I keep a vision board hanging on my wall.

I will admit that I do not update it far often enough….in part because “crafty” is not a word I typically use to describe myself (and vision boards involve a lot of cutting and pasting words, images, etc), but also because the things I envision as fleshing out a truly amazing life are pretty big things, and they do not shift or change very often in my world.

The vision board experts suggest sectioning off your vision board into segments, such as “career,” “personal,” “hobbies,” “romance,” “spirituality,” etc.

So of course I did this with mine (see “not crafty” above).

One quote that has been on my vision board for years in the “spirituality” section states:

“Spiritual maturity is the capacity to live from your true nature in the midst of the everyday madness of the ordinary world.”

I really love this quote. I especially love how it doesn’t specify whether the “everyday madness” is coming from inside of me or from all around me. Or neither. Or both.

I will never forget standing with my Dad listening to a talk by a great meditation teacher. The teacher was describing how for many years she had hated herself – she didn’t think she was a good enough mother, a good enough daughter, a good enough leader, a good enough spouse, a good enough person.

Then one day she had an experience in meditation where she began to finally see that the comparisons she had been drawing between herself and others were not just useless, detrimental even, but were actually invalid.

It was in that moment, she shared, that she first began to realize that she was the perfect HER. She was being the best spouse, daughter, mother, leader, person, that she could be in each unfolding moment. She was the perfect height, she had the perfect personality, and she had the perfect amount of hair.

At that moment my Dad, who by that point had been slowly losing his hair for years, turned to me, beaming smile on his face, and said, “Did you hear that lady? She just said I have the perfect amount of hair!”

And he does. You do. I do. We do.

“Spiritual maturity” is a term we will have to define each for ourselves, and for me it has become synonymous with “me, being the best me I can be, regardless of what is going on around me or even within me.”

Living from a place of spiritual maturity – to me at least – means that it is not my business what other people think of me, nor is it even necessarily my business what I think of myself in this very moment (given that so much of those opinions are drawn from past, not present, data).

It is not my business what others choose to do or not to do, but it is my business how I let it affect me. Spiritual maturity means taking responsibility for how I live and move about in my own world, including what I think and say and how those choices affect me personally.

Spiritual maturity for me means noticing how being me is affecting me – whether I have more or less peace and joy in my life as I choose option a, b, or c in any given situation – and making adjustments accordingly.

Today’s Takeaway: What is your personal definition of spiritual maturity? How does your definition inspire and motivate you to keep working on being the best you that you can be?