There's a version of spiritual growth that looks profound from the outside,
But it's quietly causing you something essential on the inside.
It's the version where you've learned to hold a perspective,
Find a meaning,
Trust the process,
But somewhere underneath all of that,
The actual human experience of your life isn't being fully felt.
This video is about what it looks like to grow spiritually in a way that includes your humanity rather than transcends it.
And why that inclusion as uncomfortable as it sometimes is.
Is what makes spiritual growth real.
I want to begin with an image.
Imagine two people going through the same difficult experience.
A loss,
A heartbreak.
A period of profound uncertainty.
The first person sits with it.
Lets it be hard,
Cries when they need to cry,
Feels the anger when it's there.
Moves through the grief without rushing it.
And alongside all of that,
Maintains a connection to something larger.
A trust in the process,
A sense that even this difficulty is part of something meaningful.
The second person moves quickly to the meeting.
And find the lesson immediately.
Talk about the experience in the language of growth and trust and divine timing.
Seem from the outside to be handling it remarkably well,
And perhaps they're even admired for their positivity,
Their perspective,
Their apparent spiritual maturity.
But if you could see inside,
If you could feel what's actually happening in their body in the unguarded moments when the spiritual framework isn't actively being held in place,
You'd find something that hasn't been touched.
A grief that hasn't been felt.
An anger that hasn't been honored,
A very human experience that has been reframed before it was allowed to land.
Both of those people are on the spiritual path.
But only one of them is truly integrated.
And the difference between them is not the depth of their spiritual understanding.
It's whether they've learned to hold the spiritual and the human at the same time.
We've already talked about spiritual bypassing in some previous videos,
About the specific ways we use spiritual frameworks to avoid rather than process difficult emotional experiences.
So I don't want to spend time there again today.
I want to talk about what real integration actually looks like.
What it feels like,
What it requires,
And why it is,
Ultimately,
A far more profound and far more sustainable form of spiritual growth than the alternative.
Because I think a lot of people,
Particularly people who have been on a spiritual journey for some time,
Have a vague sense that something is missing from their practice.
That their spiritual understanding is real,
But somehow not fully lending in their daily lived experience.
That there is a gap between the higher perspective they can access and the human being who still gets hurt,
Still gets scared,
Still feels things that don't quite fit into the framework.
And I want to name that gap.
It's not a spiritual failure.
It's an integration gap.
And it closes not by going further into the spiritual,
But by going more fully into the human.
Real spiritual integration is built on one fundamental understanding that changes everything.
Your emotions are not obstacles to your spiritual growth.
You're the path of it.
Not metaphorically,
But actually.
The grief,
The anger,
The fear,
The longing,
These are not lower energies to be transcended or dissolved or reframed into something higher.
They're the specific,
Embodied,
Completely valid experiences of a human soul moving through the genuine complexity of being alive.
And that spirituality that cannot hold these emotions,
That requires you to rise above them in order to maintain the connection to something larger,
It's not actually horrible.
It's a spirituality that needs you to be less.
Than you are in order to access it.
Real,
Whole spirituality includes everything.
Is spacious enough to hold the grief and the gratitude simultaneously.
The anger and the trust,
The confusion and the surrender.
The very human,
Very specific,
Very inconvenient feelings that don't fit the elevated perspective.
Real spiritual integration means allowing it all to be present.
Without requiring the difficult parts to become something more spiritual before you acknowledge them.
So what does it look like?
Practically.
How do you actually hold the spiritual and the human at the same time in real moments when the human part is loud and uncomfortable and not particularly enlightened?
The first thing.
Is the order.
There is a time for spiritual perspective.
And the time for human feelings.
And the most common integration mistake is getting the order wrong.
Reaching for the perspective and the lessons before the feeling has been honored.
Real integration almost always requires feeling first,
Not as wallowing or getting lost in emotion without ever finding your way back,
But as fully acknowledging what is there before trying to understand what it means.
This might look like.
Something painful happened.
Instead of immediately asking,
What is this teaching me?
You first ask,
What am I actually feeling right now?
And then you let yourself feel it fully for as long as it needs to be felt.
And then from that place of having fully honored a human experience,
You bring in the spiritual perspective.
Not as an escape from the feeling but as a companion to it,
Not replacing the grief but sitting alongside it.
Not dissolving the anger but holding it with a larger context that allows it to flow through you.
That order,
Feeling it first and finding meaning second,
Is one of the most practically important shifts available to anyone who wants to grow spiritually without bypassing your human experience.
The second thing is learning to speak both languages simultaneously.
What I mean by this is developing the capacity to hold two apparently contradictory things as both true at the same time.
And yes,
It's easier said than done.
The human mind tends towards either war.
Either I trust the process or I feel devastated.
Either I find the meaning or I sit in the grief.
Either I'm spiritually mature or I'm emotionally triggered.
But integration lives in the end,
Not or.
I'm devastated and I trust that this is part of something larger.
I'm angry and I believe in the process.
I'm heartbroken.
And then help.
I don't understand this,
And I surrender to it anyway.
Those end statements,
Not as spiritual performance,
But as actual lived experience,
Are the language of integration.
They don't resolve the tension between the human and the spiritual.
They hold it.
And in that holding,
Something becomes available that neither pole on its own can access.
A depth of presence,
A genuine aliveness.
The specific quality of someone who has not chosen between their humanity and their spirituality,
But has found a way to live fully inside both.
The third thing is letting your spiritual practice lead you where you actually are.
Many spiritual practices were designed for,
Or at least most commonly taught as,
Tools for elevation.
For rising above.
For accessing states of peace,
Clarity,
And connection that exist above the noise of ordinary human experience.
And those states are real.
And they're valuable.
But if your spiritual practice only works when you're already in a relatively ascended state.
Then it's not available to you in the moments you need it most.
Real spiritual practice meets you in the mess.
In the grief.
In the 3 a.
M.
Loneliness.
In the anger that doesn't feel spiritual at all.
Not by resolving those states into something more manageable,
But by being present with you inside them.
This might mean letting your meditation practice become a place where you feel the grief rather than a place where you transcend it.
Letting your prayer be honest.
Generally uncomfortably honest.
About what's actually happening inside you rather than a performance of trust you don't yet fully feel.
Letting your journaling go somewhere real rather than somewhere elevated.
The spiritual practice that can hold your humanity,
All of it.
Even the parts that feel least spiritual,
Is the one that will genuinely transform you.
Not the one that requires you to leave your humanity behind.
So what does this kind of integration create?
I know there's a fear that if we allow ourselves to fully experience being human,
If we stop using spirituality to rise above difficult emotions,
We will somehow lose our connection to the spirit.
And that by fully entering the human experience,
We'll lose our connection to something greater.
In my experience,
Opposite.
Almost always true.
The spiritual connection that remains when you are in grief,
Anger,
Or fear is far more trustworthy than one that only exists when conditions are comfortable.
Because that has been tested.
Has been carried into the hardest places and still there.
Still holding.
It's still real.
And that is what integration makes possible.
The ability to feel the full weight of your human experience without losing your connection to something greater.
That is where spirituality develops real depth.
Knowing beautiful language or higher perspectives.
But in going all the way into your humanity and discovering that the spiritual is there too.
You're not less spiritual because you cry or because you're angry.
You're more deeply connected because you no longer need to escape your humanity to access what is greater than you.
Your spirituality is no longer something you maintain in spite of being human.
It becomes something that is deepened by the experience of being fully human.
So let me close with this.
The imitation of true spiritual integration is not to become less human in the service of becoming more spiritual.
Is to become more fully human.
More present,
More honest,
More willing to feel the complete range of what this extraordinary and difficult experience of being alive actually involves.
And by becoming more fully human,
You're on the very path of becoming more fully whatever you understand the spiritual to be.
Your emotions are not the enemy of your growth.
They are its raw materials.
Your humanity is not an obstacle to your spiritual life.
Is the ground in which your spiritual life grows.
And the version of you that has learned to hold both,
That has stopped choosing between the perspective and the feeling,
Between the trust and the grief,
Between the spiritual and the human,
That version is not a compromise.
That version is the whole thing.
And that wholeness.
Genuine,
Embodied,
Nothing excluded.
Is what Real Spiritual Growth has been pointing toward all along.
And as always,
Before you go,
I want to offer you one practice to carry into this retreat.
The next time you notice yourself reaching for spiritual perspective.
For the meaning,
The lesson,
The refrain.
Pause for just a moment first.
And ask.
Have I actually felt this yet?
Have I let the human experience land before I moved to what it means?
If the answer is no,
Feel it first.
That's not the detour from the spiritual path.
That is the path.
The perspective will still be there when you return to it.
Now,
Go be yourself.
