Spiritual Upgrowth

a spiritual being,
having a human experience

• The early years
• Omens
• Spiritual disciplines
• Transcendent, spiritual experiences

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The early years

Grigoris, was always a loner. Since a young boy he preferred the company of animals, spending endless ours with them, literally where they lived. And when the night was falling, he was reading encyclopedias about animals, playing with animal toys; he was taking scallions from the groceries, fantasizing they were horses (the hair as the horse's mane and the green part as horse's tail) and he would play for hours, mimicking the sounds of the horse. Since the age of five, he was staying for many hours inside the hen's house that period; and many times the rooster bite him and his grandmother berated him, but he was loving so much being around animals. He was breathing freedom. And all these are so vividly imprinted from that young age.

Later as a teenager and until his 40s, he has had many different animals as pets and he was spending almost all of his time in close proximity to them, observing them, learning about them. Along with the love towards animals, Grigoris was enjoying spending time in nature, or if there was no time to seek for the healing energies of the woods, he would go to parks, wherever he could rest his spirit in the natural green embraces.

From about the age of 8, Grigoris noticed a difficulty when he was expressing himself verbally. His gentle and sensitive personality along with the treatment and the ridicule from the others in school about the way he talked, made him more isolated and distant towards other people.

Grigoris was developing a stutter and the struggle with words was upsetting his whole inner world so tremendously. It was difficult to defend himself in difficult situations and so, he was gradually becoming more distant with people and increasingly silent. As he grew older, Grigoris didn't feel limited due to his dissimilarity in pronouncing his words, and also his stutter didn't bother him so much, yet he chose to keep a distance from intimate relationships. And then, he gradually began to realize, that in fact, his extended inner daydreaming journeys and later on, his ability of instant and deep connections to the spirit world while meditating, must have been due to that close proximity with animals and nature since he was a boy. He must have been absorbing all these experiences and nature's energies, that later aided to the development of his spiritual faculties.

Yet, it didn't feel like isolation to him, it was more like solitude, a chosen creative time being alone, away from the noise and the pollution of the crowd. He was always friendly with people and at times talkative and social but not for long. All this constant blabber was tiring him. He needed quiet periods of introspection and mirroring inside of what he was experiencing outside, in the phenomenal world.

Nature's embrace, is one of the most effective medicines for the spirit.
It gradually brings equilibrium and a creative silence that... "speaks".

Omens

There were some interesting incidents occurred in Grigoris's life, that worth to be mentioned.

Prior birth

When Grigoris's mother was pregnant on him she fell from a scooter. After that incident she was so worried about her pregnancy, she kept crying and crying and worrying that she might lose her baby. And then, one night, the Holy Mary appeared to her as a vision, telling her that she doesn't have to worry anymore, because she is going to give birth to a healthy boy, and then she showed her an image of Grigoris as an infant. What caught the mother's attention were the curled and very long sideburns, twisting over the infant's cheeks. Later on, when Grigoris was born, he was indeed a healthy boy, in fact his mother had a short incident with anemia because the infant draw all of her blood. But he was a healthy boy weighing more than 5 kilos (13 lb) and he was exactly as his mother saw him in the vision of the Holy Mary, with the same long curly sideburns twisting over his cheeks.

Relatives' death

When Grigoris's grandmother died (the mother of his mother) it was in the day of his birthday. Later on, and about a decade later, two aunts of Grigoris were both suffering from cancer and after struggling for many months with the dreadful disease, they both departed to the other side of the veil in the same day, and within half an hour of each other. It was, again, at the day of Grigoris's birthday.

Spiritual disciplines

Since November 2011 Grigoris became a Raw Vegan, while in August 2013 he started practicing Yoga asanas. He also attended Nada/Nidra Yoga workshops instructed by Pt. Ashok Pathak. And after reading and investigating about the Qi energy (also known as chi, ch'i, ki) Grigoris started in December 2014 a basic practice of qigong (ch'i-kung: meaning, the enduring and arduous practice in order to cultivatie the flow of the chi energy in the body).

Transcendent, spiritual experiences

Living mainly as an urban monk and the periods of seclusion and prolonged meditations that followed after, led Grigoris to a deep spiritual path of transcendence, rapture and mystical revelations. During his extended meditations, there was an incident where he had the sensation of a liquid taste in the back of his mouth, a nectar-like sensation, tasting sweet, which he later identified as the amrit or amrita. Another incident occurred after his qigong practice one day, where he sensed his etheric body while meditating. Throughout that period and as well later on, Grigoris had unique experiences of transcendence where while he was completely sober, he was experiencing tremendous shifts of consciousness; he often was verbally expressing himself as in verses, like reciting oracles; and he also experienced a disintegration of limitations and boundaries of the superimposed and linear world. The everyday linear life seemed as a child's memory, with images from the kindergarten, where the images were faded and unimportant to him as an adult now. A bigger picture was gradually settling in; the fact, that there is nothing like life or death as we call, instead, there's a constant flow of energy with the energy simply changing garments according to the corresponding frequency of vibration.

Next: Mental Alignment