Forests vs Trees

I like sharing the work of insightful writers here. I usually share their work because I have learned something. I have taken away from someone else’s writing something that I need to practice and focus on.

So I share the wisdom of Avery Hart today. She says “out loud” what I am frequently guilty of. I spend so much time worrying about small things, I can miss out on the big things.

My priorities can go badly out of focus. While trying to set up a workable bookkeeping system for daily expenses, I let my taxes go unfiled. I scurry around trying to find every possible deduction and then pay a penalty because my taxes are filed late.

This is a real and nagging real-world example in my life. I have always struggled with accounting and financial management. Not that I am that bad at it, per se, but I could do a better job. I am solvent and financially comfortable. I should start acting it.

My takeaway from Avery Hart’s insightful piece is that maybe I should just get the damned returns in. The weight of carrying the task of filing them corrodes my spirit. As it is such a stumbling block and bugbear in my life, that sure sounds to me as if there is something fundamental there to investigate.

Avery Hart puts it this way. She’s talking about spiritual growth. And what else is our life purpose if not that as its fundamental underpinning?

Have you ever heard the saying “missing the forest for the trees”? It may be a cliché at this point, but I feel like this is something we all do on occasion. It’s easy to get so caught up in the smaller things to the point that we completely forget to attend to the big important things. This is especially true in our spiritual and emotional life. After all, what even are the big things when it comes to spirituality and emotions? How are you supposed to make sure that you’re getting the big things right if you don’t even know what those big things are? 

I see far too many people focusing all of their time and attention on tiny details while the greater foundation of their spiritual life is crumbling, and I don’t want this to happen to you. Today we’re going to talk about why this happens, how you can recognize if it’s happening in your spiritual life, and what you can do about it. 
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Do You Get Caught Up In The Small Details?

Have you ever spent so much time trying to pick a guided meditation that you end up not having enough time left to meditate at all? Or maybe you’ve taken the time to set up the perfect altar and get every crystal and candle in exactly the right place, only to realize you have no idea what to do at this altar. Maybe it’s even something simple, like focusing too much on trying to pick out the exact right crystal to wear that day and completely missing the fact that you’re bulldozing yourself in every situation you run into. Whatever it may be, it’s all too easy to fall into this trap of focusing on the minutia to the point that we start missing how much we are letting the big stuff slip. 

There are about a million examples of how we can get our priorities mixed up in this way. 

You can see it in the yogi who meditates excessively even while their relationships are crumbling around them. 

It’s trying to learn every esoteric skill and psychic ability out there while completely ignoring your real life. 

It’s striving to create a picture-perfect image of yourself as some spiritually enlightened being while paying no mind to the way that this cuts you off from the people around you. 

Getting caught up in these less-than-important details isn’t your fault. It happens to all of us on occasion. The problem is simply that we don’t know how to recognize what is truly important and what is a distraction. There is one easy way to begin to decipher the important things from the not-so-important things. 

Spirituality, at its core, is meant to improve your life. It’s not meant to make you feel better or to distract you from your life, it’s meant to make your actual, mundane, day-to-day life better in very real, observable ways. If your spiritual practices are not supporting this basic goal, then you are focusing on the wrong things. 

What’s more important, learning astral travel or doing inner child work? Reading tarot cards or meditating? Working with crystals or communing with your ancestors? 

The answer is that it depends on your intention in pursuing each of these practices. The practices themselves are not necessarily better or worse, it’s what you intend to do with them that matters. Inner child work may seem more important than astral travel at first blush. I mean, what do you actually gain through astral travel? But astral travel can be used to do deep shadow work and at a certain point, inner child work can become a distraction from taking real action in your life. In contrast, astral travel can be used as an escape to experience a fantasy reality while inner child work can be used to heal the beliefs and patterns of behavior that are creating problems in your relationships. 

It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it and why you’re doing it. 

This, unfortunately, means that there is no easy answer to whether you are really focusing on the important things. I can’t tell you which of your practices are important and which are distractions. You have to evaluate for yourself what your intentions are in every practice that you do and how these practices actually benefit your life. Does your meditation practice help with your anxiety, or are you simply using it as a way to feel better about yourself as a more spiritual person? Are you using your tarot cards to evaluate your life direction and gain real insight or are you using them to avoid making decisions and shunning responsibility off onto the universe or some other nebulous power? 

This honesty is one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself. It’s one of the few things that will accelerate your spiritual growth exponentially.
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