My Wondrous Spiritual Journey

It has been just over a year since I embarked on my earnest spiritual journey, and I have just had a new realization. In the past and even now, I have often inadvertently placed my own needs last. While this may be described with beautiful words as selflessness, dedication, and caregiving, the truth is that it can easily lead to losing oneself and even pushing blame for mistakes onto others (especially those closest to us). Before I delve into this serious and wondrous journey, I would like to share my experiences as a Muggle before entering the spiritual realm. I believe that you, too, must have had similar experiences, a certain level of curiosity for the unknown world, so let us remember how we came to be here before embarking on this journey together.

I am someone who is curious about spirituality and the unknown, and I have been so since I can remember (probably around the age of five). I started asking questions such as: Why am I in this body? What am I here to do? What is the meaning of being alive in this world?

As I grew up, I continuously tried to understand who I am as a person. I explored various avenues, from astrology to tarot, from numerology to personality tests such as the Enneagram and MBTI. While some of the results were consistent, others were contradictory. For instance, just the interpretation of an individual's Eight Characters Birth Chart can yield two vastly different theories. Despite every school of thought providing up to two thousand words of analysis and even some practical advice, I still felt that it was insufficiently comprehensive.

Thus, I embarked on a quest for religion, or rather, pursued it in parallel with my other pursuits. In my childhood, my family leaned towards Taoism, and we had two statues of Guanyin at home. At the time, I enjoyed calling them "Sister Guanyin" and would converse with them. When I was in third grade, I became obsessed with reciting the Heart Sutra for a period (possibly due to the popular TV show "Journey to the West" at the time) and was very determined to find the pronunciation of the last sentence of the sutra. In fact, this behavior at the time has brought me great benefits now. It turns out that the most pure and selfless act is never in vain.

Later on, when I was around 13 years old, after participating in a math competition, my teacher brought several of us students to a church, and I somehow made a decision to convert to Christianity. However, I always had many questions about Christ in my heart and of course, my faith was not very devout. Later, when I went to study in the UK, I attended a Catholic school where religious studies were a compulsory subject. Under the premise of being competitive, I achieved good grades in this subject and memorized many chapters, but my heart remained closed. It was not that I did not believe in God, but rather, I did not have that spiritual connection. At the time, I did not understand the true meaning of gratitude and love.