Why Community is a Powerful Tool for Your Spiritual Growth with Roshni Patel
I’m excited to share the conversation I had this week with Roshni Patel, podcast host, self-worth coach, and advocate for anti-oppression. She shares so much knowledge on new ways to progress your personal journey through community and showing compassion for others. We talk about failure and the positives that can come from them, and she reminds us that we really can trust that the universe does things for a reason. If you’ve been experiencing a constant sense of not feeling good enough or needing to change, keep reading this post. Sometimes this journey can feel overwhelming, and it’s okay to realize that you need a break from “personal growth as a whole and kind of create the relationship and create the newsfeed on your own terms.”
Who is Roshni Patel?
This week, I’m so excited to share so much knowledge and positivity from my conversation with Roshni Patel, host of the Is It Worth It Yet podcast! She's a self-worth coach and content creator with a background in psychology and education. She’s passionate about anti-oppression work through building self-worth in her clients and audience.
She was born in Kenya and migrated to the US at the age of five. As a third culture kid, she explores the dissonance between growing up in America, experiencing life as an immigrant, and navigating what it means to be a part of communities that don't always claim you.
Roshni centers her work around the belief that we are intrinsically enough, she believes that we do not have to prove, achieve, or earn our worth, despite what we're told by our patriarchal, heteronormative, transphobic, racist, and capitalist society. She's committed to showing her clients and audience how to strip back the conditioning and limiting beliefs, focus on their purpose, and believe in themselves enough to follow through.
You Don’t Have to be Perfect to Care for Others
We all know personal growth never really ends, we will always have something to work on with ourselves. Roshni stresses that “because we can work on ourselves for a full lifetime, we have to incorporate community care in that because we're never going to be fully fixed. Like, you can really just start seeing yourself as whole, and you can start accepting your mistakes.”
Despite the constant feeling of having to work on ourselves 24/7, we can do both. “The more that you work on yourself, the better equipped you are to help other people and the more that you help other people and see what a difference certain, you know, concepts or certain just ways that you've reached out seeing what a difference that can make to other people that's going to help you start to feel better and see what you can, you know, do to enhance that for other people even more.”
As for manifesting, it can be a battle of its own at times, too. Roshni is a huge advocate and lover of manifesting, but an issue she brings us is that “sometimes it can kind of bring forth cycles of shame or it can place all the blame on you.” Feeling like maybe you’ve not only manifested the good in your life, but also the bad. Or maybe you feel like you caused past traumas. But you aren’t always in your mind, consciously manifesting every part of your life.
Instead, Roshni recommends having the mindset that you can “switch on and switch off” the intensity with “how much your thoughts are creating your real life.” Something important to take away from this post is that you shouldn’t allow yourself to fall into a toxic cycle of blaming yourself for the negativity in your life, manifesting is a positive, peaceful practice. You deserve to only invite positivity in.
It’s important to remember that when the world gets crazy, even if you try to stop having any thoughts, the rest of the world still continues to exist. Roshni says you just have to make a distinction. You have the “manifestation space,” but the world doesn’t stop while you do, so you can’t control the bad things that happen. Remember though, that “you can control how, you know, you deal with” all of the bad stuff. Roshni and I hope you can find the freedom to let this be a positive and growing experience for yourself.
Another issue Roshni feels strongly about: structural racism. Similar to the issues with manifestation, structural racism can be riddled with blame and shame. And just like you don’t manifest negativity, no one can just manifest away racism. She recommends to just “start reading about it and opening your mind to it. And again, it really starts with like, the small little changes that you can do in your corner of the world.” We’ll talk about what community really is a little later in this post, just know that you don’t have to change the entire world, you make enough change by just helping in your community.
Molding Your Personal Growth Journey
For Roshni, meditation and journaling are the most important parts of her spiritual practice. When she finds herself feeling really scrambled, she uses something called “stream of consciousness writing.” It’s essentially a brain dump, you don’t need a prompt, you just write down whatever comes to mind until you come to “some sort of struggle that I'm having, or maybe a question that I have, or somewhere where I'm like, should I focus on putting my energy into this? Or should I focus on letting it go?”
Also important for Roshni, tarot cards. “So if it's a decision, I'll pull cards for each choice. If it's just a question, I'll pull a card or two and just kind of see what I get. And then I'll go ahead and just journal a little more, or write some bullet point notes on how I interpret that information.”
Meditation and journaling are tools that helped Roshni along her spiritual and personal growth journeys. And you are able to create your own personal growth journey with tools that you connect to. Finding what works for you for personal growth is a journey itself. Roshni says to go to the source of the information and practices you’re using. Once you know the background, you’re able to determine if a service or coach really knows what they practice and teach.
Yoga, for example, is a huge international practice, but does every instructor teach “from the root of yoga?” In other words, do they focus on the breath work, the connection of mind of body? And more importantly, do they resonate with you? This really helps you at the beginning of your journey, and allows you to grow and make connections.
If you feel a constant sense of not being good enough or needing to change, that’s your red flag. Sometimes this journey can feel overwhelming, and it’s okay to realize that you need a break from “personal growth as a whole and kind of create the relationship and create the newsfeed on your own terms.”
Find Your Community
People have become so centered around making sure they, themselves are okay, Roshni says. But we often forget that it feels good to help others. Roshni encourages everyone to take a look at their community and consider “are people able to find housing? Are people able to find food? Are people able to afford their bills? Are they able to, you know, have access to health care, like, there's so many things that goes into someone's quality of life.” It doesn’t have to be some huge act, even things such as tiny free libraries or donating canned food are so simple and make a positive difference in your community.
So what do we mean by “your community?” It doesn’t have to be the people that live in your area. For Roshni, “it's really important for me to always have free content, whether that's on YouTube, on Instagram, as my podcasts, like all three of those are things that I consistently put content out on, because I want people to have access to these things for free.” She wants everyone to have access to concepts of spirituality and mental health. Focussing on yourself and your personal growth all of the time isn’t always a positive thing, it can burn you out fast. So “sometimes you just need to step out of yourself. And that can still be personal growth.'“
All of this reminds me of Gary Zukav’s book, where he talks about the ego and how the ego is always trying to feel safe and secure, and that can manifest in selfishness are feeling disconnected or separate from other people. And that's essentially what Roshni described, that many people can take spirituality as an opportunity to be selfish. And granted, it's great to work on yourself, it's great to improve, but at the cost of cutting off your oneness with other people, I think that's the ego. And that's not true spirituality to me, and it's obviously something I work on, like, am I making sure I'm reaching out or connecting or seeing everything as one?
Self-Parenting for Spiritual Growth
In 2019, around Christmas time, Roshni lost her job. She felt lost and fell into a strong depression, “I felt like, you know, I'm working so hard on myself, I'm working so hard in every area of my life, why do I deserve this?” Luckily, she has a great community of support that we was able to open up to about what she was going through. It reminded her “you're okay, you've got this.” She forces herself to always look at the bright side of things. If she hadn’t have lost her job, she would never have started her podcast.
And then, before COVID, she was traveling for a job interview, a job she didn’t end up getting. But then COVID did hit and she “was able to enroll in B school and learn more about, you know, my business and kind of growing that way. And so it was like, all these decisions that like really kind of pulled me in and made me face all these doubts about myself, all of this kind of tendency to self sabotage.”
Instead of feeling sorry for herself, thinking that she didn’t get it because of something she did, or because she wasn’t good enough, she made a choice to keep fighting and not to let it be the end of her. “When you really put it in that perspective, you're like, I have to keep going, of course, it's the only option. But being able to feel like you have a choice over the matter, is really what helped me.” Roshni’s advice: trust the universe and put effort and work into it, continue making “what you want to happen, happen.”
Spiritual work is not visible on the outside, it’s an internal process and “as tangible as it gets is maybe like notes in a in a journal or something like that.” And sure, physical work like yoga is great, but the only way to make significant growth is by “asking yourself hard questions and correcting yourself.” Roshni calls this “self parenting,” growth is self care but growth requires work, so you have to discipline yourself on some level.
Ask yourself questions like: “Why am I like this? Why did it serve me to have this habit? Why did this coping mechanism help me for so long and why does it not help me now? Why am I holding myself back?” It can take a while to really know the answers to these questions, and you can journal along the way if you want, but don’t focus on this every second of the day, you can take a break. Personal growth is done by “making changes in yourself. But also coming from a place of love and understanding of both yourself and the world around you.”
Affirmation
I release any practice or belief that no longer serves my highest good and work to support others in evolving to their highest good.
Resources
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