Dear Julie,

First of all I would like to thank you so much for sharing your love and light with the world. You are a blessing.

I have been living in self doubt for such a long time. It came as quite a shock to me to realize that the faith that I have been "saying" that I have, I really have doubt in within my heart. I came to that conclusion a few months ago when I decided to get to the root of where my lack of self trust and belief came from.

I know that my past is just that-- my past. What I would really like guidance in, is how can I move forward and stick to a spiritual practice that I KNOW will benefit me and the people that I love as well as those that I may serve? I start something that feels good to me and then I seem to get lazy and stop. But I know that there's something more to the "lazy" part. I am feeling stuck and fearful and everything is now piling up (emotionally, mentally and physically). I am trying to get to the source of where this block is coming from... Your response, prayers, guidance and insight would be greatly appreciated. - Tasnim

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Dearest Tasnim,

Thank you for your heartfelt reaching out. Your longing to find a spiritual practice that can hold you is most important in resolving the present 'stuckness' and in moving you forward along a spiritual path.

No matter what successes you may have had in the past, the present situation emanates from a longing and need for healing for a heart that feels incomplete and that is creating an outer sign (the pattern of repeatedly losing interest or becoming 'lazy') so that you may heal this sense of incompleteness. This is a spiritual longing and a spiritual need for healing in your own desire for God, that is creating the sense of incompleteness.

Behind this start-stop pattern there is an inner place in you that feels empty and disconnected from spiritual reality. And so from that inner place it is difficult to maintain a stream of energy, even in a direction that starts out promising, because this place in your heart is not linked up to what you are doing and ends up feeling unfulfilled. Beloved one, know that this is a good thing. It is the deeper truth that has been hidden, coming more to the surface. This is the reason for your apparent 'laziness' which is not laziness at all, but a place of feeling unable to find what your heart needs in order to not feel empty.

To move through this 'stuckness' is to go deeper into your heart's longing and pain and to really feel the desire to be filled with the kind of love and devotion that creates commitment and ongoing dedication. This is what your heart seeks but has not yet found. The present circumstances are designed to create a deeper and truer search for the answer to this dilemma - the dilemma of inner emptiness - something that is available to you but requires of you more self-awareness and more of a willingness to feel your own pain about this.

Once having moved even a little bit in this direction, you will find that your heart becomes more sensitive and more open. Knowing your own longing and pain, you will also come to know what soothes you, what fills you, and what you resonate with on a deeper level in relation to people, situations, and practices. In searching in a more active way for your spiritual home, you will begin to recognize what energies bring you more of that feeling. This is what you need to seek, beloved one, but only after you can recognize and hold the emptiness and the longing.

There are various tools that can help you move in this direction. Walking alone through the woods or other natural surrounding, listening to music that speaks to your soul, writing - but only if you can use words to go deeper, not to repeat things you already know. The heart, once touched in its pain, can also be touched in its love and in its desire for God's love, and so the longing can then open pathways that have not been able to open before.

You are at a blessed point in your journey, dear one, and so there is every reason to feel hopeful and to proceed with full confidence that there are things within yourself waiting to be born, that will bring you, finally, to what you seek.

Blessings - Julie Redstone