What do you need to go on a spiritual journey.?
And I’m not talking tours here!
I’m talking about a journey of spiritual growth.

For the past three years, in the making of my film on intuition, I’ve been on such a journey. And it’s by no means over. It’s just started.

There’s so much more to read, to learn, so much more work to do.
But it’s not work, it’s fun.

I was walking yesterday, and I began to compile a packing list for what you need when you go on a spiritual journey – and here it is:

1. You must want to go.
   You must need to want to do it. No-one can make you, nor should they want to try. It’s something you must want to do yourself. The path must call to you, for some reason. For some people, circumstances put them on the path. Often it’s calamity. A major health issue, with themselves or someone close. A death of a loved one. Sometimes it’s a betrayal. A devastating betrayal. Sometimes it’s a financial calamity. Loss of job, bankruptcy, a business collapse – whatever it is, it’s often a major setback in life that puts one on the path. Or, it could be a revelation. Some kind of divine intervention. A call from the Higher Realms that now it’s time to start… Whatever it is, you must want to heed that call, and follow.
2. You must be fearless.
   You must be prepared to face ridicule, rejection, you must be prepared to lose friends who think you’ve gone whacky, or who are confronted by your new stance on life. It takes courage to walk into a room and know that many are laughing at you behind your back. That’s ok. You have to be prepared to accept that. And for every friend you lose, believe me, you’ll pick up many more! Fear will try and come at you in a hundred different ways; through doubt, through humiliation, through a perceived loss of status. How can you lose status when you raise your vibrations?
3. You must embrace imagination
   It takes imagination to go on a spiritual journey. We all have imagination. Some of us have suppressed it out of fear, but we all have that ability to build worlds where worlds don’t exist. Perhaps this is why so-called creative people find it easier to go on a spiritual path – because they have greater access to their imaginative powers. Rational left brain people sometimes find it harder – but there’s no such thing as a “creative” person. We are all creative. We all have the facilities, through our “mind’s eye,” to travel to places beyond the here and now.
4. You must be prepared to accept what’s unknown, and what’s unknowable.
   There’s what’s known, there’s what’s not known, and there’s what’s unknowable. It’s easy to accept what’s known. It’s much harder to accept what’s not known, and it’s even harder to grasp what’s unknowable. What’s not known might well be known very soon. It was only 150 years ago that Louis Pasteur discovered germs caused disease. 150 years. In the timeline of human history, that’s nothing. Before that, we didn’t know germs made you sick. Twenty five years ago, if someone told you that soon we would live in a world where we could have a wireless hand held device that could access almost every book ever written, instantaneously, well, you’d think that was not possible. Rationalists reject elements of spirituality and the notion of a Higher Power because they say it can’t be proven. So what? Does that mean it doesn’t exist? Four hundred years ago the Church tortured and imprisoned Galileo because he dared to propose that the earth revolved around the sun – against religious teaching at that time. He dared to propose something which at the time wasn’t known, but which we now accept as being fundamentally so. You too must be prepared to accept what can’t be proven – yet. And then there’s the unknowable. Which is essential. Because we need mystery in our lives…
5. You must reject the needs of the ego.
   The ego has a vested interest in maintaining your belief that you are a physical body in a physical world, that you are separate from everyone else, that you are either better or worse than others, that you are defined by what you do and what you have, or don’t have, and that this is all there is. It isn’t. You have to accept that who you think you are is merely dictated by what you believe are the judgements of others. You look in the mirror and you see a big fat nose. You think you are ugly. That’s because you live in a society where big fat noses are deemed ugly. Supposing you lived somewhere else, in the Amazon or Alaska, where big fat noses were deemed beautiful, then you would think yourself beautiful. How you see yourself is only a reflection of how you believe others see you. You have to break out of this illusion, which the ego seeks to perpetrate. You are not a human being seeking a spiritual experience, you are a spiritual being seeing a human experience.
6. You must choose love over fear
   Here’s an exercise. Consider your day, any day, and consider how many decisions you make out of fear. You wake up, you get dressed in the morning. Do you select your clothing out of fear? You say goodbye to your partner as you walk out the door. Have you selected your partner out of fear? Or are you continuing in an unfulfilled relationship out of fear? You hop in your car to drive to work. Why have you chosen this particular type, or brand, or car? Was it out of fear? And your job. Are you staying in your job, which you hate, out of fear? A sense of entrapment? If you are truly analytical and honest with yourself, I think you’ll find that many of your choices have been made out of fear. If you want to go on a spiritual journey, you have to jettison these fears.
7. You must become self aware.
   It’s interesting that in the making of my film on intuition, that over the 70 odd people I’ve interviewed all around the world, how many of them use the same words. One of the  phrases that came up continually was: Pay attention. This was key to beginning to become intuitive. Pay attention. Pay attention first, to yourself. How you are feeling moment to moment. What are you thinking moment to moment. And why? Why are you feeling upset right now? How did that happen? Was it because your boss ignored you? Does that strike at the core of your sense of self worth? Do you place your self worth in the hands of your boss? Do you need your boss’s approval to feel good about yourself? Begin to embrace a process of self examination. Self awareness. On little things. Every day things. Only then can you become aware of others, which is at the heart of compassion and empathy and generosity.
8. Get rid of judgement.
   Judgement is about control. And control is fear based. You think you are better than that person. Because you are richer, you are smarter, you are better looking. You believe you have authority over that person. Dominion over that person. You believe you have control over that person. You are in a castle on a hill and that person is tilling fields. Your fields. None of it is real. None of it means anything. You and that person you judge are the same. You are all spirit, from the one source. You cannot go on a spiritual journey and cling to judgement. It will thwart you every time.
9. Begin to understand that everything is one.
   On a level of quantum mechanics, there is no time and space. There are no boundaries between “things,” and people. There is no separation. Everything is energy, constantly intermingling with other energy. We know now, from Entanglement experiments, that the behaviour of one quantum particle on one side of the universe can impact on the behaviour of another quantum particle on the other side of the universe. Everything is inextricably interconnected. Which means we are one. We believe we are separate entities, but we’re not. Stand on a street corner, and look at the various people walking past, and look at them not as people of a different shape or colour or ethnicity – but look at them all as being essences of spirit. Each of them. And that essence is the same, no matter what they look like, what they dress like, where they come from. They all come from the same place.
10. Be humble.
    You cannot learn from a position of arrogance, ego, personality, or status. You need to learn humility. You need to let go your need to control. You need to let go fear. Fear you will be judged. You need to understand that there is strength in humility, not weakness. There is nobility in humility, not ignominy.

Okay, so this is my packing list for a spiritual journey. It’s not a full packing list – it’s like a “day pack” list. But perhaps the most important thing on the list is the first item – you need to want to go.

When you’re ready, everything will come to you that you need. Trust that. You will be given everything, and everyone, you need. That’s what happened to me – and it’s still happening.