I’ll never forget my first class with Master Co. I drove up to Seattle with my first Pranic Healing instructor, Andrea Furber, to attend – I was still living in Portland at the time. I was super excited to meet him and learn from him! He was the author of the best book I had ever read on anything having to do with energy (prana).
Sitting in class, I daydreamed he would notice my passion and commitment and ask me to be a personal student of his and work with him on spreading Pranic Healing. Any of you who know him can laugh along with me now, as that is NOT the way he works! But I wished to leave the regular world (and my problems, including a necessary forthcoming job search), and immerse myself in spirituality and energy healing instead. I wanted to be part of something I believed in, and which would help humanity. And yes, escape from the messy regular world.
Unsurprisingly, no such invitation was given! And my life was about to get way messier. I did find a job without much trouble, but next up for me was marriage, the Great Recession (affecting my husband in the worst way), buying a fixer-upper, and two kids.
While I constantly wished life would calm down so I could read and meditate most of the day, instead it just got more intense, especially with the birth of my first baby. Now I worked 24 hours a day, with only naps as breaks. The only books I read were on sleep-training, and meditating went completely out the window for a good year. By this time, I felt pretty upset. Every day I couldn’t meditate or read or go to a Pranic Healing class, I got more stressed out, thinking life kept getting in the way of the most important thing: our spiritual path and spiritual growth. How could this be happening to me?!
It took me a very long time to realize and accept it, but what I had gotten was far better than an escape into the mountaintops: A lifestyle that actually forced me into a lot of spiritual growth and development in a short period of time. How is that possible?
Most of us think the best and quickest way to move forward in our spiritual growth is to leave the material world completely. For instance, enter a monastery and renounce all material items and wealth. This is what comes to our minds when we think about focusing on our spirituality because this is the traditional way it has been done for thousands of years.
It was generally thought that jobs, family life, and managing finances could not mix with a serious spiritual practice.
This is what I used to think. I looked down on the regular world and things like jobs, money, even cities. I thought being in the regular world kept me away from a spiritual life. I probably even felt guilty about it. Some of us even feel guilty for earning money (and spending it!).
What I learned from Master Choa Kok Suit, founder of Pranic Healing and Arhatic Yoga, is that simply meditating all day is not necessarily the fastest spiritual path at all. It certainly works for certain individuals. But this pressure cooker we call regular life is an excellent spiritual teacher. It forces us to develop many parts of ourselves at the same time just to get by. This development IS spiritual development.
Succeeding at work, maintaining healthy relationships, having a family, and still making time for meditation is ALL part of our spiritual growth and development. Contrary to it being an unwelcome and unnecessary side gig, it’s actually central.
What is spiritual growth? It’s not the ability to meditate for 3 hours straight. That’s what I probably thought before. For those of us in the real world, meditating for 3 hours straight would be a picnic compared to what we have to deal with! Working full time and still getting the kids from school, caring for an ailing relative, trying to read a book or two to keep the mind sharp, even cooking healthy food a few times a week and keeping house is a LOT!
Conquering all these jobs at once without life falling apart teaches us what Master Choa called the 5 virtues. Mastering these equals spiritual development.
Loving Kindness
Generosity
Constancy of Aim and Effort/Industriousness
Honesty and Accurate Perception
Moderation
Each of these is connected to one or more chakras. Which is why working with the chakras (Pranic Healing) is an excellent way to get started on understanding spirituality!
You can read more about them in Master Choa’s book Achieving Oneness With the Higher Soul. We are all working on these constantly whether we know it or not.
Can you see how living in a monastery in the Himalayas gives us much less opportunity to master life than the regular world does?
Master Choa even said, “If you want to grow fast, have a family.”
Now, this put my mind at ease. I used to be pretty obsessed with my spiritual development and honestly wondered if I was making all the wrong choices because I didn’t have time for hundreds of hours of meditation a year. Meditation is still a critical part of spiritual development – but pausing my practice when life truly makes it impossible is not even close to being the end of the world.
I believe in ancient times humanity was less advanced, and people were so very immersed in the material world, including being entangled with money and possessions, that an opposite extreme had to be offered in order for anyone to detach at all.
It’s actually a sign of our advancement that we can handle more, and that we can BALANCE more. We can balance everyday life with a spiritual practice. It is harder that way, but we are up to the challenge!
And best of all, Master Choa created a healing modality and a spiritual practice to help us do just that. He actually emphasized that what he created was designed for regular people in the regular world. So we can have both a spiritual life and a regular life. Master Choa himself was both a multimillionaire businessman and energy healing master, continuing to run his businesses while he traveled the world spreading his teachings.
These are Pranic Healing and Arhatic Yoga. Combining these with your everyday life puts you on an accelerated path to not only rapid spiritual development, but also better health, more happiness, a sense of connectedness with a higher power, a better ability to handle regular life! – and so much more. Sound incredible?? Click here to start benefiting from all Master Choa has to offer us.
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