Life likes to throw curve balls.

We have all caught a few, missed some, and been hit in the head with a few others that have made us lose all sense of reality. The major curve ball life throws at us is when things don’t go as we expect. Someone I used to work with reminded me that disappointment comes from having expectations. If you don’t expect something to happen in a certain way, you will never be disappointed. He was also a master of customer service because he knew how to manage the expectations of the person he was helping. It didn’t hurt that he was also handsome and charming, but that was beside the point. He understood how expectations could affect an experience.

We have expectations of everything, even in our spiritual experiences. We expect certain traditions to be performed if we follow a particular religion. It’s a pattern and patterns mean safety. We go down the same road knowing where we’re going to end up. In metaphysics, we often bumble our way through, but there is a path. There are many. Our job is to find the one that fits us. That’s the hard part. We very much want someone to say, “Hey, go this way,” and point to the yellow bricks on the ground. That is not the way the world works and that is not how metaphysics works.

On the spiritual path, the only surety is that there is a lot you don’t know. That can be both exciting and terrifying. There are great lessons to be learned and pitfalls of epic proportions, just like in life. Patterns do exist. There are paths to follow. Others have forged into the unknown before you and left behind clues for you to follow if you’re able and willing. The issue is that often we don’t recognize the clues and bumble for a bit before we figure out that what we were looking for all along was right in front of us.

Human nature is to seek out safety. It’s part of our survival instinct. Only sometimes we view things that are not dangerous to us as being dangerous such as meditation. I’ve met people who started to see images while meditating and it startled them so much that they didn’t want to meditate again fearing what they might see. Then there are those who are seeking new spiritual experiences so hard that they fail to see the subtle things happening all around them.

One of the many lessons I have learned is that spiritual experiences can strike like lightning, flipping your world on its head or it can be a subtle as a whisper on the wind. Think of spiritual experiences as water erosion. The waves keep hitting the land slowly over time, stealing away small pieces of it until BOOM! The hillside comes crashing down and the noise of destruction carries for miles. This is how it can be with spiritual experiences. There is also the likelihood that you expect a big result from something and it turns out not to be.

This is the importance of tempering expectations in terms of your spiritual progress or growth. Things happen when they happen for a reason. I have to keep reminding myself that there are no coincidences. I might never know the reason something happened or didn’t happen, but it did. My next step is to figure out how I choose to feel about it and what, if anything I intend to do about it. This is true whether I was prepared for the event or not. We also never know how we’re going to feel or react to something. We might say we’re going to do this or that or that we’re NOT going to do this or that, but until you are in that situation, you don’t know for certain.

What we can be sure of is that we will do our best. That doesn’t mean we are always going to make the right choices. We could be making huge mistakes, but its what we thought was best at the time. Change is difficult. For some of us more than others. However we’ve heard that the only constant is change and we have to do our best to adjust when it comes. It’s can be very difficult to do sometimes, but if we know when to pick our battles and when we can to be flexible, it will easier for us to face the future and embrace the unknown.

Next time – Part 2 of Embracing the Unknown