Spiritual Progress and Erosion

The Course in Miracles states that we might be mislead in the evaluation of our accomplishments:
"Some of your greatest advances you have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats you have evaluated as success".
My experience certainly echos this sentiment. While I never really know how exactly my day went from a spiritual perspective, all I do is to focus my attention on the next choice in front of me. "No matter how many bridges I may have burnt today, now is the moment when I am healing things" happens to be my motto. Still, there are a few feedback mechanisms along your spiritual path. If love is in the air, chances are you did something right. The same applies if everything is in a perfect flow. However, when you experience interferences along the way, you are never sure whether this is a reflection of the fact that you have chosen wrongly, or if you are working off issues from the past, and experiencing pain is actually a sign of healing.

Don't be afraid the take a few steps back on your path, as long as that happens unconsciously. The little signs along the way will remind you of your missteps. Making mistakes can be very therapeutic. They allow you to monitor how your environment is changing in response, and once you have realized that you made a mistake you are likely to go your spiritual way with twice the energy. It is the ongoing spiritual erosion that results in that sinking feeling on your subconscious level that you are on the road to hell. This is what generates the cancer inside yourself. But then again, once you realize it there is nothing to fear anymore. As God said in Neale Walsch's Conversations with God, once you understand that you are driving in the wrong direction all you have to do is to turn your car around.