I have noticed over the years, that although we like to think we learn something and it’s done, that in fact most of our spiritual learning is more of a spiral. We learn something on the level where we are, and then move on, only to find ourselves, later, learning a deeper lesson on the same topic. This used to frustrate me.  It felt like a failure. And sure, sometimes it can be, but also, it’s often a deepening; A growing of wisdom; A chance to learn the other side of a thing. Sometimes that spiral moves slowly coming around again years after the initial learning – and sometimes it seems to hit us again and again in short succession, forcing us to learn quickly because the need is so great.

I’ve come to understand that there are layers to the ways in which we know the things we have learned. In the deepest layer, we know it in our bodies, energetic and physical. We know it in our instinct and, if we’re lucky, in our habit. Knowing at that level is not exciting – it reads like just another part of us. It doesn’t have the same overt sense of discovery as the initial learning and so many people abandon it and move on to the new and shiny – and miss adding depth and truth of a thing what they have learned. It’s easy to fall into a state of acquiring information instead of learning.