Learning Spiritual Discernment

If our goal on the spiritual path is to be authentic and sincere lovers of truth, we need to practice spiritual discernment.

1. Go soul-searching and study yourself

To study yourself is to know yourself. Self-study means going on a journey to explore the deepest realms of your mind and heart. Self-study is synonymous with the idea of soul-searching: it involves diving deep into places most people tend to avoid. Valuable avenues of self-study include reading books, studying spiritual and psychological teachings, attending workshops and self-development classes, going to psychotherapy, getting a spiritual mentor or teacher, journaling, practicing meditation, examining your dreams, doing shadow work – the list goes on. There are many forms of self-study.

2. Be brutally honest with yourself

Easier said than done, I know. But developing spiritual discernment means being willing to face the hard truth and facts about yourself. If you don’t like facing reality, you’ll find it close to impossible to be honest with yourself and therefore practice spiritual discernment. Honesty and discernment go hand-in-hand, you cannot have one without the other.

Being honest with yourself requires sincerity and integrity. The good news is that you can develop and strengthen these qualities by asking questions such as “why?” and “what is happening exactly?”

Other ways of being honest with yourself include, for instance:

• Admitting when you make mistakes

• Owning your strengths and weaknesses

• Being mindful of your thoughts, feelings, desires, impulses, and shadows

• Introspecting and reflecting on your habits, decisions, judgments, and motivations

• Humility and the willingness to be wrong

Because being honest with yourself can be so confronting, it’s essential to show self compassion. Make sure that you forgive yourself and treat yourself kindly, otherwise being honest will become more traumatizing than nourishing.

3. See from and respect others perspectives

Explore alternative viewpoints. Look into the pros and cons, the evidence and contradictory evidence, the for and against. To practice spiritual discernment means to go beyond your limited perspective and determine what is real vs. illusion. What do others say – popular and unpopular, famous and infamous, educated and uneducated, etc. – about the subject at hand? Be careful of biases. Seek to expand your understanding as far and wide as possible. Often the realizations and discoveries of others can help fill the missing piece of the puzzle and inspire us to connect with higher understanding.

4. Listen to your primal instincts

Your intuition or instincts are a manifestation of unconscious knowing. When you “feel something is off” it’s because deep down, a part of you (whether on a heart, mind and/or soul level) calls bullshit. Pay attention to how your instincts feel in your body. What sensations spread through you when faced with a bad decision, an ill-intentioned person or even a dangerous situation? For instance, some people feel butterflies in their stomach, pressure in their head, a lump rise in their throat, a feeling of dread, or like me, tingles up and down the spine. So connect with that wise and primal part of you and use it as an ally.

5. Seek and be receptive to feedback

Get feedback from trusted friends, peers, teachers, and therapists. One way to test both yourself and others is to seek out a spiritual advisor and ask them to help you see where you’re going wrong. A competent and honest spiritual advisor won’t be interested in affirming you at the cost of being truthful. Instead, they will help you to see any spiritual or psychological disease you may be carrying – and how to remedy it. The next step is perhaps the hardest: will you be receptive and listen to the observations? It can be difficult and confronting for the inflated ego to handle honest feedback as the entire purpose of the ego-self is to protect, pretend, and hide. So be gentle with yourself but also open to growing and evolving. It’s okay to feel emotionally reactive, but don’t let that prevent you from accepting and integrating the truth.

6. Ask questions (and test your theories)

If you suspect something within yourself or another may be false/disingenuous, get to the root of it and ask questions. 

There are an endless amount of questions you could pose, but these provide a springboard for you to create your own (or just use what’s here).

The next step is to test your theories. For example, if you suspect that a public figure you admire and follow is not being authentic, test your theory. Go through their work and see if you can find any instances of transparency, humanness or vulnerability. If the person is presenting an invulnerable image, something is most likely off. We are all human after all, and even spiritual gurus aren’t exempt from weakness and messiness.

7. Reflect and evaluate

Self-reflection is an important stage in spiritual discernment. How else will you discover where you may be going wrong? The easiest and most widespread way to self-reflect is through journaling.

Journaling is simply the process of writing down your thoughts, feelings, and discoveries in a journal or diary. I recommend creating a calm and atmospheric space for this practice. Light a candle, burn some incense, make yourself a cup of tea, and put on some soothing music if it helps. Getting yourself into a reflective mindset requires you to be quiet, still, and removed from the hustle and bustle of daily life. You don’t need to dedicate a lot of time to this activity – just ten minutes a day will do – but obviously the more time you can spare the better. Find a time of day in which you feel particularly lucid (or mentally clear) and make a habit out of exploring your thoughts, mindsets, feelings, habits, beliefs, and shadows. Start with one area of life that you would like to evaluate, for example, your relationships, work life, family commitments, personal goals, habits, addictions, patterns, etc.

Served with love, Kathleen💕