SPIRITUAL BUDGET

[1]Just as people budget their finances to make ends meet, we might also consider a different kind of budget. Besides what we amass in this physical world, we have the capital of a certain number of breaths to use in our lifetime. We may know how to budget our finances, but do we ever reflect on how we might budget the principal of our life’s breaths, given to us as a gift from God? In other words, how are we spending our time?

Speaking to a friend the other day we both had the same thought and feeling. The world seems to be in hyper-drive. To the point we feel we are spinning our wheels haphazardly to accomplish tasks, almost wastefully getting into reoccurring debates over principles we really have no control over.[2] We want to invest our time and talents into a meaningful life purpose, but seem unable to balance the checkbook. Once we reflect on how we are using our breaths, we can then determine how to better budget the time we’ve been given to include a spiritual budget.

We have twenty-four hours in the day to budget toward our life’s purpose. Just as we budget our finances for the necessities of life, so to do our breaths go toward activities relevant to our physical survival. We must budget time to care for our body; time for work, school or college. If we have a family, we need to budget time to care of them. Most want to be contributing members of the community, to be in service to others. Beyond this, we are left with time we can spend any way we like. This is the area we can create our spiritual budget.

As we are on the spiritual path, we must set goals of self-knowledge and God-realization. This involves spending time in meditation and prayer with scripture and spiritual reading, whereby we invert our attention to focus on the Divine. Just as we need to spend time toward developing technical skills, meditation and prayer, also, takes practice. Creating a daily habit helps to achieve success. By concentrating our attention on the God within, we can learn to connect daily with the divine source of wisdom.

While attending to our responsibilities of taking care of our body and mind, let’s budget for the care of our soul. When planning our spiritual budget, allocate time daily for meditation and prayer, not as an afterthought, but first, like your mortgage payment or something as important as a regular date night with your spouse. Just as we want a balanced financial budget, we also want a balanced budget of our time, so we can develop the physical, mental, and spiritual facets of our life. By making meditation and prayer a priority in our spiritual budget, we will be making the best use of our life’s breaths, and achieve spiritual gains to enrich all aspects of our life.

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[1] Scripture (NABRE), 1 Timothy 4:12-28; Luke 7:36-50

[2] SPEAKINGTREE.IN, “Making a Spiritual Budget” by Sant Rajinder Sign Ji Maharaj