The three essential steps of reflection are an important spiritual practice.
As a spiritual practice, reflection and its essential steps are often skipped over or ignored in favor of meditation.
Yet. it is both practical and essential — and indispensable.
The focus of reflection is necessary to get to meditation and can often bring into awareness perceptions that are not as easily reached in meditation.
Before I get to the steps, let me explain a little more about what reflection is.
Reflection is a process of how you direct your mind and your awareness in any moment.
Reflection is how to attend to and learn from life.
For a variety of reasons, it is easy to slip through life missing clues, opportunities, and shifts.
The critical voice inside may yell at you. People around you may also yell.
Together these outside voices can distract you from hearing the knowing that is available to you both within and without.
For me the process of Reflection is an all-encompassing approach to becoming more and more aware of my knowing, following its trails, embracing its flows.
Reflection fuels discovery and uncovering.
Reflection ignites remembrance and your inherent ability to learn and to open.
Reflection is the process of learning deeper and deeper levels of attention, awareness and observation.
Reflection requests your attention to your awareness whether its motion is trivial or substantial.
Reflection pays attention and observes what is going on within you and around you.
Reflection avoids knee-jerk reactions in favor of attentive awareness towards meaning and possibility.
Reflection begins with letting go of the assumption that in all cases and in all experiences of life I KNOW.
Approaching life through reflection, begins by admitting that there is much that I do not know.
Reflection instead embraces I LEARN.
Reflection stands open to receive new views and understanding.
The Three Essential Steps of Reflection as Spiritual Practice
Reflection is is easy to do once you realize that it is a listening beyond the critical voice. Reflection helps you focus on what is coming up within you in any situation or experience.
Here are three steps to enter into a process of reflection. Each step provides a series of questions to ask yourself. The awareness which comes through the question is your reflection.
Step One: Tune in to your awareness.
When something happens, what is your experience of your awareness?
What do you notice?
What caught your attention in this moment?
What feelings are involved?
What beliefs, memories, ideas, thoughts?
Step Two: Follow the flow of your knowing.
What do you know from your awareness?
What path does your knowing take?
What experience follows?
Where do your thoughts go?
What is happening in your body?
Step Three: Ponder. Consider. Meditatively Reflect.
What do I learn? What do I resist?
What captures my attention? What is missing?
Where does this take me?
What is the meaning I draw?
What are the gifts in this moment?
Good to Know about Reflection as Spiritual Practice:
Reflection is not judgment.
Reflection is observation and learning.
Judgment claims value, or a lack thereof.
Reflection is more like the observations of the fly on the wall, the third-party observer.
If you take a step back and observe, what do you see, what do you learn?
Reflection as spiritual practice has the effect over time of helping you become more open to your knowing, expanding your awareness, allowing you to become more open to all that flows to you, through you, and with you.
Reflection begins the process of expanding your awareness of knowing within the Circle of Infinite Possibility.
Your known expands from your unknown; you no longer reflexively limit yourself.
Reflection helps you step into the infinite and the eternal, the center of your knowing.
Through my experience with the Akashic Records, I have learned the direct benefits of reflection. Because I approach the Akashic Records as spiritual practice, I have created a section on my site to discuss What is Spiritual Practice?
