Where can someone go, or what can someone do, to lead a life dedicated to study and spiritual growth?

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This question hits close to home, as quite a bit of my time and effort has gone to building this kind of life. And it’s hard. Anyone can study, anyone can grow spiritually. But to have a life dedicated to these things requires that you build it.

And the road can be long and arduous. The real world intrudes in countless ways. Other people think nothing of ruining your contemplative focus and drag you down into their chaos. In many ways, going all the way with this means deciding to distance yourself from family and lose friends.

The actual steps are somewhat straightforward. Divide your life into two parts. Mundane and spiritual. The mundane part, you spend as much of your time that you can get away with optimizing for creating distraction-free blocks of time to devote to spiritual practice.

In my twenties, I would work construction jobs, one of the benefits to working with your hands is that it leaves your mind free to wander. I made many many discoveries this way. I would often be between gigs or jobs and I’d just burn down my savings in a coffee shop doing guess what, more spiritual exploration. Time was always the only thing I valued.

Eventually I would pivot to software development. This followed a phase in my journey where I pretty much lost the motivation to keep going the way I was going, and wanted something new. I considered an acting career but settled on software development. I was only able to make the decision after I could work out how to integrate mental work and my spirituality.

I needed to make the realization that I can use spiritual means to solve all manner of problems. That’s really the key that unlocks everything. What it comes down to is having the courage to take leaps of faith when you need to.

Now mind, always taking leaps of faith is super-chaotic and not at all compatible with a lifestyle of quiet contemplation. One needs to pick their battles. Patience is a necessity. Many of the skills you develop in meditation, to ignore the rest of the world and focus on building trance, find other uses.

One more thing, I personally right now enjoy a materially rich life. But I spent a decade just getting by. You have to understand your motivations. I absolutely don’t regret how I spent my twenties. But you might if you don’t spend time understanding yours. It’s not hard at all these days to carve out quiet time. But you have to actually spend it on spiritual growth, otherwise what are you really doing?