Cultivating spiritual strength
We all know the importance of physical exercise and diet for our physical fitness. We all know it is important to be mindful, to be aware of the thoughts we are thinking and to try and be more positive mentally. But real spiritual strength is something we generally do not understand.

We see inspirational people who seem able to, no matter what the calamity, sail through with calmness and equanimity, even taking such events as lessons or blessings. They seem strong, serene in their certainty, powerful in their sureness.

How do we become strong, what muscles need to be exercised for us to be spiritually tough?

There is a really simple explanation here.

Spiritual strength is dictated by the number of souls we love with the fewest conditions and expectations.

This includes every soul, every particle of matter and beyond - rocks, plants, animals, humans everything. Storms, rainbows, sunshine, wind, stars, amoeba, bacteria.

The more we connect with everything, the more we are love, infinitely powerful and whole, empowered by the unlimited potential of the one.

Let's be clear, this in no way suggests anything other than monogamy with our partners. But in our society we are spiritually very weak because we advocate just a few expressions of love, basically within the family and usually no further. The family relationships and even our partner relationships should be a tiny percentage of the ways we experience love.

For most of us, 99% of love is with our partner and family and 1% elsewhere, whereas for us to be spiritually strong it could easily be 1% at home and 99% elsewhere.

That is not to say that we should love our partner or family less, but rather everything else should be loved more. Our partner, our family, should be the example of the unconditional love that we want to radiate to everyone and every thing.

You might begin to see how this would make us stronger. Let us say we have a relationship problem with a member of our family. In the model where it is one of the few ways we experience love, it would become a huge event, an all consuming soap-opera like that would deplete us and negatively affect our emotional state.

Taken a step further, if the problem was with our partner, perhaps following on into real conflict, than this might result in an emotional and spiritual meltdown.

If we are able to have many ways that we experience love, multiple points of connection to the flow of love, then we become truly resilient, authentically and spiritually strong. The more points of connection, the stronger we are, the more God-like or like the universe we are.