It’s important to recognise that your spiritual or contemplative practice doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

While you can develop a resiliency and a capacity to be present with a wider range of circumstances through practice, your environments and the circumstances of your life will be one of the things that shapes your experience.

In some spiritual settings, focusing on the material or relational aspects of life is either ignored or frowned upon. But these things hold a huge influence over you and your way of being in the world, whether you recognise it or not, so it makes sense to consciously engage with this and consider how you can create a life that feels aligned with your spiritual, material, and emotional needs and desires.

There is also the fact that you never arrive anywhere in life and you don’t exist separately from anything around you, so cultivating and participating in happy, healthy environments and ecosystems is one of the most important aspects of spiritual practice.

Reflecting on Life

With this in mind, here are some questions to help you recognise the things you would like to focus on and cultivate more of in life.

1. Recognise that you have a flawed working model of the world

The things that people care about and the way that people perceive the world are both highly personal and unique. Assuming that these things are the same for everyone increases a sense of competition and flattens your worldview. Realising that every person has a different way of experiencing the world opens experience up and creates a huge amount of potential for spaciousness towards yourself and others.

This is really important. The way you see the world and yourself is heavily influenced by your upbringing, your culture, and the people around you. There is no way to escape this – how you see things is not how they are for everyone.

Realising the depths of how differently the world can be experienced can be incredibly liberating. An example of this is noticing that there are cultures, even within the Western world, that don’t build the idea of someone’s worth on their productivity.

To be able to see through your flawed working model, you need to be able to take a wider perspective. This can come from meditative insight, but you could also spend some time considering different cultural perspectives.

It’s also incredibly powerful to consciously reclaim your projections. If there is an edgy emotion or situation, the mind is more likely to misinterpret what’s going on, so looking for strong emotional reactions within yourself and creating some spaciousness around this is one of the best ways to create more flexible ways of looking.

2. Make room for feelings, intentions, and values

When people think about their lives and their goals, they often focus on how things look from the outside.

Looking at things in this way can mean that you get caught up in status and competition. Or thinking about the things you believe you should achieve through the eyes of others rather than what is going to lead to genuine fulfilment.

It is worth flipping this way of looking on its head. Rather than focusing on the thing you are trying to get and assuming that this will make you feel good, you are thinking about the underlying feeling or intention that you would like to experience and being receptive to how this might arise.

This approach also allows you to be present with the process as it unfolds, rather than believing that your life is going to start when you achieve or get certain things.

With this in mind, here are some of the underlying desires that fuel most people’s decisions. See if you can recognise how these are the things that are underlying what is driving you and pull out ones that you are most drawn to cultivating in your life:

Safety
Care
Love
Freedom
Recognition
Hope
Wellbeing
Perspective
Peace
Simplicity
Space
Connection
Understanding
Opportunity
Potential
Purpose
Power
Eros
Meaning
Engagement
Enoughness
Abundance
Beauty
Pleasure
Fun
Rest
Comfort
Choice
Time
Clarity
Belonging
Quality

3. What do you really want?

People tend to hide what they really want in life from themselves and others for a huge range of reasons. Some of these reasons are wise, and some of them are more self-limiting, such as self-judgement, fear, and trauma.

Framing the question as, ‘What do you secretly want?’ helps cut through the shadow and allows you to be honest, if only with yourself.

Getting really clear on what you actually want is super important, as is getting comfortable with the idea that you might not get it. Both are important parts of growing up and being able to be mature and effective in the world.

4. Learning about yourself

Reflecting on what you want in life is an incredibly rich process.

One way of doing this is to spend some time consciously fantasising about what you would most like in life. Fantasy, when brought into the present moment, is one of the most powerful spiritual tools for connecting with your deepest nature. It can cut through fixed ideas and limitations about what you believe is possible and go straight through to your deepest desires and potential.

Developing an intimacy with your eros and desires allows you to see the details of what you find beautiful, compelling, meaningful, and worthwhile in life. Fantasy can become a way to give you insight into yourself.

Also, if you can learn to embrace the feeling of experiencing and enjoying desire in the present moment without needing it to actually manifest, this can create a huge amount of spaciousness in your being.

5. Leave room for unexpected additions

One of the most magical things about life is that you can’t always imagine how things are going to pan out.

Leaving room for unexpected things to happen allows you to see change and uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a threat.

If you can be clear about what matters to you in life and open-minded about how that is going to unfold, this allows you to dance with life and the Universe.

6. Remember to appreciate and celebrate

When reflecting on life, make time to look at successes and what you already have as well. Remember where you were a few years ago and see how far you have already come.

If you don’t make time to stop and appreciate yourself and all the hard work you have already done, then life becomes an endless slog.

Take pleasure in celebrating the things that you and other people in your life have achieved.