will not help us feel that we will not want to harm anybody, ever.

Before we can change the way we feel about something we must acknowledge the disturbing feeling. Avoiding or denying the existence of an impure feeling is the greatest mistake one can make in the path for development. But we can unconsciously incur in this error. That’s why it is so important to “know thyself.”

Although you can remove those obstacles by yourself, the task can be much facilitated if you have adequate support from qualified people and apply effective tools. We may in some cases be aware and acknowledge feelings that are disharmonious to our general sense of good and right, but we may not know nor understand why we feel that way.

Using will power to refrain from acting out those feelings may help to avoid doing harm to others, but that alone will not change the disturbing feelings and the motivations they create.
Emotions and feelings can only be changed indirectly, by removing the obstacles that impede pure feelings from replacing the impure, uncomfortable ones.

The Pathwork has been a great source of help to emotionally overcome many of my own obstacles. The pathworkonline.com would be a good starting place to know more about the Pathwork and how you can apply it to foster your own emotional growth and personal development.

Gustavo Monteiro
March 2014