The fun really begins when we promote spiritual growth in others.
You cannot make a flower beautiful. You cannot make it grow. You can only facilitate the process, and then it's for that plant to blossom as a result.
That is IKYA, at our Open House on 2 September (click for the full teaching), explaining how a person truly grows — by way of gardening.
The plants in your garden, he said, don't necessarily even know you exist. They don't have to. You want them to blossom and to be their very best, so you work out what they need, and you give it. And that gives you joy. And that is how you get a garden.
He also said what happens when we skip the learning:
You can always have someone install it, but unless you learn how to garden and to develop it, there will never be true beauty, and the plants will die.
And then the gold.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, almost in passing, comes the line that the whole teaching rests on:
The only way you can grow is to promote growth in others.
Promoting spiritual growth in others is not a nice extra once your own work is done; it is not the reward for having grown already. It is the very mechanism of growth itself.
And the part that makes it unmistakably IKYA:
For the most of the time, others have no idea, because it's not about that. It's about being in a state of alignment.
Something to try this week
Choose one person, and "grow" them without telling them.
Give them one thing that makes their spiritual path smoother — an introduction they need, something you know that they don't, a difficulty quietly removed before they ever reach it. Then let it be. They never find out it was you.
And then notice what happens in you. That is the part being measured.
You do not have to believe any of this, and that is rather the point. These are principles you can test, the same way you would test anything else. So test it for a week and see what it does for your spiritual growth.
And who gardened you?
Most of us have been on the other side of this exchange without knowing it at the time. Somebody made our path smoother once, and we only worked out later what they had done — if we ever worked it out at all.
We would love to hear about them. Tell us in the comments, or write to us at info@ikya.org.
And IKYA teaches again at our second Open House on Wednesday, 30 September, at 18:00 Oslo time — free, and you are welcome at IKYA Center in Oslo, on Zoom, or on YouTube Live.
No beliefs. No dogma. No fluff. – Just awakening.
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