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What is Spiritual Growth?

Updated: Feb 22

Spiritual growth is the journey of your lifetime. It involves continual surrender and letting go, and looking inwards rather than outwards for your joy, peace, love, abundance, meaning, and purpose.


The best acronym I have heard for God is 'Grow Or Die.' Instead of endlessly worrying, allow divine intervention to ease your anxieties. Have Faith that clarity will be found.


Remember you have a track record of getting through some difficult times. Don’t let temporary disruption make you forget the multiple times you overcame adversity. Remember how powerful you are. Roger Miller said that "Some people walk in the rain. Others just get wet." Which are you?


I studied medicine for many years and have a number of higher degrees and yet I was never taught any wisdom. Bulleh Shah wrote (it could have been written about me) "You studied all the time and became a scholar. Yet you never bothered reading your own soul. You are always eager to enter temples and mosques. Yet you never bothered entering your own heart." Does this resonate with you?


Most people are lost in their minds and are suffering and in despair. This results in anxiety, depression and feeling empty. This has become the human condition. This is due to past experience and conditioning by our parents and society determining all of our thoughts, emotions and beliefs. Spiritual growth is the way out...


What is spiritual growth?


What is spiritual growth?

Spiritual growth is a process of surrender, acceptance, non-resistance to what is, non-judgement, and non-attachment. It is the greatest thing you will ever do. It means taking a ‘Hero’s Journey’ to discover your ‘BEingness’ and who you truly are. It is a deep realisation that all is well and that whatever challenges you are going through, that you can handle them, and that they too shall pass.


Spiritual growth involves breathwork, prayer, meditation, and mindfulness. It requires connection with others in order to deflate your petrified ego and choose your Higher Self at all times.


It involves developing Faith and always choosing to come from a place of love regardless of the situation. It involves losing your sense of separateness and being at one with the Universe. Spiritual growth involves becoming of service to other human beings and no longer obsessively thinking about yourself, your wants, and your desires. It is a place of getting what you need.


It involves developing wisdom rather than knowledge. It involves developing your intuition and your self-reflection. It is a journey into presence and living in the now. You will just keep crashing if you never take your eyes off the rearview mirror!


Spiritual growth involves seeking to cultivate qualities such as compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude. It involves a renewing of your mind and a rebirth into the second half of your life. It means a life based on love rather than fear.


There is a vast difference between having a brief spiritual experience and becoming established in a permanent spiritual state: Just as there is a vast difference between living in London and visiting London. So, how does one work with those differences? You can have experiences along the way, and they can be inspiring.


You are not your thoughts

You are enmeshed in this mass of thoughts and emotions. They are consistent; you have a personality (ego); you have a way of doing things; you like things; you say things and you think that that's who you are. Those are things that you're experiencing - they're not who you are, but you don't know that when you are lost. Pretty much everyone is lost. That's why I don't judge. I have compassion for everyone nowadays: You see there's all kinds of people who have trouble. Well, they behave accordingly - fine - you had better accept that. This is how it is. This is not a very high plane. There are much higher planes. The vast majority of people are lost in their minds.


Witness consciousness

Spiritual growth is realising that the Universe does not bend to your will. Therefore you have to change on the inside to deal with the fact that you can’t influence the outside. It involves letting go of negative thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. Most people are lost in this place. They get upset when they don't get what they want. As you wake up you come to realise that you are not your thoughts, emotions, or beliefs. You are the witness. You will eventually reach a state of 'witness consciousness'.


You can use deep meditations. But they are not who you are - they are experiences that you had. So, how does one understand those differences and work with them? This is different to achieving the state that establishes you in a permanent state of BEing. The starting position is that you are lost. It means that your thoughts and emotions are so powerful and distracting that you don't even know that they are not you.


Surrender means to surrender your ego and so deal with the world from a place of total clarity.


The more you work on your Self, the more you will understand why other people behave like they do and what reactions and processes they are subconsciously carrying out due to their human conditioning.


Spiritual growth leads to spritual bliss. It is a lifelong process. The ultimate goal of spritual growth is Self-realisation and Enlightenment: It is a stairway to 'Heaven' on this earth. It is a place of miracles. It is a place of infinite possibilty.


You are enmeshed in thoughts and emotions. People are lost in their minds and emotions. Lost in their personal minds. The mind that got made, based on your past experiences and conditioning. It ends up being filled with likes, dislikes, dreams, hopes, beliefs, and preferences. Beliefs and Faith are a mental state of mind. The mind and the heart are in cahoots. They conspire. If your mind opens, your heart talks nicely. You have thoughts and emotions and they are very powerful. They are powerful because they are based on the things that you kept inside of you and buried (your emotions). These were strong things that affected your heart. Because of the power that you gave them, you weren't able to let them go. You held onto them. The pattern was stuck in your mind. Most of them were strongly negative. Why are they mostly negative? It's because you built preferences over the course of your life. If things happen that hit those preferences in the wrong way then they are negative. How many things that you could list on a piece of paper that would blow your mind in a good way? Compare that to how many things that you could write down on a piece of paper that would freak you out or that you don't like: Way more than things that you do like. It's because you set up these mental processes.


The first step is to realise that you are lost

The world doesn't unfold that way. You get disappointed or scared. The first step is to realise that you are lost. You built these mental thought patterns and the world is not likely to be ther way that you want. You think you have to make it be what you want or make sure that it's not what you don't want. And so you are left struggling with life because you have these issues inside. So that's the starting position. It's very difficult to live that way. Your entire life, you had a list of what you want, and a list of what you don't want. You struggle with the outside to make sure that it's going to be that way. And guess what you're still doing it.


Your whole psyche is the sum of your learned experiences. Your heart and your mind are programmed by past experiences. Your preferences in your hopes and dreams are the results of your learned experiences. Life is not going to be the way that you want. Things will naturally be the way that they are. You are going about trying to manipulate the world to make it the way that you want. That's just not going to happen. You can't fight the Universe. The Universe will not naturally be the way you want it to be. People don't do well when the moment in front of them doesn't turn out to be the way that they want. You only seem to do well when the moment in front of you matches what you want it to be.


We need to evolve inside

We are the highest species on the planet. We have evolved wonderfully outside but we need to start evolving wonderfully inside.


All species focus on survival. The problem is that you are running away from your inside. Your starting position of evolution is that you are lost in you. And you are trying to make you and everything else be the way that you want them to be. People's psyches are programmed entirely by their past experience. There is only one world out there and we are trying to manipulate it to become exactly as we want. This sounds stressful and full of anxiety but you do not have to live like that. There should be no stress and no anxiety. This is only stressful because you get stressed if what you want doesn't happen and if what you don't want does happen. And then you are out there trying to make manipulate the world to make whatever it is happen. That’s stage 1: That’s the basement. So that's the problem of the human race, not understanding that they have been programmed to like or dislike what is happening. People are then depressed if they don't get what they want or if they get what they don't want. So this is the starting position. This is what happens.


The major next step is to realise that you are not your thoughts. You are the one who is watching them.


Waking up

You can wake up after an extraordinary experience and you realise that there is something beautiful inside of you. Or you may wake up after deep suffering. Through trauma there may be transformation. In either case you want to feel better as much of the time as possible. 'Efforting' and ‘hustling’ do not work. You feel that you have to find a way out. You can start to seek help, so that you can start to feel better.


Those who know and love you unconditionally will allow your spiritual growth: Werner Erhard said that "Love is granting someone the space to be who they are, and to be who they aren't, so they can change if they want to, and they don't have to."


Work on your Self

You start to lift your Self up and realise that it can be nicer inside. Guess who did it? It must be you as you are the only one in there. The next stage of awakening is to start doing work on your Self. Your consciousness is who you are. You are the being who is aware of your thoughts. This is ‘witness consciousness’. You have found a way of separating your Self from the part of you that tends to be negative, needy, and fearful. When you reach a state of ‘witness consciousness’ how hard do you have to work to see what's in front of you? Zero. The same is true of the inner work. It was just consciousness being aware of what's in front of it. The one who is established in the seat of Self looks down at their thoughts and they are not caught up by them. There is a sense of perspective here. You are not pulled down by your thoughts. You are just aware of them. You are just noticing. That is witness consciousness.


What is happening? Consciousness is extracting itself from what it's looking at. You have a much higher question - why is this there? You, over the course of your life, have had experiences that are not comfortable. What did you do? You pushed them away. So, now you're scared of them, and you want out. They keep coming back up. That's because you shoved fear down inside of you for your entire life. And you don’t want that stuff inside of you. Your heart has a more sophisticated system of getting this rubbish out of there.The system of purification, the Shakti, wants to feel love and beauty. Shakti is a Hindu concept that represents the Divine Feminine in all of us and the power that sustains the Universe. It is often depicted as a goddess, and is associated with creation, maintenance, and the Universe. 


Your natural state is love

It's not naturally a mess inside of you. It's beautiful. Your natural state is love. All the time. What you have done is to be evolved enough to be able to handle what goes on in there. You suppress and resist all this stuff. So, you work on it. And you realise that you won’t trade off this beautiful natural state and summary of learned experiences.


You spend way more time not meditating than meditating. So what happens during this time is way more important than when you're meditating. Your practise is not shoving more emotions down there.


Stop bothering your Self

Start working with your Self constantly. Learn to get higher and not to be uptight. A major part of your growth is your everyday life. Remember that the moment in front of you is not what is bothering you. You are bothering yourself over the moment in front of you.


You get to the point where if you are able to handle it then it no longer bothers you. That when something bigger happens you can handle that too. So, start with the low hanging fruit. Have fun! There is no point in getting uptight and upset about everything which you know you do. Work with your Self and then you can handle bigger and bigger things. Every time you get used to handle what used to bother you then you can deal with these bigger and bigger things. What does it feel like not to be bothered by something that you used to feel bothered by? It feels great! It’s your natural state to feel good. You do not have to work to feel good. Your natural state is ecstasy; bliss. Total Satchitananda – Truth, consciousness, bliss. You don't feel it as you have pushed all this rubbish on top of it so you don't access it. Stop closing your heart. It will start feeling nice in there. You don’t need to go down. Then you don’t need to get back up. Your natural state will lift you up. There is a natural spiritual state that occurs when you let go of the rubbish. Why would you want to go down? You let go of what was holding you down. Stop bothering your Self. Then you will stop being bothered. This is how you will find the uplifting energy. Just do the inner work. Commit to stop bothering your Self. Let go of the part of you that wants to go back down. Stop closing your heart. There is no door to close: It is always open. There is no one inside you but you. Make it nice in there. Eventually you will reach the point where it's so nice in there that you don't have to do anything.


The seat of your soul

Now you reach a state where you are established in the seat of your soul. You deal with things. But you don't have to come down to deal with anything. You can't go any higher. Spiritual growth just happens to you. It dawns on you - where did you come from - you are no longer being pulled away from your Self. You are like an air balloon where you feel a force pulling you up and the tethers have been cut. Now the letting go is letting go of the innate fear of not existing.


Jesus said in John 10:30-38 that "I and the Father are one." You are looking down at your own thoughts. You are no longer trying to leave God. You are done with the addiction to your Self. It's just surrender. This is the stairway to Heaven on earth. You can use your life to do something truly great. You are in a God-realised state. This is the meaning of life: Self-realisation. In Islam, there's this saying "One who knows himself, knows his Lord Almighty."


Bill Wilson wrote 'As Bill Sees It' that "Pain is the touchstone of spiritual progress... Emotional turmoil before serenity." This does not mean that you have to suffer. Suffering is in direct proportion to your resistance of reality. Wilson continued "Believe more deeply. Hold your face up to the Light, even though for the moment you do not see... To us, the realm of the spirit is broad, roomy, all inclusive, never exclusive or forbidding to those who earnestly seek. It is open, we believe, to all men." He wrote further that "We find that bit by bit we can discard the old life - the one that did not work - for a new life that can and does work under any conditions whatever. Regardless of worldly success or failure, regardless of pain or joy, regardless of sickness or health or even of death itself, a new life of endless possibilities can be lived if we are willing to continue our awakening... Meditation is our step out into the sun... Constructive meditation is the first requirement for each new step in our spiritual growth... The more we become willing to depend upon a Higher Power, the more independent we actually are. Therefore, dependence... is really a means of gaining true independence of the spirit... We did not always come closer to wisdom by reason of our virtues; our better understanding is often rooted in the pains of our former follies."



Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly



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Hello,

I am delighted and enchanted to meet you. I coach men with 'Deep Coaching', 'Supercoaching', and Transformative Life Coaching (TLC). Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my email for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching on Zoom or in person. 


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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have a number of other higher qualifications in science and surgery. I have published over 50 peer reviewed PubMed cited scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for over five years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.




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