Creating a Spiritual Practice For the Complete Beginner

The first step is to just start.

I know..that's pretty cliche.

But hear me out.

You want a spiritual practice to connect you to your faith, spirituality, ground yourself...whatever that goal might be?

Pick one thing and start it...right now.

Do you want to read the Bible every morning?

Go right now, get your Bible, pick it up and read 1 chapter anywhere in the Bible and then come back here.

Do you want to start a meditation practice?

Go on Youtube and type in "5 minute meditation" right now, do it, and then come back to this article.

Do you want to journal?

Go grab a piece of paper and a pen and quickly jot down what journalling would look like for you (or anything else on your mind) and when you are done...you guessed it...come back here.

Spiritual practices are just that...practices.

And in order to do them...you need to..well..practice.

However for those of you that are overthinkers and want to have a step by step goal outlined for you to help you through this journey here it is:

What is your goal with your spiritual practice? What are you hoping to get out it?

If you don't have a goal in mind as to why you want to do the practice in the first place you are going to find it very difficult to start out and continue your practice over the long term. Which then makes this kind of pointless. So I want you to get a piece of paper or a notepad or journal whatever you have and write down what your ultimate goal is in your spiritual practice. Is it to find peace within yourself? Is it to ground yourself and aid in anxiety management? Is it to connect you to your religion and faith? Is it theological study? Is it a combination of the above? What makes this something that will make you tick....

The second part to this is what is your ideal day going to look like with this spiritual practice?

How much time do you plan on investing per day or week into this practice? Do you want to do this every day? Do you want to do it every other day? Do you want to only have 1 day out of the week to do the thing? When do you want to do it? Before work, after work, before your workout, after your workout, before you take the dogs out or after? If you could snap your fingers right now and make this happen what would that look like to you in your life.

The third part to this would be what do you have to do in order to make what you outlined in part 2 to happen?

Would you have to wake up earlier? Would you have to change when the kids get up? When you take a dog for a walk? What time you go to the gym? Are you still going to be productive at your job or daily life managing by making these potential changes or is the waking up an hour earlier going to turn you into a massive grump the rest of the day that no one wants to be around?

The fourth thing is how serious are you about this plan of yours?

Sure everything seems great right now in the moment, but are you sure that you are dedicated to that morning religious study for 45 minutes before the kids wake up? What is the motivating factor. This ties in closely to what I had you write on for question 1 so you may have already answered this up in the first question in which case...great! Continue on.

But for those of you that kind of glossed over that part take a moment to really do some introspection as to why this is becoming important to you. Is this an internal motivation or an external motivation?

The fifth and final thing I would take note of is how you hope this practice is going to change your life and if you see it developing or growing in the future?

Now right now you might not have any idea if you this practice has a way to develop or grow in the future and that's perfectly fine. Maybe you know of ways in which potentially it could grow but you don't feel like doing that and currently don't see that as something of interest at the moment.

That being said, no matter what, when you add some sort of new practice into your life (spiritual, health, businesses, education whatever) it should be adding something into your life that you feel you were missing previously. So...what are you hoping that this practice is going to add? How do you foresee it impacting and enhancing your day to day?

Whatever this fifth thing is should also be part of your motivation to continue doing the spiritual practice to start off with. If you're only meditating because someone told you that meditating is good for you, but you have nothing solid to actually hold onto in terms of a meditation practice and how it will enhance your life in some aspect then you are going to find it really difficult to actually do the practice itself.

Take your time when doing all of this and every 6-8 months I would encourage you to come back and re-evaluate these questions and log the changes and differences that it has made as well as seeing what has changed as a result of the practice you decided to do.