The Ideals of Spiritual Life and What To Do When We Fall Short

Why do we such high ideals in spiritual life? What is renunciation and why is it important for genuine spirituality? Once we understand why these ideals are the way they are, we will naturally take up and attempt to live according to them. Naturally, we will also  fall short time and time again. The temptation here might be to drag the ideal down to make excuses for our weakness. Or conversely, our tendency might be to be overly critical of ourselves for failing and thus render our spiritual practice wholly unsustainable. What then are we to do? This class first establishes what ideals exactly are valuable in spiritual life by studying the teachings of Jesus next to the Buddha. We read a little from a transcribed talk from Swami Ashokananda. Then, we offer some suggestions about how to deal with falling short of these ideals with reference to the standing balancing poses of Hatha Yoga as a metaphor.
I hope this talk will be some encouragement to you as you endeavour to live a genuinely spiritual life, a life lived insight of the Highest.

After this little talk, we all go into a Hatha Yoga class called "The Spiritual Ideal", to apply some of these ideas in real-time. You can follow along with that class here:
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OM Tat Sat