I know it's a terribly unfashionable sentiment, but spiritual work must have some abnegative discipline – a sacrificial structure – to be in any way effective on the longterm. A lot of so called spirituality nowadays consists of pampering and indulging the self in the hope that that will stimulate it to reward me with good feelings which I can then chose to interpret spiritually. But such an approach, on the longterm, just strengths and bloats the ego – a sure path to decadence and corruption. Read any well established spiritual or religious text and they say the same thing: prayer is most effective when it is impossible to pray, love is most effective when it seems impossible to love, practice is most effective when it's the last thing you want to do. Yet again it all boils down to giving yourself what you need rather than what you want. This is maturity.