What is Spiritual Counseling? How Spiritual Counseling can help people live a conscious life? Is Spiritual Counseling related to any religion? How is Spiritual Counselling different from other psychological counseling? The answers to all these questions lie inside this article which tells the truths of Spiritual Counseling.
Life is Suffering
“Life is suffering” is the Buddha’s definition of life. Buddha realized that suffering is there throughout life from your childhood to old age, and till death. But he also describes the impermanence of the miseries of life, so the happiness. He also gave a path on which can remove these miseries of life. In every period, the Avatar to the great sages identified life’s miseries and shared their wisdom with the world to transform this suffering into eternal bliss.
In Indian philosophy or Hinduism philosophy (the world’s oldest living religion on the planet earth) the seed query is about the suffering and its removal, Samkhya the first philosophical venture in Hinduism was created by the Sage Kapila( he created the Samkhya philosophy), as per him there are three types of suffering in the life of human being.
- Adhyatamic (Spiritual Suffering) – Physical or Mental pain e.g disease, sorrow, etc.
- Adhibhautika (Physical Suffering) – Suffering caused by the act of man and animal e.g., snake bite, bodily hurt, etc.
- Adhidavika(Nature Suffering) – Suffering caused by acts of God or due to supernatural causes e.g. death by lightning, death of relatives, etc.
When these sufferings afflicted a person then these sufferings become the truth of life and people start living a painful and miserable life. The mental pain, delusional fears, weak and uncontrollable mind, negative emotions, uncontrolled thinking like dark shadows cover the mind and the world seems like an enemy, life becomes adrift and miserable. But these basic questions come into the mind, What are the causes of the suffering in life? Why do I suffer from pain and misery? And how can we eliminate the suffering from life? The answers to these fundamental questions that everyone wants to know.
Life Is an Experience of Good & Bad Time.
In an average life span of a human being of 70-75 yrs. from the day one of your birth till the last breath of the life we deal with many experiences, some are good, some are great and some are bad, miserable like a nightmare. The feel-good experiences we all want in our lives and we want to experience our life in that way. Experience is nothing just a state of mind for a particular set of time. All the experiences of life are the creation of our minds which discriminate them into good and bad. Bad experiences can either make us strong or weak it’s up to us how we perceive them. Life is a mixture of various experiences and their related emotions; these experiences somehow define life. Good experiences lead to a positive and blissful life and the bad experience make life a nightmare. So, life becomes an experience and leads the direction based on your past and present experiences.
Now how to deal with it that’s the big question from the ragpicker to the riches who create their life based on their experiences of life, the only difference is the perception to handle these experiences. But to understand the life and the cause of its miseries there is a need to go beyond these experiences or the mental states where all the solutions are stored.
The Spiritual Dimension of life.
Spiritualty is the inner essence of human life, our whole life is experienced by the inner self (the jivatama) or individual soul, so, it is the inner watcher of life and its experiences. The process of atmabodha or self-realization transforms your experience of life into a realization, the realization of consciousness.
We perceive life through the different modes of mind as, we have limited ourselves around the mind and it is functioning only, but the truth lies beyond the mind. Once the process of self-realization (Atma Bodh) awakens, it creates a spiritual dimension around you that is deeper and broader. In the spiritual dimension, the mind becomes your tool and the thoughts processing becomes deeper and deeper unless you touch the root. The clouds of the illusion of pain, misery, fear, problems, and other emotional imbalances of life start fading out and the clarity developed. Through spiritual wisdom, the reality of life becomes clear and all illusions vanished, this leads to a witty, truthful and conscious life.
What Is Spiritual Counselling?
Spiritual counseling is a spiritual form of guidance that started during the ancient Guru Shishya Parmapara in Vedic tradition. In Vedic tradition, the Rishis(sages) act as a spiritual counselors for the king and other reputed people to deal with all kinds of problems of life that bring misery and misfortune. Spiritual counselor plays an important role in society‘s spiritual and psychological development and growth. A healthy spiritual & psychological society creates a healthy and spiritually aware nation. Spiritually awakened society is not just the physical or mental development but it goes beyond the mind and establishes in the spiritual dimension. (Spiritually awakened society builds a utopian nation that is not a mental illusion but the history of this world that existed on this planet, which is now lost from our mind and becomes a myth in the form of stories. )
Spiritual counseling is a divine spiritual method that guides people to develop a seed of self-knowledge about the existence of the self(atman), create inner awareness, bliss, and peace to live a conscious life. The ultimate aim of spiritual counseling is to show the path for the self-realization of the potential or power of true self, which transform this miserable life into a bliss and conscious one. Many Indian saints, sages, and yogis help the world to awaken its consciousness and create awareness.
In today’s time, when life become so hectic and stressful, especially under the time of pandemic and war the suffering of life become more tangible and painful, but due to the technological innovation when the time of isolation is going on the online spiritual counseling can play an important role to help people to remove the miseries and pain in their life.
