6 Essential Elements for Spiritual Growth

The Baha’i teachings identify six essential elements for spiritual growth — the daily practices that will facilitate our spiritual development and can also be used in our search for meaning, truth, and happiness. 

Three of them primarily provide spiritual nourishment for the soul, and three focus on developing our soul’s capacities. 

The three that feed our souls ask us to pray, read from the holy writings, and meditate on a daily basis.

Those spiritual practices do not follow any set form or ritual and can be accomplished according to our individual inclinations and needs. Much like the food and drink we take in to nourish our bodies, it varies in quantity, quality, type, and timing from person to person, culture to culture, and age to age, so our spiritual nourishment can vary. 

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To pray simply consists of our turning to and reaching out to the transcendent Creator with humility, purity, and detachment — and opening our minds, hearts, and souls to whatever guidance or inspiration we might receive. Prayer may take many forms and can be expressed in our daily actions, our work, and our service to humanity, as well as reading the prayers revealed by all of the prophets and messengers. 

The Baha’i teachings clearly define prayer as an active pursuit — that praying calls on us to express ourselves through our deeds and not just our words:

Therefore strive that your actions day by day may be beautiful prayers. Turn towards God, and seek always to do that which is right and noble. Enrich the poor, raise the fallen, comfort the sorrowful, bring healing to the sick, reassure the fearful, rescue the oppressed, bring hope to the hopeless, shelter the destitute!

To read refers to immersing ourselves in the Word of God, which has the power to energize and transform us when we meditate on those words. Baha’u’llah, the prophet and founder of the Baha’i Faith, wrote: “Immerse yourselves in the ocean of My words, that ye may unravel its secrets, and discover all the pearls of wisdom that lie hid in its depths.”

To meditate means to ponder our own inner beings, to try and understand ourselves, and to attempt to comprehend the mysteries of the universe: “Meditate on that which We have, through the power of truth, revealed unto thee, and be thou of them that comprehend its meaning.”

Through sincere, thoughtful, and attentive prayer, reading, and meditation, we can obtain insight, self-knowledge, and spiritual strength. 

Whatever insight we gain can then be acted upon, which reinforces a virtuous cycle of reading, meditation, and prayer. This cycle can bring about more action that will lead us to higher and higher states of spiritual communion and spirituality. 

The three essential actions needed to develop our souls are to strive, serve, and teach others. 

We must strive to apply the guidance and nourishment we receive through prayer, reading, and meditation to our daily lives and to serve and teach others based on the learning and strength we have gained. 

Developing and implementing these six practices will help us acquire deeper insights, virtues, and powers — nourishing our inner true selves and leading to greater strength, happiness, and contentment in our daily lives. In his writings, Baha’u’llah identified certain key virtues we should strive for every day: 

The virtues and attributes pertaining unto God are all evident and manifest, and have been mentioned and described in all the heavenly Books. Among them are trustworthiness, truthfulness, purity of heart while communing with God, forbearance, resignation to whatever the Almighty hath decreed, contentment with the things His Will hath provided, patience, nay, thankfulness in the midst of tribulation, and complete reliance, in all circumstances, upon Him. These rank, according to the estimate of God, among the highest and most laudable of all acts. All other acts are, and will ever remain, secondary and subordinate unto them …. 

Wherever we are, whatever condition we are in, anyone can begin this process today to create a more joyous, fulfilled, and beautiful life. 

Once we’ve experienced the spiritual world and its virtues and delights, our progress onward and upward on the path of spiritual growth accelerates. Our virtues, such as truthfulness, courtesy, forbearance, and justice, grow day by day and shed their light on the peoples of the Earth. Those virtues, as we acquire and put them into practice, will gradually lead our souls to higher states of being, blotting out our negative lower instincts. Our righteous actions, goodly deeds, and upright conduct lead to our spiritual development and happiness in this world. 

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In many ways, this fleeting material world represents a theater where our souls act through the characters of our bodies to acquire the spiritual skills and attitudes we will need in the lasting spiritual world we will inhabit after our bodies die. Much like our mother’s womb was the place for the development of our bodies to acquire the attributes we need to physically thrive, this world is the place for us to develop our souls for their ongoing existence in the next world.

We are merely acting out the spiritual drama of our souls in the womb of this world. The soul is the real actor, and our bodies are the temporary stage characters we play while we exist here. We do not get to choose the play or the role — we can only determine how we will act.

We cannot take any of the props or costumes with us to the next world — they belong here. We only take our souls, the spiritual qualities we develop in playing our parts in this realm. That is our true identity, not any temporary part we play here. After our souls separate from our bodies, when we stop playing the part we have been assigned in this world and leave this limited theatre of illusions, they will continue to progress and develop their essential powers and attributes in the real, everlasting world of the spirit.