When Spiritual Growth Is Uncomfortable

Well, aloha, and welcome to today’s conversation, which is all about spiritual growth.

And actually, it’s a continuation of something that I started to talk about maybe six, eight weeks ago, which is spiritual awakening. Because part of spiritual awakening is spiritual growth.

Part of spiritual growth is spiritual awakening. And there’s a really close relationship between spiritual awakening, spiritual growth, spiritual emergency and personal growth in general.

So if you are spiritually-minded, it’s worth thinking about these things, because if you haven’t already gone through some kind of process of spiritual growth spurt that has awakened you more but maybe brought about some crisis, then it’s very possible that along the way, that will happen.

Apart from the fact that I’m gonna be designing a course on spiritual awakening, so I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently,

I’ve also been going through my own spiritual growth spurt which has largely been prompted by some personal development work I did.

So I’m a coach, and from time to time, I like to improve my skills, to develop my skills. I’m a skilled coach, I’m an experienced coach, I’m a trained coach, I’ve been doing it for 20 years, but I feel it’s important from time to time to grow.

So I was interested in voice dialogue training, which is about, the idea being we have a self, and the self is like a diamond. And the diamond has many facets.

And each facet of the diamond that is self is a part. So you have the protector part, hich the job is all about protecting you and keeping you safe.

Very often we have a pleaser part, a people pleaser part, which is about pleasing other people. Often it’s so that we’re liked, so that people aren’t mean to us. We have a pusher part, which gets things done.

We have the responsible self, and in different people these different selves may or may not be present, although the protector self always is.

But these different selves may or may not be present, and they’ll be present in different combinations. And as part of this work, one of the things that we would be looking at is the inner child.

I’ve always been allergic to inner child work. Ran from it screaming, don’t like the idea. Never could see the point. However, doing it, I’m starting to see the point.

And I’ve talked about that before, so I’m not going to go into that in too much detail now. But what this provoked was personal development in me.

Getting me in touch with aspects of myself that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. And it could’ve just been at a very personal level. However, I’m on a spiritual trajectory.

I’m on a spiritual path. I’m developing my spiritual side and my relationship with spirituality and consciousness and whatever those mean, because depending on who you read, they mean very, very different things.

But developing my sense of spirituality, my sense of consciousness, higher consciousness.

And the awakening, the unlocking of access to some of those emotional parts of myself that I really hadn’t spent much time considering for a long time because it hurt too much has also prompted a lot of spiritual questioning and a lot of, well, what do I mean by spirituality?

What do I mean by consciousness? What is my path? I’ve also been finding myself very connected to my dad, and again, I’ve talked about that a lot recently.

But because I was co-officiating as a minister at a wedding, it was the in the church where he used to play the organ, and music and my father always connected me very, very deeply.

So just that experience of being in that church where he played, co-officiating for somebody who was a student of his and who thought highly of him and he thought highly of her,

and the music being the kind of music that he would’ve chosen and that he would’ve played, that kicked off a lot of emotion for me as well.

My father’s spirituality was Christian. He was a church organist, and for him, so much of the spirituality lay in the music.

That was really the spiritual piece for him because that was where, when he was listening to church music or when he was playing, performing church music, that was where he tapped into that place of just something beyond, something bigger than, something more important, something deeper, something wider.

And that was the place where he tapped into it. For me, it’s nature. I can tap into it when I go into nature. I certainly tap into it when I go to Hawaii.

And what I’ve been discovering lately is tapping into love. So here’s a question for you. How often do you really tap into deep love?

How often do you allow feelings of really deep love to well up for you, whether it’s love of another human being, whether it’s love of a pet or whatever, but by and large, human beings and animals and sentient beings, let’s say?

How often do you really allow yourself to feel that wave of love that washes up? Because if we are in spiritual growth or spiritual crisis, that love can be such a centering, grounding place to become and to be.

So love is definitely a key in all this. And if you are going through any kind of spiritual crisis, which very often manifests as a personal development crisis.

You know, things are going on in your life and you can’t handle them. Or suddenly what can happen is that emotions suddenly start to bubble up, and it’s not depression, as such,

but it’s just feeling a lot of emotion, a lot of it sadness, anger, negative emotion that you don’t quite know what to do with and you don’t quite know where it came from.

And you know that you’re spiritually aware and you want to be more spiritual. That can be a sign of a spiritual growth spurt, as something going on at the spiritual level that’s gonna take you to the next level.

But the problem is we don’t always know how to handle that. We don’t always know what it is. So my suggestion is that if you are experiencing any of these kind of, crisis is too strong, although it may feel like a crisis.

But if you are feeling things like this where you’re questioning your own spirituality or where you’re experiencing an intensity of emotion that you don’t quite know what to do with or you feel lost.

You start to question what’s the point of what you’re doing? What’s the point of where you are? Who am I, really? Because that’s another question that can come up.

Then it’s possible that this is something to do with your spiritual growth, your spiritual expansion. And go see a minister, go see a coach, go see a counsellor.

Go see somebody who works around spirituality, because I know from personal experience, it’s an incredibly difficult thing to deal with on your own.

It’s difficult to navigate on your own, even if you are well studied and well experienced. Even if you’re a minister. I’m an interfaith minister. So, and I’ve sought help.

So really recommend doing that, and also recommend embracing it because it is a part of our growth. It is a part of our development. And light does come at the end of the tunnel.

Sometimes you just have to ride the wave through the tunnel to get to the other end where the rewards are beautiful. So I hope this has been interesting.

I hope it’s been useful, and I look forward to talking to you again very soon.

If you want to book a conversation with me, secretartofhuna.com/diary, and if you want to come to a one day training on huna,

so working with some of this, if you’re starting to experience this spiritual growth spurt, then 30th of November in Banbury. secretartofhuna.com/live will give you all the information.

And I’ll talk to you very soon.

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