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Do you identify as a spiritual seeker or someone on the path of spiritual awakening or committed to inner growth? Have you ever felt stuck, like you're doing something wrong or that you backslid and somehow failed a test from the divine? If so, this episode is for you. This is part one of a two-part series where we're going to unpack the key elements of inner development and spiritual awakening, and why love, as insipid as it sounds, really is the answer. Welcome back to Roots of the Rise with me, sarah Hope.

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This episode is part one of a two-part series exploring the inner development journey, and I want to show you how synchronicities and the divine often set things up perfectly. I had been thinking about this topic, about the challenges people face along the spiritual path and what kind of that inner development journey really looks like, and I had started to outline what I wanted that inner development journey really looks like, and I had started to outline what I wanted to share on this topic. Last week and then this past weekend, I got to spend a day with my mentor during his annual teacher update and guess what his focus was on this exact topic. So I went back and I did some revisions to include my favorite nuggets of what he shared because they were so good, and we don't gatekeep here. Before we dive into the different aspects of spiritual development, though, we need to establish one very important key truth, and that is that every spiritual path eventually leads to love. What we understand intellectually as things like compassion. Love what we understand intellectually as things like compassion, forgiveness, joy, gratitude, acceptance, presence. Many traditions treat this as like a late stage goal, something that you eventually start to cultivate, but my experience and what I've learned through heart-based meditation is that beginning with love is actually the fastest path to healing and transformation. I mean, part of me still cringes to say it because I mean, I've said this before for the first 35 years of my life, love was scary. You know, I loved love.

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I was always in relationships starting in like first grade, you know like, but hearts like mushy, sentiment being vulnerable. That was something I avoided. You know, depth, the depth of relationship was something that really scared me. Love felt like danger. Opening up meant risking pain and rejection, abandonment, betrayal. My childhood was full of mixed messages. I mean, my mom would effusively tell me she loved me and then, five minutes later, be spewing intense criticism and blame it me, and that pattern made me wary of opening my heart and I carried that fear into adulthood right. I made mistakes in relationships. I avoided vulnerability. I even delayed becoming a mother because I was so certain I was going to pass on the same patterns.

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For months I blocked my heart entirely. When I learned heart-based meditation, I didn't even do the heart part of it, not because I intended not to, but because I subconsciously just didn't even hear it in the training. So you know, I very much believed, I knew, I thought that shutting down would be what kept me safe, but it didn't. It only created a cycle of closed off pain. So what changed was that, you know, I learned heart-based meditation, the guidance that, very slowly and intentionally, with a lot of support, allowed me to begin to explore the facets of the heart, to explore the essence of love, to actually really experience what it energetically feels like, and I was able to cultivate compassion and forgiveness for everyone who would hurt me. I know I was able to come into acceptance for myself and have gratitude for my path and experience joy I never imagined possible. I learned how to live a life aligned with who I truly am and, as much as it still surprises me to say it.

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Love was the key. You know, love really does heal all. Living from the heart is actually the most powerful answer to every form of the question how do I heal from this? When we radiate love through acceptance, presence, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, compassion, our hearts naturally dissolve the darkness. As Dr Martin Luther King said, darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that. When love is our primary directive, when we begin to cultivate love intentionally, when we give ourselves the ability, the experience of being able to settle into the energetic essence of love, we raise our vibration and perception, which allows us to see reality more clearly. It allows us to hold both human and spiritual truths and heal faster. We don't need to be fully healed, fully purified or perfect to embody love. Love itself is the light that dissolves the darkness.

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Yes, I know that sounds easier said than done and in the beginning you are right, it is not easy. It would be awesome if we could just snap our fingers and be in the essence of love and have all those spiritual tenets be embodied and simply part of us. But let's be real here. That is not how it works for most of us. For like 99.9% of us, the path of inner healing and spiritual development is gradual, not an overnight awakening. What it is, as Dr Douglas puts, it, is a perceptual unfolding. It's unfolding of a greater reality we are learning to perceive at a higher vibration. We're learning to perceive the energy of love. It's not just changing belief or changing how you think about things. It is a transformation and how reality itself appears to us. Now, of course, there are many different ways to do this, but I'm going to share with you what I know, which is how it works with heart-based meditation. So with this method, we intentionally begin by cultivating an awareness of the subtle energy of the heart, the energy of love. This is why it's so effective and why people who have practiced other methods often experience rapid shifts when they start meditating in this way. It's not that anything external is actually changing. It's that our perception of reality is being up-leveled. We gain the ability to look at an awful situation and be able to hold both the human reality and the spiritual perfection.

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Now I want to talk about the different phases or elements of spiritual development. But understand there is not a fixed order. We often experience aspects of multiple stages, multiple elements at the same time, sometimes even like three in one day. They might overlap, they might arise in unexpected sequences or return again in a new way. Consciousness growth. It is not a straight line. It is a spiral where we continuously come back to things we thought we understood and see them in a new way. This is the way of growth, of inner development. So it's not backsliding, it's just. This is how we grow, this is how it works, and every phase requires humility, discernment, in order to evolve in a sustainable way. So it's important to not listen to what I'm about to say and immediately slide into judgment about yourself, about where you are. These phases are not a test. They're not a measuring stick. Judging yourself for where you're at is only going to do you a disservice. Not a measuring stick. Judging yourself for where you're at is only going to do you a disservice. Every level, every part of this carries its own joy, its own wisdom and opportunities. So think of what I'm about to share as a way of understanding where you might be and what patterns you might need to be mindful of as you walk this path. Okay, so let's begin.

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Every inner development journey begins with an awakening. Sometimes it is dramatic. It's like a life crisis, a health scare, someone we love dies. Other times it's a little more gentle, like an experience we have during a meditation retreat, a psychedelics not that that's always gentle or a religious experience. Awakening is the moment we remember who we really are. We sense, even just for one moment, that there's something deeper guiding us, that the divine spirit, source, god, whatever it is, however you think of it is not separate from us but is within us, and it's in that moment we see reality, unfiltered by our usual beliefs and programming. So for some it might even be like an aha moment during a therapy session. But it's never just a cognitive understanding. We have like a felt experience of it. We know this new truth on a deeper level and that's when we realize like I'm not just my body, I'm not just my thoughts or my emotions. I'm more than that. The invitation here is to trust. It is to honor this pull out of nowhere towards meaning, even when it feels inconvenient or confusing.

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Awakening doesn't mean you have to have everything figured out. It means you have opened the door to a more conscious, heart-centered life. And this can be hard because, as anyone who's been through this can tell you, it can feel very destabilizing. I mean old identities and roles no longer fit. And what do you do with that? I mean, clients often say I know I felt it too, that like my life is falling apart, there's something great trying to come through, but I don't know how to get there. I don't know how to do this, you know, and that paradox, that's the essence of awakening. It's wonderful and it's also like confusing and hard and therefore we might doubt the experience, we might dismiss it, we might struggle to integrate it.

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You know, this is one of the problems that we have with psychedelics like ayahuasca. Now, let's be clear, I'm not down on these practices. They can be incredibly transformational, especially in therapeutic contexts. I mean, there is a ton of research out there now showing how psychedelics can support healing PTSD in veterans, for instance. So I am not saying that we should not use them. They can be great. They can be great. But I am saying that they need to be approached with respect and caution, because sometimes we get more than we bargained for.

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Sometimes the nervous system simply is not ready to hold the intensity of the experience, and it can essentially, we can essentially kind of short circuit. So any method that opens us to higher consciousness, whether it's meditation, psychedelics, some sort of deep devotional practice, like all of it needs to be done with care, intention and ideally with help, with supervision or mentorship of some sort. And yeah, so, with all that said, once you've had that glimpse of something bigger, something more, something inside you shifts Like you can't unknow it, you can't unsee it. Something inside you shifts Like you can't unknow it, you can't unsee it, and that's when you begin to shift into wanting more of it, of chasing the experience, of longing to feel it again. Now, that chase might take the form of more psychedelic journeys, or it could mean starting a consistent meditation practice.

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You know, trying out all the different healing modalities, searching for a hopefully not a guru, but for a mentor of some sort. You know mentalities searching for a hopefully not a guru, but for a mentor of some sort. You know diving into spiritual studies, entering therapy. I mean, this is where all the old patterns rise up, emotions intensify and life often feels way harder before it gets better. But you're not doing anything wrong, you're being invited to the next level of growth.

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I came across a quote from Alana Fairchild that I love. She said there is a compliment inherent in being allotted life challenges. If something big has shown up on someone's path, then the universe is basically saying they are enough of a spiritual badass to deal with it. It's a vote of divine confidence. If you or another are battling something, you can choose to feel awe and respect rather than fear or despair. All you seekers, write that down, Keep it somewhere. You will see it daily, because this stage, this part of growth and healing, can feel so long and so hard.

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This is where mentoring can become so valuable, because it's easy to get scattered. Here you start learning about different spiritual methods, modalities, techniques, and before you know it, you're bouncing around from one to the next. You know, you try one type of meditation for a month, think it's not working. You switch to another. Oh, I like that person. Oh, no, now they said one thing I don't agree with, so I'm going to throw them out. You know I always think of it like digging a hole to China. If you dig 50 shallow holes and keep hopping around, it's going to take forever to break through. Yes, I know you don't break through, but you get me. But if you have a mentor who can point you to the easiest path, who can give you the right tools for your specific soil, so to speak, the unique traumas and conditioning your healing well, then your journey accelerates. A mentor can also remind you not to get addicted to peak states or altered experiences, mistaking intensity for depth or confusing spiritual experience with spiritual embodiment. You know they can help you avoid two common pitfalls One, spiritual bypassing.

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I'm spiritual, so I never feel anger or grief or the opposite of the spectrum, over-identifying with your wounds. My pain is my whole identity. You know this is also the stage where we start forming the identity of being someone who is on the path. I am someone who is on the spiritual journey and that identity, while useful, can also become another trap, you know it can keep us stuck in this loop of, you know, seeking of searching. The real lesson here is realizing there is no separation between spiritual life and regular life. It's all spiritual.

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The question isn't what will get me another high, another escape, help me transcend my humanness. It's how can I deepen my connection to love? What will help me embody love more fully in my everyday life? There's a lot more to say on this topic, which is why we're going to have a day two, but I want to stop here while we're talking about asking questions and give you some journal prompts to consider. So here we go.

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Where in your life do you feel fear, resistance or avoidance around love, compassion or vulnerability? What would it feel like to open your heart in that area, even a little? Do you cringe when you hear me say love is the answer. Why? When have you experienced a moment of profound clarity, awe or spiritual insight? What did you learn? What did it teach you about who you truly are? Or put another way, think back to that moment when you felt a glimpse of your deeper self or a sense of guidance from the divine. How did that moment shift your perception of yourself or your life?

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In the next episode we go deeper into the journey of spiritual development. We'll explore purification, shadow work and the integration of experience, showing how facing your inner darkness with love really does accelerate your growth. If you've been feeling like facing your demons is an endless battle, remember to hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss it. Thank you for listening. I so appreciate your support. 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.