Accelerated Growth and the Spiritual Work of the Soul

There are times in your spiritual life in which you do practice, study, learn, grow, contemplate, and have insights and realizations that fuel your path and inspire you forward. And then there are times when the accumulated work of years seems to lead to an accelerated shift in awareness during a period of deep integration and unification.

I am currently experiencing a time of accelerated synthesis where things I’ve experienced over many years are rapidly converging into a new perspective. During a New Year’s broadcast this year, I spoke about how I felt a shift was coming, and now I’m amazed to see it unfolding so dramatically.

Ideas and conclusions I’ve held for years are changing before my eyes. This is how transformation works. The past, present and future change all at once. You see yourself being a different person, living into a new future, and the past reconfigures to accommodate the person you have become.

Just over thirty years ago at the age of 29, I decided to leave everything – a lucrative career, a beautiful relationship, and most of my friends and family – so I could devote all of my energy to spiritual practice and the process of awakening.

For twenty years, I lived in a spiritual community where I could do unending spiritual work in the company of hundreds of people who were as devoted as I was to the path. The collective energy that was generated in that collection of kindred spirits catapulted many of us into profound heights of realization.

Just over ten years ago the community came to an end and I began to sift through my experience to discover the very best of what I had to offer and share it as an author and teacher. Initially I focused on the practice of meditation and the mystical philosophies I loved so much.

Now all that experience and more is coming together in a way that is recontextualizing what and how I want to share.

I’ve always spoken about two aspects of spiritual life. The deep release we find in meditation that leads to the surrender of control, and second, the mysterious journey through our breakthrough experiences that brings us into direct contact with higher dimensions of reality.

What is becoming clear to me now is that the release in meditation is the only spiritual work that can be accomplished by our ordinary Earthbound self and it culminates in a self-forgetting that liberates awareness from the assumption of being separate.

The journey through higher dimensions is not the spiritual work of our ordinary sense of self, it is the work of our soul. When awareness is liberated from the identity of the separate self, it merges with the higher dimensions of the soul and opens to a profound spiritual vision that illuminates invisible worlds of spirit.

I can’t honestly say that I didn’t know all this before. In a sense, this has always been what I saw in my heart of hearts to be true, but for years I didn’t fully admit it to myself, in part because it was different from the common view held in my community. Even after I began to admit it to myself, I still didn't have the courage to share it with others – until now.

This is another way that transformation works. Everything is revealed to us in our early awakening experiences and the path that we see as deepening our realization, is the journey that makes us willing to admit what we already know.

In my recent teachings, I am offering more detailed instructions for inner work than I ever have before and they are giving people greater access to higher dimensions of spirit. I honestly believe that the purpose of human existence is to illuminate spirit with the light of awareness, and that we can only truly find fulfillment by giving ourselves to that endeavor.

As I find greater access to those realms myself, the thing I want to do most is share it with anyone who is similarly inspired. The retreat that I will lead in North Carolina this summer will be the first in-person opportunity I have to share this in the ways I feel called to do.