Does Sacrifice Help?

 

Photo Credit: Reaching Women

Does Sacrifice Help?

Many seekers do not know how to progress in their spiritual practice, specially if they have not yet found their living, enlightened spiritual Guru. The main contributing factor is their resistance to move away from their own comfort zone and their set routine. They do not want to go outside it. Hence, taking the next step towards spirituality becomes difficult.

Also, people have various attachments – they could be both physical and emotional. They actually believe that the things that they are attached to will bring them happiness. But nothing can be further from the truth. We are all aware that we live in world of flux, constant change, and the very things that we are attached to can make us sad when they change. Giving up one’s attachments and moving outside one’s comfort zone is easier said than done.

The spiritual practice of sacrifice involves making concerted efforts to make sacrifices of one’s mind, body and wealth to follow the spiritual path – we particularly see this in the Jain community. However, when we mention ‘sacrifice’, abstaining’, or ‘giving up things’, we feel that it ultimately involves giving up our worldly lives and going into the jungles or mountains. Also, a thought comes to mind – ‘What if I give up all this and do not get anything in return?’ This makes the whole spiritual venture transactional at the outset, thus making us fearful and hesitant about embarking on the spiritual path.

We need to understand the spirit of sacrifice – it needs to be made out of love, wherein one never feels that one has made a sacrifice. An example that can help us understand such a kind of sacrifice is the sacrifice parents makes for their children. Parents go through many difficulties and sacrifices to ensure that their children have the best opportunities. They never feel it because it is done with love. Sacrifice as a spiritual practice is similar. The only difference is that here we are giving back a bit of what we have received from the Creator Himself, to serve Him. But this takes effort, and one may still be filled with hesitancy to go outside of one’s comfort zone and sacrifice one’s mind, body or wealth.

In this time and age, we can start with small sacrifices – say restricting the number of times we check our social media accounts, checking our likes and so on, instead of being more or less continuously on social media. Then, a small sacrifice of the mind can be to spend time in the spiritual practice of chanting mantras. You will gradually observe that whenever you do this you are benefitted – it could be physically or mentally and always spiritually.

When we sacrifice, we make space within ourselves to receive. When we make efforts to go out of our comfort zones and take one step towards the Divine, we will experience that He is doing much more for us.

Some ways by which we can sacrifice are – giving time to serve God, offering our skills and talents to serve his mission, donating to help spread spirituality, offering our physical help if the above are not possible – and if none of the above is possible, we can at least pray with a clean heart for the benefit of all.

Sacrifices can be made as per one’s capacity. As the quality and quantity of our spiritual practice increases, our desire to sacrifice increases automatically. Ultimately though, we have to sacrifice everything and our attachments related to body, mind and wealth. Only when we give up our worldly way of life and all the attachments that come with it completely, can we experience God completely.