What is inner maturity? It is an ability to meet challenges both big and small with mental and emotional poise.
It comes from gaining wisdom from learning about life and applying that knowledge to respond efficiently to situations, while keeping your emotions in check.
As children we cried over small hurts such as a little fall in the playground or if another child burst our balloon.
As we grew, we naturally developed an inner maturity and didn’t cry or react as easily.
But growing older doesn’t necessarily mean that we are “grown up”. Real growing up means acquiring an inner maturity.
Inner maturity doesn’t happen automatically as it did when we were children. We have to work to gain it.
We must first acquire the right understanding of life through learning and personal experience and then actually live it.
Daily spiritual self-study and cultivating values are two sure habits to advance our inner maturity.
There is an ancient prayer that was chanted by spiritual students of India. In it, the student prays “…let me grasp the Truth that the vedas (scriptures) teach. …let me continuously live my days and nights in my studies. I think truth; I speak truth. May that truth protect me and my teacher.”
So, there are two responsibilities that the students undertook—daily spiritual study and living up to the truth they learned by nurturing a virtuous character (I think truth, I speak truth).
These are the two habits described in this article.
#1 Spiritual self-study helps to advance your inner maturity
#1 In his YouTube talks on Tips for Happy Living, spiritual master, Swami Tejomayananda explains that to be happy, we must change how we view life and respond to it.
Life brings us many unexpected situations that can affect our physical health, finances, home, family, friends or work.
We must know how to respond both practically and emotionally to the situation at hand.
While situations relating to everyday life can be dealt with through practical solutions, our emotional reactions to them cause us stress and linger on.
To build emotional strength and inner maturity, we must have some spiritual knowledge of life, an understanding of our higher purpose and faith in the Creator. All these three can come through spiritual self-study.
A committed daily discipline of studying any of the spiritual or religious writings of the world or works written by spiritual teachers will help us understand life from a higher perspective.
Spiritual knowledge helps to lessen life’s blows through right knowledge and understanding. This is what the Buddha talks about when he describes being hit by two arrows.
The first arrow represents sorrow from outer causes and the second arrow is one that we inflict on ourselves through our reaction to the first arrow.
The self-induced pain from the second arrow is far greater than the pain from the first arrow. We ask, “Why did this happen?” or “Why me!?” “Why? why? why!?”
We have a hard time accepting something or lack faith that the universe or higher power brought this situation to help us gain inner maturity and evolve. Our own emotional reactions increase our suffering.
When we accept the unexpected, we reduce the mental disturbances and are better able to think clearly and find viable solutions to the situation. This lessens our own suffering. Later, we are even happy that we learned what we did.
When engaging in spiritual self-study, it’s important to stop and reflect on the new knowledge. Personal reflection makes the knowledge our own wisdom. This means we’ll remember it and be able to act on it when meeting a challenge that requires its application.
For example, you have reflected well on the fact that fear is a symptom of being attached to something or someone.
So, the next time you feel anxious or fearful at the possibility of loss or harm to an object or person, you will recognise that you are attached.
You may be able to stop the flow of negative thoughts and remember that attachment is mentally unhealthy and suffocating. And you let it go with faith in the abundance and benevolence of the Universe.
When engaging in self-study, remember to not just go through the books but be sincere in your studies and allow the books to go through you.
With daily self-study, we will gain a greater understanding of life and its laws. We will grow in our inner maturity that will help us to accept and deal with loss, change, or pain better.
Existential questions about birth, death and the purpose of life that lingered and bothered us will slowly start to get answered.
Our faith in the divine will start to grow. We will develop inner strength and resilience.
#2 Cultivating values advances your inner maturity
Would you like to be with someone who is good-looking but rude and dishonest, or an ordinary-looking person who has a kind and gentle character?
I’m pretty sure you’d like to be with the latter type of person.
We all like to be treated well, with kindness, honesty, and respect. These are values that we like to see in others and others like to see in us.
Values are norms of conduct and behaviour that are universally accepted as being valuable and good.
Examples of values are truthfulness, humility, patience, compassion, acceptance, kindness, non-injury and self-control.
When we imbibe and practice these values, they become a part of our character and are called our virtues.
Practicing virtues builds character and inner maturity. And they foster a peaceful mind.
You know this is true because when you don’t do what you know to be right, your mind is flooded with thoughts.
For example, a tourist on a cruise ship walks into an island store selling local handicrafts. The shopkeeper seizes the opportunity to sweet-talk her and convince her to buy more than what she came in for and to pay more than five times the price for her shopping. He knows she will probably not know any better.
Although the shopkeeper makes a fat profit, his successful sales will generate many self-congratulatory and excited thoughts about the next tourist he can fleece and how much more money he can make with his next customer.
His greed will rob away his inner peace. (Perhaps, when the tourist finds out that she was cheated and posts it on social media, he will lose out on his business too.)
There is a way that the shopkeeper can sell, make a profit, gain peace of mind and inner maturity.
He can work honestly, seeing himself as an instrument of the divine higher power and dedicate all his actions to It. Read what is the right attitude in work that brings inspiration and inner growth.
Here are other examples of how practicing values brings inner maturity.
Humility denotes an absence of pride or ego. There is a willingness to learn, adapt and grow. We easily confess and admit our mistakes.
Compassion enables us to empathise with the sorrow of others. Forgiveness teaches us to accept and let go of blame and hurtful feelings. Patience trains us to remain in control of our emotions and runaway thoughts.
The opposite qualities of these values express as immature behaviour and irrational demands. (Humility – arrogance, compassion – callousness, forgiveness – fault-finding, patience – irascibility).
What prevents us from practicing values is our personal desire, selfishness and attachment to who and what we want. There is an inability to let go of our insistence for things to be as we want.
When we drop these things and practise noble values, they bring harmony within us and with people around.
Signs of inner maturity
The signs of inner maturity are a quiet, focused mind and balanced emotions that are under our control.
Daily spiritual self-study and a concerted effort to live the noble values of life are two sure habits that will nurture these qualities in us.
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