Roots of the Rise
Short episodes with grounded wisdom for healing, growth, and reconnecting to your true self.
Roots of the Rise is a soul-centered podcast hosted by Sarah Hope—Ayurvedic health practitioner, spiritual mentor, meditation teacher, biodynamic craniosacral therapist, and energy healer. Drawing from thousands of hours of client work, group facilitation, and her own journey through childhood trauma, grief, and the profound rediscovery of love and joy, Sarah offers a grounded, heart-led space for inner transformation.
Short episodes (10–20 minutes) released on Mondays and Thursdays, offer bite-sized insights, ideas, and practices for inner growth and self-development. Whether you're seasoned on the path or just beginning to explore, this podcast gives you digestible nuggets to stay inspired—without overwhelm. It’s perfect for those who want to stay engaged in the work, curious newcomers feeling overloaded by long-form content, or anyone wanting to understand a loved one's journey from a broader, more accessible perspective.
Sarah’s intention is to expose you to a wide range of spiritual concepts, therapeutic tools, philosophies, and practices—all in service of helping you become the healthiest, happiest, most authentic version of yourself. The journey can be hard. It can feel lonely. But you’re not alone. Come walk this path with her—learning, healing, and rising, one grounded step at a time.
This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Sarah is not a licensed therapist, and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist, or any other qualified provider. That said, she hopes it inspires you to grow, heal and seek the support you need to thrive.
Roots of the Rise
Episode 82 - Are You Trying To Heal Your Way Out Of Being Human?
Spiritual transcendence isn't about escaping your humanity or rising above difficult emotions—it's about expanding your awareness to hold all your experiences with compassion. The misconception that healing means never feeling pain, anger, or grief can derail your growth journey and leave you feeling like you're failing when you continue to experience normal human emotions.
• Real healing means changing your relationship to triggers, not always eliminating them
• As you develop spiritually, you actually feel more deeply rather than less
• Your emotions are like weather patterns moving through the sky of your awareness
• Healing isn't a straight line but a spiral where you revisit lessons with new depth
• Everyone has intuition—the difference is how much we've cultivated it
• The full human experience includes both painful lows and exhilarating highs
• The goal isn't to escape feelings but to expand your capacity to be with them
Have you ever thought to yourself if I were really spiritual, I wouldn't get angry. If I were really doing the work, this wouldn't bother me. If I were really healed, I wouldn't get anxious. I'd just immediately rise above this? If you have, you're not alone and you've got it wrong. Those feelings, everything you're trying to escape they are inevitable and they're part of being human. Too often we judge ourselves for acting like it. We think we're broken or that we haven't healed enough, that we're not working hard enough. If this is you, keep listening, because today I'm talking about one of the biggest traps in spiritual healing confusing escape with transcendence. Welcome back to Roots of the Rise with me, sarah Hope.
Speaker 1:Today I want to clear up one of the biggest misunderstandings I see in spiritual healing. It's a misunderstanding that can make people feel like they are failing at their own growth and healing process, and if you hold onto it, it can quietly derail your healing journey for years. Here it is. People often believe that spiritual transcendence means escaping their humanity, rising so high that pain, fear, grief and anger no longer touch them. But that is not what healing really is, and the sooner you understand this, the freer you'll feel, because when you drop the idea that spirituality is about escaping the realities of life. You can finally start living more fully and giving yourself and others more compassion, as we all continue to learn and grow and try to become the best version of ourselves possible, which is not some sterilized non-feeling, never sad, never mad being.
Speaker 1:The truth about developing spiritually is that it's not about leaving your humanity behind. It's about expanding your awareness so you can hold all of your humanness with compassion. It's not that humans are somehow less than divine. It's about recognizing the divinity within our humanity, the perfection that exists in being fully human. And it's definitely not that you stop feeling once you've reached a certain level of development. You actually feel more deeply. This is why so many who are on this path actually talk about their quality of life going down as they start to transcend, as they start to develop, because they are more aware and you don't get to pick what you're aware of.
Speaker 1:So, yes, you become more aware of your triggers, more aware of where you can find joy, more aware of the good things, but you also become more aware of the difficulties. You become more aware of the ways in which you are denying yourself, the situations you're putting yourself in that might be harmful, the ways that you are acting that are not in alignment with who you truly are or want to be. You start recognizing the relationships that maybe are not actually healthy for you. You start realizing just how much your work is sucking the life out of you, maybe, and that's painful. Those realizations, those recognitions, they hurt, they're hard, and so often people start having them and then they say wait, this doesn't feel better, I'm not feeling more joy, I don't have more clarity, I'm just confused.
Speaker 1:And now I'm sad because I'm having to try to figure out well, how do I leave the job? How do I let go of those friendships? If I let those friendships go, who am I going to be with? Who are my people going to be? Am I just going to be alone? That's scary, that doesn't feel good and we have this misconception that as we start to heal, as we start to rise above that, everything is just going to feel better, that we are going to feel better, that we are not going to feel the pain so deeply. And that does happen eventually.
Speaker 1:I don't want you to think that it's all gloom and doom with this heightened awareness forever. It's just that in the beginning it can feel very overwhelming as you start to allow everything you've repressed, everything you've tried to escape from, to come forward, as you begin to feel more deeply. But as you move through the healing process, you stop being defined or consumed by those feelings. Here's one way you can think about it. Imagine the sky and the weather, your emotions, your struggles, your pain. They're like weather systems Storms roll in, rain falls, winds blow. If you mistake transcendence for escape, you're trying to run away from the storm or banish the weather altogether. But real transcendence is realizing you are the sky. The weather moves through you, but you don't disappear when the storm comes. You remain steady, vast and whole. Those storms, that rainfall, it has purpose and beauty. That's what healing allows. It doesn't erase storms, it gives you the capacity to hold them.
Speaker 1:One of my clients had really strong triggers around workplace racism and sexism and let's be clear, those things are wrong and it's natural to be upset by them. But when she encountered them they would completely ruin her day. She'd stew over comments, feel stuck. She'd judge her co-workers harshly and at first she also judged herself. She thought I shouldn't still feel this way. I must be failing at my own healing. Over time, as she kept going, she realized something crucial Healing doesn't mean you stop being triggered. Healing means changing your relationship to the trigger. Now, when these situations happen, she still notices the frustration, but instead of letting it take over her day, she can acknowledge it, breathe through it and return to compassion for herself and for the imperfect world we all live in. She doesn't spiral into hopelessness or judgment anymore. At least, that's what she's able to do most of the time. It depends on how tired she is. What else is going on in her life? What other stressors exist on any given day? I say this to remind you that healing isn't a straight line and it doesn't happen overnight. Think of it like a spiral.
Speaker 1:Many people assume, and definitely hope, that once they've worked through something it's gone forever. But real healing often means revisiting the same lessons repeatedly from new depths, each time with more compassion, awareness and love. And even once you understand the lessons, it's not like you're able to then execute what you've learned perfectly every single time. You may have a single major like aha moment during a session at a retreat, listening to a guided contemplation, but very rarely does that new learning stick forever. Immediately. From that point forward, there's a learning curve, a period of integration where you get it right sometimes and still really struggle with it at others.
Speaker 1:Not judging yourself is a key skill to develop. I mean that's real spiritual growth, that's real transcendence Not judging yourself for still being bothered by something, not trying to escape discomfort, not denying what's real, but discovering a new way to relate to life as it shows up, no matter what. And this matters because if you keep chasing escape, thinking you're never supposed to feel pain or anger or grief or any of the difficult emotions, you will always feel like you're falling short. You'll waste energy trying to outrun your humanity instead of learning how to embrace it. In the beginning, one of my other clients often talked about how she just doesn't want to be here, not in a suicidal way, but in a how can anyone really enjoy living in this world kind of way. She sees the suffering, the violence, the cruelty, the speed and disconnection of modern life and it feels very overwhelming. This client is a sweetheart. She's soft and loving and has experienced a lot of trauma from a very young age, so it's completely understandable that she sometimes struggles to connect with her own emotions, with other people and with joy. She's found a lot of healing through grounding her central nervous system with craniosacral therapy, like I talked about in my last episode. But I bring her up here because we had a particular experience during one session that highlights this powerful truth about spiritual growth.
Speaker 1:I want to take a quick tangent here about intuition, just to lay some groundwork before I share about that session. I'll dive much deeper into this in a future episode because I think it's important to talk about it. I know for a long time I personally thought intuition was something you either had or you didn't, and if you did, it put you firmly in the woo-woo psychic. How can I take you seriously, bucket? But after studying meditation and consciousness for over a decade, I know that's not true. Everyone has intuition. The difference is simply how much we've cultivated it and how clear the channel is that we've developed for the intuition to come through without it being clouded by our own trauma and beliefs. More on that in some other episode, but for now, at this point in my practice, intuition is really the backbone of how I receive information during sessions.
Speaker 1:You may have heard of different intuitive abilities, things like clairaudience, which is hearing messages. Clairsentience, which is sensing emotions, energy or physical sensations that aren't your own, and clairentience, which is sensing emotions, energy or physical sensations that aren't your own, and clairvoyance, which is perceiving visions, images, symbols or scenes. Those are some of the most common ways people experience intuition, though there are more. I receive in a few different ways, but in this particular session what came through was visual. Sometimes the images I receive are very literal, like impressions of something that's actually happened in the client's life. Other times they're more metaphorical, carrying a message or insight that's meant to help guide the healing process. What I want to share with you today is one of those metaphorical visions, because it speaks so clearly to this question of what it really means to transcend and why this human life, in all its messiness, can still be a gift.
Speaker 1:In this session, I saw a place that reminded me of Avatar or Rivendell a world of pure beauty, full of nature and calmness and peace. All the beings there were walking about with gentle purpose and there was no war, no violence, no hatred, just love and serenity. I described this to my client as I was seeing it and she said well, that sounds amazing. That feels like where I am supposed to be. Why am I here and not there? And the answer came clearly it would be boring. It was beautiful, it was peaceful. There was no pain, no stress. You know. There were no lows, true, but there were also no highs no ecstasy, no giddiness, no belly laughter. Highs no ecstasy, no giddiness, no belly laughter, just monochromatic peace. And as hard as the lows can be in human life, the highs are incredible and they are worth living for.
Speaker 1:The lesson here is crucial you don't get to choose only the joy To experience true bliss. You must also allow for pain. Spiritual growth isn't about escaping discomfort. It's about learning to hold your pain with love and to know that two things can be true at once. You can feel fear and still know you're safe. Fear and still know you're safe. Feel grief and still know you're whole. You can feel anger and still remain rooted in love. That is the freedom spiritual healing offers Not freedom from being human, but freedom within being human. As Brianna Weist says, we are not meant to heal our way out of being human. We are meant to allow being human to heal us. That's exactly what this work is about allowing the full human experience to teach us, guide us and expand our capacity for love, compassion and presence.
Speaker 1:Before we close, I want to leave you with some questions to ponder, as always, this time about your own beliefs around transcendence. 1. Do you believe spiritual growth means escaping your humanity or fully embracing it? 2. When you feel difficult emotions anger, grief, fear how do you usually respond? Are you trying to push them away or are you willing to sit with them and see what they can teach you? Three what would change in your life if you saw transcendence not as rising above life, but as a new way of relating to everything that shows up the highs, the lows and everything in between? Take a moment to reflect on these. The answers you discover might shift not just your spiritual growth but how you experience your entire life. Remember, the goal isn't to escape your feelings or rise above them. The goal is to expand your capacity to be with them. The next time something uncomfortable arises anxiety, sadness, frustration pause and try this. Instead of saying I shouldn't be feeling this, try saying this too is part of being human and I can hold it. That's transcendence, that's healing, and it is so much more powerful than escape.
Speaker 1:Thank you for being here with me today. If you enjoyed this episode, please hit follow or subscribe so you don't miss the next one. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and remember, know who you are, love who you've been and be willing to do the work to become who you want to be. Just a quick reminder this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist or any other qualified provider. That said, I hope it inspires you to grow, heal and seek the support you need to thrive.
