True to Yourself Podcast 25: Awakening Spiritually: 3 Signs It’s Happening In Your Life with Ananta Ripa Ajmera
How do you know you are awakening spiritually? There are 3 main signs I feel are critical to gauge how much you are progressing on your spiritual growth journey. Learn what these are, and how to cultivate them on an ongoing basis as part of your emotional self care and to evolve and heal spiritually.
I share with you stories from ancient mythology, including that of an Indian goddess with many arms, and my own personal experiences, what it means to embody these 3 signs, as well as embrace greater self-love, no matter where you're at on your spiritual journey home.
This episode brings the true to yourself quote (that this podcast is based on) to life.
It will be particularly helpful for those who identify as an empath. Boundaries and a fuller definition of forgiveness of yourself and others (vs forgiveness and forgetting) will be explained in terms of how they support your journey of change + transformation.
Resources:
Become the hero of your own spiritual growth journey in a free 14-day trial of The Ancient Way's Circle of Life Community: https://theancientway.co/community
Embrace your true Self with the wisdom of the ages by joining The Ancient Way's Wisdom 1-2-3 Newsletter at https://theancientway.co/wisdom-1-2-3 for:
1 wisdom quote straight from an age-old sacred text
2 nuggets of inspiration from me, to make that wisdom relatable
3 introspective questions to awaken your inner guru, no matter how packed your schedule is
Let's connect on Instagram for spiritual empowerment and inspiration to awaken your inner guru: https://instagram.com/ananta.one
Embark on a heroic spiritual journey with daily rituals rooted in ancient Indian goddess wisdom in my award-winning book The Way of the Goddess: https://theancientway.co/wayofthegoddess
Live in harmony with nature, embody ancient wisdom & glow with radiant well-being - become an Ancient Way Wellness Ambassador: https://theancientway.co/wellness-ambassador
Ignite the fire within & empower others on transformative journeys - become an Ancient Way & Association for Coaching Certified Spiritual Coach: https://theancientway.co/spiritualwarrior
By tuning into this Podcast, I acknowledge that the entire contents of it are the intellectual property of Ananta Ripa Ajmera, or used by her with permission. They are protected under U.S. and international copyright and trademark laws. Except as otherwise provided herein, listeners to this Podcast may use and apply information found in the Podcast only for personal, non-commercial, educational purposes. No other use, including, without limitation, editing, reproduction, or retransmission, of this Podcast can be made without taking prior written permission of Ananta Ripa Ajmera. You can request permission by emailing info@theancientway.co.
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TRANSCRIPTION
Episode 25: Awakening Spiritually: 3 Signs It’s Happening In Your Life with Ananta Ripa Ajmera
[00:00:00] Namaste and welcome back to the True To Yourself podcast, a place where we explore the power of authentic living. I am your host, Ananta Ripa. Ajmera. Before we begin today's episode on three ways to know you're evolving and awakening spiritually, I wanted to share with you a little bit about a very special opportunity to join a free 14 day trial of our Circle of Life Spiritual Membership Community. If you are ready to embark upon
[00:00:37] your own spiritual hero’s journey through the nine-step framework that I've developed through my book, The Way of the Goddess, then this program is going to be an amazing way to really ignite your spiritual growth and transformation process in an incredible, safe community. We are an Association for Spiritual Integrity accredited organization, committed to really upholding the highest ethical standards for spiritual organizations worldwide.
[00:01:10] And we welcome you to take a opportunity to really try out the experience of our program, which includes a lot of amazing, delicious Ayurvedic recipes, chakra visualizations, spiritual wellness masterclasses, live writing circles, power of practice circles, to really talk about what it means to. live the teachings of this podcast and of my book and of the ancient teachings of Ayurveda Yoga, and Vedanta, and we also have a lot of conscious business and book development resources to really support you on your journey of finding and expressing your most authentic voice in the world.
[00:01:57] You can visit https://theancientway.co/community to learn more about that. Today, I'm really happy to talk with you about how to know that you're awakening spiritually. I feel that there are three main signs of spiritual growth and awakening. One is that you begin to develop a lot more acceptance of what is.
[00:02:27] There is less of a clinging to what could be and what you wish would be and what your desires are. When you can start to really accept life and reality as it is, without the filters of past experiences, projections onto the future, worries, anxieties, and whatnot, then you know you're really in a good place spiritually.
[00:02:55] What this also means is that you're going to become a lot more able to really accept the challenges in life rather than denying them. A lot of times, we put on a really nice spiritual mask, even in spirituality, to bypass the raw human emotions and experiences that we've had. We think that if we just don't acknowledge certain things in our lives, like certain emotions and certain experiences we've had, that they can somehow disappear or go away.
[00:03:30] What happens when we do this however, is that the emotion, the experience, is undigested, and when things are undigested within the body, they manifest as disease according Ayurveda, which says that the root cause of disease in the body and in the mind is indigestion of your food. We have to really be able to process everything that
[00:04:03] we take in through our five senses and all of the emotions that we have and all of the experiences that we go through in life. We have to really understand them. We have to feel whatever they bring up in us. And then only can we really separate out what we wish to take forward, what was positive from that experience, what lesson we learned from that experience, and what are we going to leave behind?
[00:04:32] It's only when we take that step of accepting reality as it is that we can start to transform our pain into power by really asking ourselves, what is it that I can learn from this situation? What does this hardship, what does this betrayal, what does this trauma have to teach me about life, and about myself?
[00:04:56] For example, if you've been lied to a lot, if you've had your trust betrayed by people who you really placed your trust in, and I know I've had that experience myself, then the lesson I feel that life is trying to bring forward to us is to never lie to yourself. When you are really honest with yourself and when you are really true to yourself, as the podcast
[00:05:26] is called, then, as William Shakespeare once said, “thou can not then be false to any man.” And when we are really honest with ourselves, we are never going to be diluted by someone else's illusions and lies, or whatever they are doing. It's not going to affect us. If we've been betrayed by others, then I feel the karmic invitation of that trauma is simply to never betray ourselves, to really be true to ourselves, and to really be authentic and to even come to the point where we're able to really appreciate, not even just accept, but appreciate the challenges that we face.
[00:06:15] And recognize the value that they had for teaching us how we want to be and how truthful we wish to be, and how we will never betray ourselves, and therefore we will never betray another. It's only when we repeat the behaviors that come our way, or the abuse or the trauma that's inflicted upon us, towards other people, that we stay in that karmic cycle. When we accept that, yes, this abuse has come my way,
[00:06:46] yes, this betrayal has come my way, but that I am more than this trauma. I am more than this abuse. I am more than this betrayal, and I will never abuse another. I will never abuse myself. I will never betray another. And I will always be honest with myself and therefore others. Then we break that cycle.
[00:07:07] We're not going to have to continue to experience this over and over again. Over time, we'll start to generate much more authentic people and relationships in our lives who are going to mirror our innate authenticity and honesty within ourselves. It all begins with this step of radical acceptance of what is, and that leads us then to be able to appreciate the challenges and to be able to really learn from them how we wish to dissolve any negative karma that has come our way.
[00:07:44] And thereby it allows us to positively shape the course of our own life and our own destiny. A lot of times people feel really victimized by the idea that everything that's happening to us in life is due to the law of karma. However, I feel that this is a very empowering understanding of karma to know that, yes, you can never control what happened in the past.
[00:08:11] It is karma. It is just what was meant to happen to you. But when you really understand the law of karma, it's actually so amazing to know that you can shape what your karma becomes in the future by the choices, words, actions, and thoughts you have today. You have the power basically to shape your whole destiny, and it begins with accepting what has come into your life, learning from it, and allowing that learning to mold your thoughts, your speech, and your behaviors.
[00:08:46] These are the three seats of karma to unfold your most authentic Self and your real, true essence. This is the gift of understanding karma, of accepting karma, and then being able to really transform that karma as you go forward. The next sign that you are really spiritually awakening is the ability to move from acceptance to forgiveness.
[00:09:16] This is really important on the spiritual path, because we need to be able to let go of whatever difficulties have come our way, and whatever anger and resentment we may have built up about those difficulties. First we have to accept it. Then we have to learn from it, and then we have to let go of it and hold onto the learning.
[00:09:41] I don't believe in forgiveness and forgetting. I believe that we must forgive and learn. We must let go of the hurt, let go of the anger, and let go of the attachment to any kind of victim story that we may have told ourselves, about ourselves and about our lives and the experiences that we've had, and also hold onto what we gained from each of those experiences.
[00:10:09] That's really important, because when we are really angry with someone else, we may think that they will suffer as a result of our anger, and so let us hold onto our anger. But in actuality, we are just holding onto poison, hoping the other person will get poisoned, when actually, we're just poisoning ourselves.
[00:10:31] Therefore, it's very important to learn how to really understand what we were meant to gain from a situation and then to let go of any attachment to the pain or any attachment to receiving an apology, for example, from someone who has hurt us. I've gone through this experience many times in life, enough to be able to really share about them with you from a place of having digested a lot of.
[00:11:00] abuse and a lot of trauma and a lot of betrayal. I really look back on it all through a spiritual lens and see that these were the exact experiences I needed to really commit myself to speaking the truth that sets us all free, to being radically honest with myself and to really work on loving myself.
[00:11:24] That's because no one can actually abuse us or betray us or manipulate us if somewhere there is no internal abuse nor internalized manipulation nor internalized lying to ourselves in some kind of way. It always takes two to tango, and we always have to know that on the spiritual path, there is no other, there is only the Self with the capital S.
[00:11:54] If someone is abusing us and we are internalizing that abuse and inflicting it upon our own self, then the reason the abuser has the power to continue to do that is because somewhere we're agreeing to it. Somewhere, we believe that we deserve it. Somewhere, we are allowing it to continue to happen. When we talk about forgiveness, it's of two different entities.
[00:12:24] We need to forgive the other for inflicting pain or suffering upon us, but then we also really have to forgive ourselves for allowing that abuse or disrespect or betrayal to go on unabated. We have to really say sorry to our own self for allowing ourselves to get hurt and not standing up for ourselves perhaps sooner than what we should have or sooner than we would have for someone else, especially for empaths.
[00:12:59] I feel this is a really tough thing, to learn how to really forgive, but also get out of situations where our energy is getting drained. There's so much of the empath journey that involves getting our emotions tangled up with other people's emotions. And if we are to really be able to let go of any kind of anger or resentment, we also have to detach ourselves from holding on to anything that we've absorbed emotionally from other people.
[00:13:33] This requires a really radical sovereignty and a really radical ability to assert our own individual power and our own individual self in the context of relationships of all kinds. Therefore, I believe that a third really important sign that you are awakening spiritually is that you have really healthy, strong boundaries.
[00:14:01] Not only do you accept everything that has happened in your life and let go of all the pain, while holding onto the lessons learned, but then you also stand in that sovereign power of your own true Self. You don't allow yourself to get wavered by the fluctuations of other people's whims and fancies, other people's emotions, other people's desires, or start begging other people for breadcrumbs of approval or
[00:14:32] stamps of recognition. When we are truly evolving spiritually, we will not only become more loving and more compassionate, first with ourselves and then with all others, but we will also become a lot stronger. We will also become a lot more independent, and that independence is reflected in our ability to really own our yes,
[00:14:55] and to own our no. And to be able to assert our boundaries and to assert our no in a really beautiful way, in a really fragrant way that ultimately comes from a space of deep compassion and that recognizes the humanity in the other who we may have to draw some limits with. This is all really hard to bring together, and that's why I feel that these are really, really great signs of knowing that you are awakening spiritually.
[00:15:26] When I talk about what it means to be a spiritual warrior, for example, I feel that it's all of this, it's acceptance ff the law of karma playing out as all the challenges in our lives. It's then being able to let go of whatever needs to be let go from those painful experiences and challenges, and then being able to assert
[00:15:52] our sovereign power through the ability to set boundaries in a way that acknowledges the humanity of others. I have a really great story for you from my book, The Way of The Goddess, that I feel truly illustrates all of these ideals for us in an incredible way. This is the story of Goddess Durga, the warrior mother, goddess from the Vedic spiritual tradition, in her incarnation as Goddess Chandraghanta.
[00:16:25] And I'm going to read to you this story of Goddess Chandraghanta. In Duga’s first incarnation as Shailaputri. she immolated herself out of love for Lord Shiva. In her second incarnation, she performed brahmacharya in order to remarry Shiva as Brahmacharini. I've shared both Shailputri and Chandraghanta’s stories on earlier episodes of the podcast you can check out. Now, in Durga’s third incarnation, Chandraghanta,
[00:16:58] the story comes full circle. Lord Shiva has become detached from worldly affairs and has retired into the mountains in deep meditation, isolation, and penance After losing, Shailputri, and seeing Brahmacharini’s resolve to marry him again in her new birth. Shiva agrees. But on the day of their marriage, he appears with ashes of the dead smeared on his body, with snakes around his neck and without bothering to comb his matted unsightly hair.
[00:17:35] Even worse, his gruesome marriage procession includes ghosts, goblins, ghouls, naked ascetics, and sages. Chandraghanta’s mother and other relatives faint from terror. In that moment, Durga transforms from Brahmacharini to Chandraghanta, a fierce avatar of Durga with three eyes and 10 hands. She rides a lion and carries a weapon in each of her hands.
[00:18:07] She is ready for war, a holy war that is. She has a fiery golden sun colored complexion. Her body becomes celestial and full of hot fire. She radiates so much light, in fact, that her mirror appearance requires a lot of visual energy to take in. Chandraghanta is not angry. She is powerful beyond measure and makes no excuses for her fierce stance.
[00:18:37] When Shiva's strange behaviors terrify her mother and family members, she persuades him to transform himself into a handsome prince with a much nobler marriage procession. Shiva then returns as Prince Charming, bedecked in jewels instead of ashes. As in chapter two, though, this is the story of a man and a woman,
[00:19:02] it is not meant to be understood literally. Instead, the story of Shiva and Chandraghanta can be taken as the story of the ongoing struggle to expose and to unite with our true Self. This unexpected marriage story highlights how we all must find the power and strength within to take a stand for what we believe is right.
[00:19:25] Which benefits others and ourselves and ultimately allows for genuine change and connection. It is certainly not easy to be fierce and compassionate at the same time. That is why Goddess Chandraghanta is armed with so many weapons, which are symbolic of destroying inner demons. When we acknowledge our emotions fully, by feeling them however we can and learn to transmute them rather than getting overwhelmed by them, we become empowered to fight outer battles by being both fiercely loving and strong.
[00:20:04] This is because the Self in us, with a capital S, is the same as the capital S self in any other being. Fighting for the greatest good of all without ever forgetting our own needs is what it means to be a true spiritual warrior. When we can wage war with our anger, resolve it for ourselves, and then engage in battles in which we recognize the spiritual oneness we all share, we are more likely to emerge from such conflicts victorious.
[00:20:38] We will know how to set appropriate boundaries when needed, but it all comes from a place of divine fierce love. I also have a taking inventory section in this chapter of the book that gives an idea of what it means and how to know if you're operating from your soul power or if you're operating from the power of your ego.
[00:21:04] It's really easy to get confused between the two, especially with the word power intermixed in both. We might think that power is just something of the ego, or power is just something of the soul, but actually there's power in both, and we have to really align ourselves with what is going to contribute to our spiritual connection and our spiritual awakening journey and process.
[00:21:31] One of the ways that you know you're really evolving on the spiritual path is that you start to draw your power from deep within. Instead of looking to other people for approval and validation, you start to learn how to validate yourself. You start to learn how to really approve of yourself by judging whether your actions are really aligned with dharma.
[00:21:56] Do my actions serve the greatest good of all? Do they benefit not just myself, but other people as well? That becomes our yardstick by which to really measure how show spiritually aligned we are. Then we are really progressing on our spiritual awakening journey when we're able to stand our own ground with inner knowledge of our own power, even in the face of insults.
[00:22:27] This is a really great test of your spiritual awakening journey progress, especially for empaths who are always looking for approval and being reassured that we are okay and we're enough and we're valuable by other people. We need to learn, on the spiritual journey, to really validate our own inherent worthiness and to be able to
[00:22:52] protect that and to know that even in the face of other people throwing insults our way, when we are really progressing spiritually, we'll be able to understand that anyone else's insults are a projection of their own reality, and we'll be able to separate out what is useful and valuable for us and what simply needs to be let go of and reflected back
[00:23:17] to the other person with the intention of transmuting any pain that they're projecting to be healed in return back to them. When we are on a spiritual path and we have to correct someone, such as happens in spiritual teaching situations, when a person comes with humility and openness to learn, we can correct them.
[00:23:41] We can guide them back to dharma, back to what is beneficial, not just to that person, but to other people, too. But we will do so from a space of compassion. I have to say, I once had a spiritual teacher tell me they had no compassion for me. That's when I knew that that relationship needed to be completely over.
[00:24:07] No matter how long it had gone on, it was completely the test of that person not being a true teacher to me to even say such words. And if someone ever says that to you, then your healthy boundaries should also come up, and you should really validate your own deserving of compassion, because every soul is worthy of
[00:24:34] compassion, no matter how terrible anyone's actions may be. When we're truly spiritual, we're going to be able to have compassion towards others. At the same time, we're not going to tolerate any of this kind of abuse that can come even from so-called spiritual teachers and authority figures on the spiritual path. We will be able to self-validate our own power, our own worthiness, and really approve of our own actions in terms of how aligned they are with dharma, because that is the yardstick, that is the measuring stick of whether an action is worthy, whether an action is spiritual, and we
[00:25:18] can really decipher that for ourselves. We always know, deep down inside, when we're lying to ourselves, when we're lying to others, when we're manipulating others. There is always a voice of the conscience, deep down within, that will know and that will trouble us ourselves for not asking for forgiveness or not correcting our own actions.
[00:25:40] If we have violated someone else ourselves, then it's really important to say sorry to the soul who we've harmed, who we've hurt, who we've manipulated, who we've betrayed. We have to acknowledge, first, that we did all of this to our own self, and then we have to find the courage to actually ask for that forgiveness from the other in order to cleanse the karma, and to begin a new cycle of much more peaceful and authentic living that is in alignment with dharma and our true essence.
[00:26:11] It takes a lot of courage actually, and humility, to be able to accept our own learning curve and to gracefully ask for forgiveness when we have acted out of alignment with Dharma. That is a really great sign of progress on the spiritual path. A lot of times, people think it's a weakness to ask for forgiveness, but it's truly a sign of strength and inner power growing, to be able to have that humility and to be able to accept your own
[00:26:40] learning curve in life with a lot of grace and acceptance and forgiveness. And then to be able to have the right boundaries with ourselves, to not continue to inflict pain and suffering onto other living beings. Being able to be gentle with ourselves when we make mistakes is really important on the spiritual path.
[00:27:01] It's a sign of soul power, when you are really able to have that gentleness with yourself, and also have healthy boundaries and to respect the boundaries of other people. We know we're awakening spiritually also by how present we are in the moment, without revisiting the past or traveling to the future.
[00:27:25] Acceptance and present moment awareness and living in the present moment are very much connected. They're very much a sign of spiritual awakening. Vulnerability and authenticity and courage are also really, really important qualities of soul power and are going to really support us on our spiritual journey of returning back home to our true essence and our true Self.
[00:27:52] We want to really cultivate these qualities within ourselves. I would encourage you, therefore, this week, to really reflect on your relationship with your own true Self by how authentic you can be with yourself. I really challenge you this week to check in with yourself and ask yourself, how am I really feeling right now?
[00:28:23] Am I being honest with myself? And just allow your own wisdom to guide you to the truth within yourself. Next week, I'll be sharing with you a lot more practices you can try to activate your soul power and to really act from this empowered spiritual warrior space. But for now, I would really invite you to be with this wonderful question of authenticity within yourself and to really allow your inner guru.
[00:28:57] to guide you to your most authentic expression of yourself. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the True To Yourself podcast, a place where we explore the power of authentic living. Namaste.