 So I don't know if this is an actual term or not, but we're just gonna call it one for the sake of this video. And the reason I wanna talk about it is because it's something that I've gone through multiple times, but this last time has been the most difficult to deal with and understand. And so we're gonna call it spiritual backsliding. And this can mean different things, but it's generally like a decline in someone's spiritual practices, beliefs, understanding, or even our commitment to our spirituality. It's kind of like when you go through this spiritual path and down the spiritual awakening, if you guys are like me, it's kind of like all your focus on, like obviously you're doing life and whatever and doing the things that you need to do and take care of, but like your main focus is kind of guided around your spirituality. And for the last few months, I'd say probably about two months or so, I just like completely lost it. I lost interest, like where before all I was doing for years was researching different things on spirituality, consciousness, you know, anything like that. I stopped doing all of my spiritual practices, which are such an array of things, whether it's like dream journaling, regular journaling, meditation, and even to a point praying, you know, I stopped doing my gratitude practices. I stopped listening to spiritual books and YouTube videos and all that kind of stuff. And I didn't really realize it was happening until I was like a while into it. And I was like asking myself, why don't I feel good? You know, like why am I losing interest in this? Why am I not listening to these audio books when I usually get through at least one a week? And I couldn't figure it out, which is almost making me a little more depressed. So I wanna talk about what exactly this spiritual back-signing is and how we can come out of it just like I have learned to do. Because I figured, well, if I'm going through it, then there's probably other people out there going through it too. So let's go through this together so that we can start feeling, you know, high vibrational and happy and good and positive and nourished again. So as I mentioned, the first thing could really just be a diminishing enthusiasm or passion for whatever our spiritual practices and our spirituality is. And obviously, as I've talked about before my channel, I really do believe that a lot of it is kind of like a la carte. So it's not going to look the same for everyone. It's not going to look the same for you as it does for me. But it's just like a general like loss of interest. Another aspect of this could possibly be like a back-sliding in your morals or even like your ethics. An example of this could be, and this doesn't pertain to me because I'm just not really like a big partier. But like maybe when you got into your spirituality and you started going down that path, you stopped going out and drinking. Like maybe you cut out alcohol because that's such like an inhibitor to our spirituality and connecting to like our higher self and everything else, you know, that's around us. But maybe you find yourself kind of back in the party seeing drinking a lot again and kind of like reversing what you would previously cut out or maybe just increasing it. On a deeper level, it could be more of, you know, dishonesty and unethical actions, you know, other harmful behaviors or even just like cutting out those spiritual practices, right? Because for me, not doing those things is very harmful to my mental health. It can come with a lot of like questioning. Look, like when we're down this spiritual journey we question everything, right? We wanna know the answers where we're truth seekers, right? And then sometimes we can start to question those things, right? So I got really into manifestation, specifically the law of attraction. I will link my playlist here if you guys wanna check out some of those videos. But over the last few months, you know, I'm part of some Facebook groups and things like that. I found myself just like rolling my eyes at all of these posts that people were talking about the law of assumption. I'm like, why am I like annoyed by this? I'm like, oh, shut the F up. You know, like I was just so annoyed about everyone being so focused on that. When that was me, you know, just a few months ago, you know, you might be questioning the validity or the relevance of whatever your beliefs are since you started going down this spiritual journey. And what that can do is lead you to a loss of conviction of that this is the truth or even this is my truth. This is your truth. With the law of assumption example, even though I found a lot of success with it, there was a part of me the last few months that was like, this is bullshit. Even though like I know it's not and I have proof that it's not, there was just a part of me that was just, I don't know, over it. And just like, yeah, this is a bunch of crap even though I know it's not. So if you guys can relate to something like that, I'd love to chat about it in the comments. You know, you could be neglecting the spiritual communities that maybe you were once a part of. That could be church. It could be something online. It could be maybe a group that you meet up with. It could be even like friends or family or things like that. But essentially it's distancing yourself from those supportive networks that you've developed on the spiritual path. And I think maybe I could potentially argue that this is potentially the biggest reason that we would spiritually backslide. And that is inner conflict and guilt. Maybe for not, I don't know, living up to your own expectations or guilt that you haven't achieved X, Y, and Z whether it's within your spiritual practices or outside of them with like relationships or work or whatever. Where you become so conflicted inside that it just starts to kind of disintegrate within you and you just lose that momentum and that belief and that conviction that you got this. You know, you start to lose maybe you don't do the affirmations anymore like me, you know. I was really good with doing affirmations and they made me feel really good. You know, maybe we feel lost in life and a lot of times that can happen. We're going through a dark night of the soul cycle which is a part of the spiritual awakening. And if you're not sure what that is, I'll post this video here so you can check that out. But, you know, when we feel so down and depressed and lost, especially when most of the spiritual community is all about high vibrations and positivity and stuff like that, it can make us feel so much more disconnected and we become so down on ourselves like why aren't we like them? Why aren't we achieving these things? Why don't I feel happy all the time? And that's really a big part of what my channel is all about because no one feels happy and positive all the time. But there are steps you can take to feel happy more often, to feel more positive more often. You know, it can be a very subjective experience that obviously varies from person to person. We all live different lives. We all have different experiences. We all have different spiritual beliefs. So this is not a one size fits all kind of thing. So what happens here is we have a few choices to make and I want you to understand and what I'm learning right now is that you don't necessarily have to completely go back to the exact routines and practices and beliefs that you were doing before. It's okay that those can change and evolve and ebb and flow. You know, that's the whole point of going down a spiritual path and being on this journey. And that being said, this could happen for a few weeks. This could happen for a few months. I mean, I'm sure for some people it happens for a few years. But I want you to, if you don't take anything out of this video about this, I want you to understand that just because you're feeling that detachment and resistance right now, it doesn't mean that you're never gonna get back on the horse. It doesn't mean you're never gonna get back to your spirituality and your practices and just to be gentle with yourself because I know that I certainly wasn't. So when we're going through this, how do we overcome it? You know, how do we move past it? I'm gonna give you a few options or steps or however you wanna take it here. And maybe you can cherry pick from that might help you. But there is one thing that I wanna point out that I believe will be true for everyone in this position and that this is going to take some self-reflection and a conscious effort to get back into it again. It's no different than if you were someone who is consistently eating healthy or working out in the gym for like years and then maybe you fall off for a little bit, right? You can always get back on. It's really important to have empathy and respect for yourself and where you're at right now and to not force anything, but allow it to kind of like flow a little bit at a time. You know, you're not gonna go from doing none of your spiritual practices to waking up tomorrow and doing 10 things, right? That's too much. It's like if you've never gone to the gym before and then all of a sudden you say, well, you know, starting Monday, I'm gonna go seven days a week. It's just not realistic and it's not something that's going to be sustainable for you. So be gentle and have compassion and practice some small tidbits of self-care. And if you wanna do like a whole day of self-care, like I do sometimes, I'll post this video right here so you can check out what I do on a whole personal care day. So here are some things that I did to kind of hop back into my boat. Is that the, what is, that's not the thing. That's not the saying, hop back onto my boat. Where did I come up with that? There's just a few things to get back on track that I did and I want to pass along to you to see if, you know, maybe one of these things will help you in your journey. So I want you to reflect and think about your spiritual practices and things that have made you feel good in the past. For me, this was a whole morning routine, which I'll post right here. It's five minutes and it's literally what you do when you're in bed still and you wake up in the morning and it just always set my day up for such a positive, good day. And I realized like, wow, I probably haven't done that in months or maybe it's journaling or maybe you used to meditate every day and now you don't anymore. Maybe you used to go on walks outside in nature. Like whatever it is, I just genuinely felt good to you. Just ease in with that and see like, what was I doing before that I'm not doing now that I can ease myself back into? You want to reflect on any significant life events that may have happened to potentially have thrown you off from this path and reflect on that and learn from that how to integrate that and move it through and use it within your spiritual practices. You know, next you want to clarify whatever your beliefs, whatever your values are. And like I mentioned before, it's okay if they're different than before but it's easier to move back into the groove of things if you are clear on what exactly those are. You know, what do you truly believe in? What values are important to you? And what this process can do is rediscover the core principles that matter most to you so you can take those little baby steps and get back to them. Next, I want you to list out all of the spiritual practices you like doing. If you're like me, you couldn't do them all in one day but take a piece of paper, I'll get your journal out whatever it may be and write down every single one that you did, whether it was every day or not. You know, for me, it could have been, you know, journaling, dream journaling, reading the Bible, listen to these YouTubes, prayer, going to church, yoga, meditation, laying outside on my hammock. Maybe it's engaging in acts of service or kindness or volunteering somewhere and just pick one of those things and start doing it again. Sitting in nature is one of the easiest ways to start feeling at ease and at peace again. So if you can, get outside in nature, go ground yourself in the grass, go hug a tree, go swim in a lake or an ocean if you're lucky enough to have one of those around. Go take a hike, go walk on a trail, go for a walk around your neighborhood even. Observe the absolute beauty that is all around you because sometimes when we're out of our element and we're not focused on those things, we don't even notice them, right? Like even just behind you guys where I have the camera set up, you know what, I'll show you. As I was saying that, I kind of like looked up and I was like, holy crap, it's fricking beautiful out there. Just like right out these windows here. And it's just like, wow, like how stunning is that? You know? And a lot of times we can just really, you know, take that for granted. So get out in nature and just soak it all in, enjoy it. You know, self-care and mindfulness is another huge part of our spiritual journey because when we are not nourishing ourselves whether it's our physical body, our spiritual body, our mental body, whatever, you know, of course we're gonna feel scattered and detached and frustrated and down. You know, for me, it was like, I stopped doing my skincare routine at night. Like I would do just the basics. I'd take my makeup off, wash my face, throwing my face lotion on where before I had like a 12 or 13 step process that I was doing it. It made me feel so good. It made me just feel so like taken care of. And I just like stopped doing that. So that was one of the small things that I started doing again from my own self-care practices. And I would love to hear like what you do for self-care because I feel like we can always learn from each other and like maybe I could pick up something from you. So if you do anything specifically for your self-care routine or maybe that you've got even away from, please let me know in the comments below because I might wanna steal it. And the last thing is, and I talk about this a lot because I honestly think it's the most important thing and that's gratitude. If you can truly hunker down on your gratitude practice throughout the day and the morning at night, whatever it may be that's easiest for you, it is life-changing and it's so simple. It's like 10 seconds, 20 seconds. You know what? I wanna show you guys something that has to do with gratitude. So we're gonna go on a little field trip. And I wanna show you guys two things that really help me with my gratitude because like I said, if you take anything from this video, just start your gratitude practices again. So the first thing is, sorry, I have this written on my bathroom mirror. So it says, I am so grateful for, and so every time I'm in the mirror and I notice that I always fill in the blank, right? I have this little reminder up here too, feel good now. So you could do something like that, actively remind yourself and think about, you know, these spiritual, whoa, I'm like washed out. I am very ghostly right now. And the other thing is, this book, it's like a journal, but it's like a workbook kind of, but you just do it like in your journal. It's called The Magic. If you, I'm sure most of you that are watching this are very familiar with the book and the movie, The Secret. But The Magic, it's like a 28 day workbook process that you go through and it's all about gratitude. And it is, I've only, I've gone through it twice before, and I realized that this was just something that I needed back in my life. Now, I think last time I did it, it took me like 40 days or something to go through. So again, just like be compassionate and gentle with yourself and, you know, where you're at. My camera decided to stop working for me, but just be cognizant of where you are with your spiritual practice and just be gentle with yourself. And like it's a 28 day program, right? It's okay if it takes you 30 days or 40 days or 60 days, all right? But I would highly recommend that to anyone that wants to like get back onto their spiritual practices. And also another part of that is just have some gratitude for your little fur babies. Say hi, Sassy. It's been a while since you were on my channel. Hi, mama. Mwah. She's like, why are you up here bringing a camera in my face? So I really hope that you guys enjoyed this video and our little field trip. If you guys have any other suggestions or any questions on anything that we talked about today, please do not forget to put it in the comments. I love you guys so much. Please like and subscribe so we can hang out again next week. I love you guys so, so much. Don't worry, we are in this together. I love you and don't forget, be limitlessly yourself.