Do Truly Spiritual People Ever Feel Really Sad?

If you are a truly spiritual person, should you ever feel really sad?

Well, the Little Prince, who represents our inner being, felt very sad. In fact we will find as we proceed through the Little Prince’s story that he experienced the full range of emotion—including emotions that it’s often assumed “spiritual” people shouldn’t feel.

What does it mean to be spiritual?

For many it’s a state that’s different from what we experience in normal everyday life. Million are actually seeking such a state so they can escape normal life, which they don’t find too pleasant.

But what people are wanting when they seek something other than their present reality isn’t spirituality but dualism.

They imagine heaven, or nirvana, or enlightenment—whatever you want to call this elusive state—as something other than being present in our ordinary life right this moment.

It’s as if there’s something wrong with simply being present in ordinary life—that to be ordinary is somehow “lacking.”

In actuality the only thing lacking is consciousness.

When I say "consciousness," I’m talking about being fully present in, completely aware of, and embracing whatever is happening right now.

Spirituality isn’t something other than ordinary life, but is life lived in full awareness. To be spiritual is to live each moment consciously.

We are conscious of what we are doing and also why we are doing it, instead of being motivated—or, more accurately, driven—by unresolved emotional issues of which we are unaware, unconscious.

So the Little Prince is showing us that consciousness involves being fully present in our life, which means we experience all the emotions that spontaneously arise in us or are triggered in us.

It was finally allowing myself to feel everything I was experiencing that catapulted me into a continuous state of present moment awareness.

Events happened in my life, some of which were of my own making and some of which were the result of others, that brought me to a state of absolute inertia. I was in so much emotional pain, I went into post-traumatic stress. My whole body felt like it was burning from an acidic state, to the point I couldn’t eat. If I tried to put a toothbrush in my mouth, I wanted to throw up. It was literally hell.

What do you do at such a time? Well, you could take meds. Or you could try to busy yourself to take your mind off it—if such will even work at this point.

Alternatively you could allow yourself to become still and feel the pain, breathing through it by using connected breathing. That is, you don’t pause between the in-breath and the out-breath, and the out-breath and the in-breath. The breathing isn’t forced, but quite natural; yet it’s continuous, much like a dog breathes.

I started this breathing because I began Michael Brown’s procedure for moving into greater consciousness, The Presence Process. Within a couple of weeks, the acute distress had left. I never looked back.

I don't mean that I didn't have a lot yet to see, a lot yet to grow in. But in terms of all my attempts to feel good, boost myself up, explain myself, apologize for myself, I had hit rock bottom. I was a disaster, and I was still okay.

I finally began to completely accept myself. Not as a mental concept, something to affirm. Just a realization that, God damn it, at my very worst, I am loved, loved, loved. The divine loves me, wants me, is me in expression in all my mess.

And all the mess had to be because it was the only way I could come to the realization that it's all part of the divine evolving in incarnate form. Once get this, really get it in the heart instead of the head, and you too will never look back.

From this point on I had a clear sense of what I was to do with my life and couldn’t be diverted from it by all the logic in the world, including that of longstanding friends who sought to be helpful. And as I took the steps life was asking of me, the path quite naturally and spontaneously began to open before me.

That’s what we’re going to find happens with the Little Prince and the airman who has crashed in the desert, as I did. It seems to take a crash in the desert to shift us into a continuous state of consciousness.

In due course, further on in the Little Prince’s story, we shall see that the disciples of Jesus had to go through such a crash in the desert, when the one they had trust and followed, giving up everything to learn from him, shocked them by simply allowing himself to be taken and executed, leaving them all alone to flounder in bewilderment. (I talk about this, and how it totally changed their lives, in my book Your Forgotten Self.)

The mistake it’s easy to make when we decide to be present with our emotional pain is that we have a goal in mind. We want it to pass right now. Or at least we want a date by which it will have passed. It doesn’t work this way.

When we are goal-oriented, we aren’t present. To be present is to leave time out of the picture and to simply allow, being with whatever arises, whatever happens, without attempting to get it to pass.

The trouble with so many of us when we crash in life is that we don’t allow ourselves to crash in the desert, metaphorically a thousand miles from any inhabited place. We don’t really allow ourselves to feel our emotions in all their immensity.

Either we vent, or we go over and over what’s happening to us, wallowing—neither of which is being with our emotions.

We have to remove all timeframes and just allow ourselves to sit with ourselves, so that our false self can be seen for what it is, collapse about our feet, and open the way for our true being to begin to emerge.

I’m persuaded it doesn’t have to be as bad as it was for Eckhart Tolle, who in The Power of Now describes reaching the brink of ending his life—and as it was for me. It can be more gradual. It depends on our willingness to allow.