Written by Wes Annac, The Culture of Awareness

I feel inspired to encourage us to take a grounded approach to spirituality – an approach that doesn’t cause us to ignore our negative or destructive tendencies, but instead, surface them, explore them and flow with them.

I won’t encourage us to give up the practices that align us with higher aspects of our consciousness, but we don’t want to use them to hide from the darkness within.

Carl Jung told us that “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”. I think ‘making the darkness conscious’ is exactly what we’ll want to do if we want enjoy our lives and our spirituality without hiding certain parts of ourselves from the world (or from our own attention).

They’ll get our attention one way or another, and they’ll get it in big, bold and destructive ways if we spend our whole life trying to hide from them. There’s no sense hiding from the aspects of our consciousness that could be seen as ‘dark’ or ‘negative’, and we make them worse by convincing ourselves they’re wrong or shouldn’t exist.

We aren’t meant to hide from the darkness we all carry within, which can manifest in the form of destructive habits, tendencies, mindsets and actions. It’s meant to be embraced and understood as an essential aspect of ourselves that we can love and respect, and we’ll continue to wrestle with our inner demons until we stop trying to run.

We have no reason to run from the things about ourselves we could label ‘bad’, and in fact, we liberate ourselves when we embrace them and give them some air.

I’ll use a personal example to illustrate my point.

Lust is one of my biggest obstacles, and I’m realizing that it’s only such a big deal because of the way I’ve approached it for years. We’ve been taught to believe lust and sexuality are shameful taboos we should hide away from the world and only express to our partner or someone we’re comfortable exchanging our sexual energy with.

We’ve been conditioned to hide this part of ourselves away (even though society openly flaunts it), and while spiritual seekers tend to be more open-minded than the rest of society, there’s a tendency in some of us to want to come across as ‘enlightened’, ‘uplifted’ or complete in a way that some of us haven’t yet achieved.

This tendency can unfortunately cause us to use spirituality to hide the ‘bad’ things about ourselves that we wouldn’t want others to see.

You might read my articles or intuitive ‘Voice Within’ messages and assume I have it all figured out. You might think I’m on a constant meditative and creative cloud, and I’ll admit that I do strive to stay aligned each day.

I do little things to stay aligned, like exercise, drink fruit juice and smoothies, eat organic food (which I fail at a lot) and stay as creatively consistent as I can.

You might read the work that results from all that and assume I (or anyone else who does anything similar) am some mega spiritual seeker who’s completed all his lessons and is here solely to share with others instead of growing, learning and evolving.

If that’s what you think, you couldn’t be further from the truth!

A number of obstacles stand in my way each day, and one of them is the tendency to get upset when things don’t work out the way I intend. I can be a big baby if I don’t get what I want or I unsuccessfully try to avoid a conflict by staying ‘positive’ and denying the reality of whatever situation causes it.

Some days, I don’t end up writing at all because I choose to wallow in negativity, victimhood and other forms of conflict and self-pity the whole time I could be writing. On some evenings, I have to rush to schedule posts to the blog because I misuse my creative time by getting upset about something or trying to resist lust or another quality that can be degrading.

Only now am I realizing that any ‘lower’ quality, whether it has to do with anger, fear, greed, or lust, is meant to be openly embraced and explored rather than hidden away. Lust is a natural part of being human, and the desire for sex is embedded into our DNA.

It’s how we reproduce, and lustful desires are programmed into our physical, emotional and spiritual bodies. They aren’t the demons they’ve been made out to be, especially by some spiritual seekers, and we’ll keep hurting ourselves if we keep telling ourselves they are or keep trying to run from them.

This open, grounded spiritual approach is helping me see that sexual energy has a specific role to play in humanity’s evolution.

We can use what’s called ‘sexual alchemy’ or ‘sexual transformation/transmutation’ to bring that energy back up through the chakras and funnel it through the heart or even the third eye, thereby enhancing our creative passion and our passion for life in general. (1)

But we can’t do this if we’re too busy treating our sexual feelings like beasts that need to be chained up and hidden from ourselves and the world. Like I said, these beasts will surface no matter what, so we might as well surface them ourselves and learn how to work with them to create something positive that we can feel good about.

Sexual transformation is a revolutionary concept that could help a lot of people who are psychologically hooked on sex or pornography, but we can’t open up to it if we don’t open up to our lust. Similarly, we can’t explore the ways we can transcend any other personal demons if we don’t open up to them, give them some air and explore them.

I think this is what most people call grounded spirituality – an open, aware, loving, spiritually rooted perspective that we don’t use to avoid reality or anything dark or negative we carry within. We use it to embrace them, thereby enabling ourselves to really explore our consciousness.

There is one small mistake some people make with grounded spirituality, however, and it’s that they decide the things that once helped them raise their vibration and align with spirit are now outdated or won’t help them (or others) anymore.

Some will even speak openly against spiritual concepts or practices they embraced before they confronted their demons and empowered themselves, and there are two things they don’t realize. One is that those practices still help others who are on different paths, and the other is that those practices can still help them too.

From my perspective, the most common concept that’s trashed once a seeker empowers themselves is a spiritual teacher or a guru, which extends to channeled sources and other forms of external guidance.

Some people who empower themselves will tell you there’s no need to take advice from gurus or channeled sources because it’s all within. This is true, but instead of all-out denouncing these sources of spiritual guidance, we change our perspective of the guidance they offer.

Whereas at one time, we might’ve given all our power and attention to a guru, we can now take their advice with balance, discernment and self-empowerment.

We no longer need to glue ourselves to these sources for guidance or inspiration, but we can recognize that they’re still helpful and utilize their advice while recognizing that we have everything we could ever need within.

I’ll give another example. I used to be so heavily into channeling that I vehemently defended it when anyone would speak ill of it. Then, I discovered other paths that empowered living people more than non-physical entities, and I pretty much stopped supporting channeling altogether.

I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I didn’t want to write about it. And I certainly didn’t want to practice it myself. I was worried that I’d be cast away by the more grounded and levelheaded spiritual seekers for advocating an idea that could be seen as ludicrous depending on who you talk to.

I was pushed even further away from the concept when other spiritual seekers started pointing out the follies of some channelings. Before I knew it, I’d completely stopped advocating it or even talking about it.

Now, I’m realizing that taking advice from a non-physical teacher doesn’t have to be so bad or ‘wrong’ (provided the message is sensible and grounded itself), and it’s all about the mindset we embody when we read the material.

The same can be said with living teachers and gurus.

We can take their advice with a grain of salt, and we don’t have to wholeheartedly embrace or close-mindedly denounce the things they say or the help they give. Sometimes, a spiritual teacher or a channeled source will say something we really need to hear, and other times, their guidance won’t help or interest us much at all.

The best thing we can do is empower ourselves and be ourselves, without thinking the things we carry within, such as anger, lust, or even an interest in something like channeling that most people don’t think is legitimate, invalidate our spirituality or our ability to stay grounded. They don’t, unless we let them.

If we empower ourselves and, most importantly, learn to love ourselves, we’ll be able to take any advice we’re given, from any source who gives it, with balance and a refusal to judge or condemn it (or judge/condemn ourselves for taking it).

Similarly, we’ll be able to explore any dark or negative tendencies we carry within, without convincing ourselves we’re bad people or we aren’t as spiritual as we’re supposed to be. Everything is spiritual, and that includes our inner demons and the skeletons in our closet.

It’s time to be open with ourselves and our community of like-minded spiritual seekers. Our fire will light when we’re truly open and willing to explore everything – about ourselves, the world around us and the spiritual nature of our existence – with an open mind and a refusal to judge the things we learn or witness.

Openness, self-empowerment and the willingness to be completely open and vulnerable with ourselves will show us the way back into an open, expanded state of consciousness, and from there, we’ll enjoy the harmony and bliss we’ve sought for so long.

The best part about it will be that we’ll enjoy these qualities without using them to hide our destructive tendencies, which will have long become our allies.

Footnotes:

1. Two articles from Lonerwolf.com inspired me to write this. The first is ‘What Is Spiritual Bypassing?’ (http://lonerwolf.com/what-is-spiritual-bypassing/) and the second, which has to do with ‘sexual alchemy’, is ‘Transforming Sexual Energy Into Spiritual Energy’ (http://lonerwolf.com/transforming-sexual-energy/)

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I’m a twenty-one year old writer and blogger, and I created The Culture of Awareness daily news site.

The Culture of Awareness features daily spiritual and alternative news, articles I’ve written, and more. Its purpose is to awaken and uplift by providing material about the fall of the planetary elite and a new paradigm of unity and spirituality.

I’ve contributed to numerous spiritual websites including The Master Shift, Waking Times, Golden Age of Gaia, Wake Up World and Expanded Consciousness. I can also be found on Facebook ( and ) and , and I write a paid weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to for $11.11 a month .