The Arrogance of Being Humble

It's easy to get arrogant on the spiritual journey, to think that your efforts and attempts at self-improvement and intentional growth put you in some special category, and confer upon you some special wisdom.

It's easy to think that the humility you've acquired makes you more special than those paying no attention, that those with no personal insight or value for self-reflection aren't working hard enough.  It's easy to set yourself apart, to see your work as worth more than the mundane stuff others are doing all around you.

But you can be absolutely certain that if you feel this kind of self-satisfaction, that you have been waylaid upon the spiritual journey, and taken an alluring but deceptive detour.  Because real satisfaction on the spiritual journey doesn't come from comparing yourself to anyone else.  It comes from contentment, the internal sense of being satisfied, not with your efforts, but with yourself, not with how you are trying to change, but with how you are.

Work hard on your journey.  Don't get lazy and complacent.  But if your spiritual journey is as full of ambition and competition and judgement as your daily life, then you're just pretending at being on the spiritual journey.  The rewards of the spiritual journey are invisible, at least for a while, and almost always impossible to describe until you get some maturity around them.  The rewards that you want to scream and shout about aren't the true rewards; the significance of the spiritual journey is better communicated in silence than screaming.

So relax and recognize who you are - who you really are - and stop fighting it all the time.  Judgement, anger, contempt, irritation, disgust, sorrow - so much of this is the shadow of us rejecting ourselves, wishing we were someone or something else, using the spiritual journey as a way to gain peace at the expense of self-acceptance.