Most essentially, spirituality is openness to the Spirit….The whole thing is a dance. Your partner is the Spirit, who has already entered the dance floor and is calling for you to come. The 
Spirit will lead the dance. You only need to follow. Don’t hold back from trying to learn the first dance steps. Just get out onto the floor and trust your partner to teach you everything you need to know and to give you everything you need to receive….Awakening is always a response to the Spirit, and if what we offer is not a response to Spirit, it is not a spiritual response.
Contemporary understandings of Christian spirituality miss this truth much more than they recognize it. So often the spiritual journey is presented in terms of what we must do. And what we are told we must do is to be faithful in our effort and discipline. This is a recipe for spiritual disaster because what it does is strengthen the false self. When the spiritual journey is my own self-improvement project, the major product will be an ego that is in even more control than before the journey began.
David G. Benner, Spirituality and the Awakening Self: The Sacred Journey of Transformation
Does this ring true to any of you?
In what ways do we take control of our spiritual growth through “what we must do” rather than letting go?
What do we do in the name of our spiritual growth that is actually a “self-improvement project” that winds up strengthening the “false self” and produces an “ego that is even more in control than before the journey began”?
The truth is, I suppose, than anything we do as spiritual activities–our church, our denomination, our theology, prayer, charity, anything–can easily become attempts on our part to lead the dance rather than responding in simple (but excruciatingly difficult) trust in the Spirit.
I don’t mean to paint everything with one brush, but I am finding more and more that a chief problem I create for myself is holding on tighter and tighter when I should be focusing on letting go.
Don’t worry. I’m working on it. (See what I did there?)
