Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the Week of August 25, 2025


On the Path

(Where Do I Live? 5)

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Do we live on the spiritual path? Are spiritual practice and the spiritual worldview front and center in our mind and heart? Do we aim to make every moment count?

You may have an intuition that some moments count more than others, that every moment of presence, prayer, meditation, or kindness, every moment where your feet are clearly on the path, that all those moments do indeed matter. Those moments count for you, for us, and for the whole, because they feel and are more real, with more depth, than our usual way of being. Moments when we are truly awake, when we a truly here, have more life in them. Their energy transformations and their connection with a more universal will create ripples in both the visible and the invisible worlds that touch us all.

Some people live on the path full time; nuns and monks, for example, devote their lives to the spirit. Yet those who make their lives in our common world outside the cloister, who may consider themselves to be part-timers or amateurs on the spiritual path, make a very important difference. Their inner work may even be as deep and as pervasive as for those in the monastic settings, and they may be just as firmly rooted on the path.

One sign of the depth of our work is our relationship with time. Spiritual time is different than ordinary time. Indeed, moments spent in spiritual practice are moments outside of time, moments in eternity. They have a different weight and a different impact than our ordinary moments. Our experience in meditation, prayer, and presence can have a timeless depth that touches the roots of the world. In the spiritual path, depth matters more than clock time, though the duration of intentional practice does lead us deeper. Our acts of opening to those levels enable spiritual nourishment to flow into us and thereby into the world.

Or take the example of the practice of three-centered presence, with body, heart, and mind united in the act of being here. It widens the immediate base of experience, broadens our present moment, and allows us greater contact with the timeless now contained within every moment. That firmly grounded, broad base of experience, joining what would otherwise be several instants of time, paves the way into the timeless.

The energy transformations resulting from spiritual practices affect our whole day, our whole attitude and experience. A strong meditation, spiritual exercise, or heartfelt prayer session in the morning enlivens and enlightens us throughout the day. We tend to live more in peace and equanimity, with an open heart to those we meet. Our ordinary perceptions become more vivid. We have moments of inner silence, without the fog of associating thoughts and reacting emotions. That quiet mind and peaceful heart together open our senses to the clear and direct experience of the world we live in, as well as our intimate connection with it. This is life on the path.

Yet, as with any life, the spiritual path does not grant immunity from loss and anguish. We may live on several levels, and the level of ordinary life always remains. Events around us may bring us grief. So can events within us. When we can see clearly, we also see ourselves, our inner situation more clearly. We may see that we have far to go to real transformation. Yet we also have the countervailing hope, faith, and determination to persist, come what may. We make our life on the path. Within that, we serve the spirit while serving our family and society in the usual ways. It all makes for a rich, creative, and responsible life full of heart.

The core characteristic of the spiritual path is that it gives us a direction and a compass pointing out our next step toward or into the Sacred. Focusing on what we can do now to engage more presence, more depth, more kindness, more freedom, more letting go, defines the path and our work on it. This next step is our path.


     

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