4 Ways to Reawaken Your Spirit

Do you ever feel that your faith traditions are dissipating or altogether falling by the wayside? Do you sometimes wonder if you’ve lost sight of God, or find that the modern lifestyle and technology have made a life of faith harder to practice?

If you’re looking for a way to come alive again spiritually, try these four practices today:

Take Control

Being the subject in our faith is the core component to revitalizing our relationship with God. Deciding how, when, and where to build that relationship is highly personal, and it requires a commitment to personal growth. It is, after all, our spiritual life we’re dealing with.

Prayer and Meditation

Prayer and meditation are valuable spiritual activities, but we don’t often talk about them in common conversation. I wouldn’t normally ask a coworker or a classmate how their prayers went last night, or about their morning meditation. At first, I even had a hard time convincing myself that prayer is more than just saying words and chants to myself.

The Unification tradition views prayer as a type of reporting, a way to assess our day and express gratitude. We report our life to God--our struggles, our feelings, our inspirations-- and affirm our determination to grow. Prayer becomes a conversation with God.

Meditation, in a similar way, can be like a conversation with ourselves. By staying silent, emptying our minds, and being aware of our surroundings, we can practice going deep and looking into our inner selves. This deepens our reflection and self-understanding, too.

Make Conditions

We all make conditions every day when we determine to eat healthy, exercise, or be on time. These are repeated actions that help our outer life stay in good condition. But what about our spiritual life? Our spiritual life is what helps us connect with God and affects how we view or act in the situations we face.

Making good internal conditions can help us understand ourselves on a deeper level. I like to think of it as training the mind and spirit. We can make conditions based on the aspect of our spirituality we want to work on. For example; if you want to condition yourself to be more positive, then take five minutes to write down any positive things that you experience during the day. There are many ways to start up a condition and being creative about it makes it fun.

Challenge Limitations

There are a number of factors, some more subtle than others, that limit our spirituality. Why pray when you can plug into social media during your train ride? Why go through an awkward interaction with a stranger about God when you can just mind your own business and your own comfort? These are actually the times when we can challenge those limitations. Passing up these opportunities to revitalize our spirit is like missing a chance to hang out with God, while going through struggle to overcome challenges is a part of our spiritual growth process. It is how we gain experience and become better versions of ourselves. If we stand up to our limits and just accept being awkward, the results might surprise us.

We can reignite our spiritual lives in many different ways, but it’s up to us to own up to the opportunity or not. The more we ignore our life of faith, the weaker it gets, so before we even get there, let’s start exercising our spirits and reconnect with our inner self.