When we talk about pursuing rewarding things, we always talk about passion, commitment, practice, and yes, sometimes pain and discomfort. To talk about being passionate about bodybuilding, or tennis, or cabinet making, we have a very clear story as to how to get our chops to together. We can look at our accomplishments in a very physical sense.Are we getting bigger, better, stronger, or is our craft starting to take shape?

People use the phrase, as I do, the art of living. One could better say, the craft of living. This is because we can splash paint on a canvas and call it art. But a craft takes time and skill to hone. Perhaps I should toss aside this term, the art of living, because one of the great dangers of spiritual practices is those that get a little too loose, as if we can make up the rules, splash some paint on our canvas and oula, we have a beautiful life, if we could just find the right paint! And to add to this metaphor, we can parade around what we think is the beautiful life we have created and most everyone else just sees a mess on a canvas.

In my personal travels and connections, what I have discovered is that religions provide the opportunity to create community. I have met wise and ignorant people under the roof of every religiou splace I have visited. And I have felt love and compassion under many roofs fronted by the signs of various faiths, and I have been in many religious places that where dry, devoid of energy, people just going through the motions to check a box in their lives.

When we see a painting and there is a clear craft involved, even if we do not love the painting, it is not our particular style of art, we can still appreciate the technique. We can see the skill and we know we could never grab a brush and much such a thing without years of practice. Getting back to the human side of affairs, and to this point, we do not have to craft our selves into highly complicated people, in which others say, wow, how did you get so intensely complicated. There is a flow, an ease, a simplicity, maybe a melody, to a finely crafted expression or work of art. It could be said that this is the final step in our evolution, to return to some sense of this.

When we want to become good at something, we should not obsess about skill. We obsess about practice, and then the skill will come. We also must ways of bring joy to our practices, but we should not do them solely for the sake of being joyful. I have a sort of fifty fifty rule in life. Which is that we must account for both side of our existence, the joyful side and that which is responsible for dealing with suffering. When we seek spiritual wisdom, many obsess about the pursuit of joy, when at least half of our work is the management of suffering.

So now we need to talk about the very possibly misleading title of this article. Is there even such a thing as spiritual skill? Yes, there is, but we are entering a world in which the certain rules spot on reflect how we go about our business in our external worlds, while other things are counter, in truth, they are meant to counter balance the weaknesses of our physical nature. To illustrate this point, we can enter the pursuit of many skills in life with a certain amount of ego. Maybe ego is our initial motivation to help us become skillful at something. If we are dedicated and hard working, and not simply full of our selves, that is we have a healthy ego, one that still has respect for others, this is not such a bad thing. Time and evolution will let us know when our egos are doing more harm than good for us. We can adjust we go. We become increasingly skillful and we can start to embrace there is a far more rewarding to connection to life when our ego is not our central force, but we can still garner respect for who we have become.

In our spiritual pursuits, it is most dangerous to enter them with any form of ego as our drive. Our spiritual lives are meant to counter balance our egos, and give us a ground in which to manage the ego which runs through most of human existence. In the West we have a specific notion of ego, a sort of selfish arrogance. In the Eats ego is often used to describe any attempts of the logical mind to wrap its head around life for the purposes of self preservation. In this, we can see there are many forms of ego, relative to eastern translation, that are not deal breakers. People who sell the notion of enlightenment speak of losing the go, essentially losing the mind, but this is a dangerous pursuit and I speak to tis in my article about enlightenment. We should not lose our minds or egos. We should lightly shed them. To do that, we should leave them entirely at the door when we are in spiritual practice. So, this is one aspect of our spiritual “skill” development that differs from our outer lives.

What else? Effort. In our physical lives, we must put in effort, physical effort. It is not just a thing of taking action and exerting our selves, it is about keeping our engines firing, about summoning the natural part pf us that likes to do things and be engaged. Our most powerful spiritual understanding comes from surrender and effortlessness, which is counter to what we have always known about learning and growing. This art of letting go can bring us tremendous growth and wisdom, but remember, it is half of our equation. We walk back into life and now we are no longer just surrendering our spiritual wisdom, we must surrender to the wisdom of the world, and that is our godliness quickly returns to our humanness.

The act of meditation, which I highly recommend, reveals that to put ones self in a deep state of effortlessness requires…wait for it…effort! I have a personal saying which is that one of the most difficult things you will ever do is absolutely nothing for a long stretch of time. And that is why we can do physical things that feel effortless, and we can sit still and feel like it is taking all of our energy to try to allow our selves to just sit still. Oh lord, yes, it is all a crazy dance, but fortunately we don’t need to understand it all. We just need to practice.

So, if we could define spiritual skills, how would we do that? Some people would begin and end at faith, but I would argue faith is not a skill. And if we rely solely on faith, we will find our selves in blind faith, that is blind to the things life is asking us to pay attention to. Faith is a means to embrace the grand design of life and that we are part of that design. In this, everything is taking its course and the grand design is not for us to fight, only to listen to. Not really a skill, more of an awareness. I guess you could say it falls into the art of knowing when to surrender. We should always surrender to our wisdom, but we should not always surrender to those things we encounter. Our true spiritual skills? Calm. A sense of calm. All great and wise people have the capacity to be calm in the middle of storms. We all have a breaking point, but we want tp push that breaking point as far as we can. That is a skill.

Compassion is next on the list. To be compassionate people in a meaningful way, it becomes a skill. No, we cannot simply throw compassion at people. Anyone who has been alive for more than 10 years should know, people will use us and suck the life out of us, if we don’t manage compassion in a way that takes reality into existence. All of our spiritual skills are immensely humbling. They all reveal all the things we cannot control or change, even things we cannot tolerate. To develop compassion as a skill is perhaps the most humbling, and speak a little more to this on the article focusing on compassion.

The last skill I will call managing our higher mind, or inner guru if you will. In a perfect world, we would all be governed by our higher minds and our inner gurus. The represent the best and wisest of us. Yet how many of us can be our best and wisest self at all times? And so there is a part of us, not our ignorant self, but a component of who we are that understands our place in our own evolution. This what allows us to move forward with all of our imperfections. We have tis thing you could call spiritual ego. It takes over our inner guru and starts to demand perfection from us and others. It keeps poking at us, why are you not here, or there, and it doing so, it sabotages our most important skill which is presence. This is an unavoidable thing at times, sometimes long stretches of times, when we must decipher whether or not something in us is really pushing us upward and we need a kick in the pants, or if a part of us is demanding of us something we cannot yet do, maybe ever. This can be an extension of that parental thing, when a parent wants us to be that thing they could never be, and so we feel pressured grow out of fear and demand. I have found that true evolution comes from the ground up though our humanness. Wisdom and energy may come from the heavens, but it is a very earthly affair to live a wise human life. We all know what it is like to have our angels and devils duke it out in us. We all know what it is like to feel what we could become and yet not know if we ever will or even should try. A sort of Buddhist perspective would be that we just keep walking and taking steps. We get where we get when we get there. In that process, sometimes we don’t know whether we ned to the lower blind part of us with a stick or that part that seems to barking at us from above. This is a craft, an art. And act of breathing and moving forward and letting life work itself out and reveal itself to us.

And finally? Line dancing and car repair. Why? Just to keep us on our toes.