If your one of those people who's spiritual learning is solely from books, articles and discussion boards then you could well be doing yourself an injustice.
Even these articles on my little articles around the web are simply a small taster, a brief idea of some of the things that can be achieved if you commit to doing the work, learning some of the practices.
BUT there's an inescapable law that what is first read then becomes harder to learn, and especially in this field.
For this reason i, and some others deliberately don't publish techniques and here's just one simple example why.
I really do wish I had $1 for everyone who said "My mind is too busy to meditate" and who was meditating very effectively 10 minutes later.
If i published those techniques they wouldn't work because as soon as you read them they would become disempowered as they form an ego construct an "idea" within the same machine that says to you "I know I cant meditate"...
and of course that machine is not capable of knowing the reality because it works in simplistic constructs.
And lets not forget the "well it's different for me", or "I need something different because I'm a visual person" or "no technique works for everyone" and all the other barriers to experiencing the magic of working with your energy.
Put simply, working with spiritual energy, the stuff the universe is full of, and that which our soul is made of, is like rain...
In rain everyone gets wet, the tall the short the fat the thin the old the young the good and the not so good - the same is true for all when working with energy...
as soon as we can get past the subjective reasoning of what "me" is capable of.
I explain this bewildering idea that we somehow need to 'get it' on an intellectual level through the following analogy.
Two kids intend to learn to ride bikes.
One we give no advance information, the other we tutor in the concepts of balance, physical dynamics, wind resistance and anything else we can think of about bike riding.
Yet its the one who has no mental concepts, no constructs up front who is always likely to be able to ride the bike sooner because the learning is happening down within the experiential learning ability where they are open, not up in the head...
where the other guy is struggling to apply concepts because he's working from up in the head.
What I'm describing here isn't about intelligence, nor is it openly believing anything one is offered without healthy boundaries...
its simply about the subjective reasoning that the mind uses to 'grasp' or 'reason' things by making ideas or constructs.
is fine for math but gets totally in the way when learning so many of the spiritual disciplines, (same as with riding the bike) its the great editor that can keep us from these experiences for a long time.
One well practiced technique is worth a million articles, books or board discussions - and always comes the "WOW I didn't know I could do that I wish I'd tried it years ago".
And that's simply because the person either needed a belief system that it could be achieved, or simply didn't believe it could be achieved and so years went by without it happening.
And as for blind reassurance? that often inhibits the work because it's creating yet another idea, construct to which we can emotionally attach something.
Worse than that, often boards or other support mechanisms kept the person so wrapped up in the concepts and constructs, or became the balm, that the individual was kept from the journey through their pain and into healing for far too long.
Anything other than something that is educating, demonstrating and empowering can too easily be a "feed the need" drug for the subjective reasoning".
Many would see that and say "that's not spiritual" but what they mean is "that's not buying into my pain and reassuring me".
In the real work it is empowering through tough love not disempowering through enabling the pain, much of which doesn't need to be there anyway.
You could for example learn a good meditation in an hour that will save months or years of pain and mental confusion THAT'S the spiritual way, rather than months or years of sympathy.
No we don't mean lack of compassion, we mean sufficient compassion to care enough to not empower that which traps you, but to give you the keys to become untrapped.
Don't waste the opportunity for progress through needing to 'get' the concepts, there is no mental aspect to the deeper inner journey..
Its this world of concepts and abstracts that the journey is trying to free you from.
Much of what can be achieved surprises or even shocks people on a regular basis...
Even with the simplest methods.
The good thing about your energy is it doesn't care if you believe in it, like it, want it, or anything else.
It remains beautifully detached from all of that and because it's removed from subjective ego its enormous potential remains ready to be tapped into, unsullied by your opinions, beliefs or conditioning.
And as for the "it's OK for you your strong enough to do it and I'm not" or "you believe and I don't", most of us have got here because we walked the path and were trapped in those same illusions for far, far too long.
As soon as we can escape the concepts, we can tap this amazing potential but only though the work, the practices, the disciplines.
never through "I get it now", which is just another mental construct or concept that resides in the same mechanism that can say things like "it wont work for me" We live in an energy universe capable of infinite possibility and can begin to access it through simply being open to some good technique.
Whilst anything remains words and thoughts, however much we think we "get" it, it remains the same as drawing the changes on the map then wondering why the landscape stayed the same.