A lot of people in this world have been relying on religious affiliations or self-help gurus and books to navigate life. For them, inner peace or direction is found through going to church, or absorbing materials that are meant to help guide you to happiness and joy.

Still however, many are left with unanswered questions about how to obtain true inner peace, balance, happiness, and purpose.

Despite gravitating towards resources that are believed to grant those things, some people wonder why their life is not where they always dreamt it would be. By embarking on a personal spiritual journey, I believe people could live and lead more fulfilling lives. This piece will help you get started.

Self-Love

First things first, you must learn how to love yourself from the inside out. It's crazy that self-love needs to be learned! It is meant to be instinctual. I'm not talking about vanity or ego, rather genuine love for the essence of what makes you complete, which is all within you.

No additives should ever be necessary.

Do you know how unnatural it is to look in the mirror and hate what you see? The dark things of the world have managed to separate us from the innate love of self by poisoning our minds with the beliefs of seeking validation externally. Dangling false sense of beauty and jaded ideals of what it means to be successful, or worthy; pushing every soul away from their truths.

Related: 5 Truths About The Higher Self That Will Elevate Your Life

Who are you when you take away your money and clothes? When you relinquish your job titles, political and/or religious affiliations, and Instagram pages? Who are you outside of Black, White, Male, Female, Gay, Straight, etc?

Describe your soul. What does your Spirit look like? Love the heck out of whatever that is. Once you do that, love for your physical vessel is a piece of cake!

Introspection

Going inside of yourself and understanding what motivates you is an important step along your own personal spiritual journey. Allowing yourself to be alone, uninfluenced by the world around you is imperative to finding your truth.

Get still and be quiet about what you personally feel about any and everything that bothers you. Whether it's about yourself, about your friends, or family, or the world at large. Figure out who you are without the opinions of anything outside of yourself.

Understand your pet peeves and what irritates you. Figure out what makes you smile, and what makes you sad. Learn to monitor your thoughts as if they are separate from your body.

Introspection of self is the key to finding where it is you need to heal.

Unpacking

Once you get a handle on your mind, you open the door to get a handle on your emotions. Unpacking is the psychological term for realizing wherever you hold emotional baggage. This can stem from your childhood, to experiences with other people in platonic and romantic relationships, to how you have fared so far in your professional life.

Every emotion we feel is connected to another emotion. It's up to you to figure out where the negative ones come from. This is what unpacking means. It is not always going to be fun. Unpacking painful emotions and feelings can feel like picking at scabbed-over wounds.

Related: Every Major Win In My Life Came After A Breakdown

You can't think that you are over something that you have repressed, put a big Band-Aid on it, and call that healed. The truth is, it is not healed until you get to the source or the root of the wound, and remove the origin of said pain. That is why a scab still hurts. It is not fully healed. A scar however, is physical proof of something that has been healed.

This will require you to be humble and dissolve your ego. It is definitely one of the hardest parts of a spiritual journey.

Release, Shedding, And Rebirth

Once you have gotten to the bottom of any pain within your spirit or your soul, it is time to release any hang-ups or resentments about it. This can come in the form of accepting apologies, or giving apologies. This can also represent cutting people off who no longer serve you, and have decided not to continue growing with you. This can also take the form of forgiveness.

Whether you have to forgive yourself for something you have done wrong, or forgive someone who has wronged you. Forgiveness is proof that you have healed what needed to be forgiven. This release, or shedding, can represent an old personality as well. If you have been known to be a hot head in the past, or mean, or envious, these are all low vibrational traits that dissolve with ego. If you have been impatient, you have to reverse that. Where you have been intolerant, or angry, you have to release that energy.

Emotions, characteristics, and toxic people aren't the only things that need to be released. Addictions, bad habits, and materialistic desires need to be balanced in order to remain on a spiritual journey.

You don't have to subscribe to any religious affiliations to be reborn. You need only truth.

Find Purpose

Once you get through these initial steps of healing your soul, you can move on to finding your purpose. The truth is, all of these steps lead to purpose to begin with. This is the point of embarking on a spiritual journey. In actuality, every human being has been on a spiritual journey since they were born.

With this process comes true joy, happiness, inner peace, unconditional love, empathy, compassion, and an understanding of universal oneness.

Meditation, affirmations, self-care, and connecting with like-minded people help to keep you aligned along this journey.

As someone who has navigated the waters of this journey of truth-seeking, I have found that I literally exude a glow. I am not perfect, but I am happy, whole, worthy, and a survivor. I tattooed on my wrist the word, "healer," because my journey has healed me.

I mentioned in the very beginning of this article that you do not have to be affiliated with organized religion to start a spiritual journey. I personally believe that truth shouldn't be organized. As someone who has broken out of a very Christian upbringing, I can honestly say that I have never been more spiritual.

*Featured Image by Vic Styles