What's more important for your better life: Psychology or Spirituality?

(By Eldad Ben-Moshe ✨ Reading Time: 2 minutes)

❤ Hey there Better Lifers!

Who got it right - the east or the west?

Yes, you can see spirituality in the west, and psychology in the east.
But by and large, the west focuses on psychology.
The east on spirituality.

But the fact is that you must deal with both in order to grow. 

If you believe that you can deal only with your personality and ignore the spiritual...
Good luck 😉

You will find that at best, the form of the problems and neurosis changes. 
But you’ll always dance between pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness.

There will always be more’ stuff.’ 
Nothing will be solved completely.

If your goal is to have a happier, better life -
what does it matter if you used to have problem A and you now have problem B?

Maybe your life got a bit better,
but did you really reach a stable, unchanging level of happiness?

And again, this is the best scenario,
in which you did completely overcome a specific habit or neurosis.
It is not a very common thing to attain.

Most people have a hard time even just improving their situation.
So eliminating the problem altogether is not a very common achievement.

But on the other hand, 

If you believe that you can deal with the spiritual and ignore your psychology,
your habits, your personality, your automatic patterns…

Then welcome to the spiritual-bypass-phony-holy club. 🎉
And good luck with that one as well… 

Just like a bird needs both wings to fly, so do we.

You must deal both with physical life's psychological ‘stuff’
(yes, that includes your personality, not ‘other people’ -
it’s never really about ‘them’);

And with your spiritual growth (in a grounded, honest, effective way).

The good news?

They compliment each other. 

If you’re working on both simultaneously,
you’ll see better results in each one of them, and in your life as a whole.
The work you do on one plain feeds and helps to deal with the other.

It’s a result of the law of synergy,
which states that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Some things are working better together.

That is one of the reasons I get so many stunning reviews
from my coaching clients - as you can see when you click here.

Now you might think I’m just saying that.

I get it. 
A healthy level of doubt is actually a good thing.

So here is what Ram Dass has to say about it.

He was (and still is, even though he died) one of my teachers,
a worldwide well renowned spiritual teacher,
and also a psychology professor and researcher at Harvard University:

"We’re living in a culture that focuses on the psychological very, very strongly, and in that sense we tend to see psychological problems as things that need to be given primary consideration before one can go on to spiritual work.

In other traditions, for example in Burma, where I study meditation, psychological issues are really treated as pretty irrelevant. You go ahead with the spiritual practice, and the psychological problems keep changing as your spiritual development progresses. One with the other.

In the West, what most of us have done is form an interplay that is often sequential rather than simultaneous. To avoid this, you’ve got to understand that all of your spiritual practices are selected at least partially as a function of your psychological make up. Then, when you follow your spiritual practice, there will be points where you begin to realize that your psychological problems, or neurosis, or patterns are becoming more apparent and coming to the surface really well.

What you would like to do now is stop for a moment, and attend to them because they seem ripe for plucking.

I think that to the extent you keep looking at it and analyzing it over and over, you tend to reinforce it’s reality. I think from a spiritual point of view, the best game is to take a look, see whats ripe, and then go back into your spiritual practices. You’ve got to get it as it comes up, because once it’s up, it has all kinds of secondary effects and it feeds upon itself. You get it at the beginning, and you have to make the commitment, “I really wanna let go of that stuff – it’s not letting me go to God. I don’t need it anymore. It’s not serving me.” And then every time it comes up you get it out. You get rid of it."

-Ram Dass
(highlighted parts were higlighted by me)

Remember -

• Implement.

• Baby steps.

• Joyfully.

Done is better than perfect.

To your better life,
with tons of 💖

Eldad Ben-Moshe
Founder, Teacher, and Coach
Better Life Awareness Center

P.S.

Life is a journey of learning together, learning from each other.
You don’t have to do it alone.

Share your thoughts and questions with me by leaving your comments on this page or by sending me a message via our chat icon or our contact us form. 

I love hearing what you think and answering your questions.