Is your spiritual path helping or hindering your psychological growth?

After a series of experiences that deeply shaped and clarified my own psycho-spiritual beliefs, I found myself wanting to reflect on the importance of choosing spiritual paths and communities that support — rather than bypass — our humanity, emotional reality, and psychological growth.

More and more, I find myself drawn toward approaches to spirituality that are psychologically grounded, emotionally honest, compassionate, and spacious enough to include the fullness of our human experience. Because while we may be souls having a human experience, we are still having a human experience. And to live meaningful, connected, and emotionally healthy lives, I don’t believe we can afford to ignore either aspect of ourselves.

This article is an exploration of some of the psycho-spiritual truths I’ve personally landed on over the years — through healing work, lived experience, reflection, relationships, community experiences, and many moments of unlearning and re-understanding along the way.

As always, I invite you to take what resonates, leave what doesn’t, and stay connected to your own inner knowing as you read.

Here we go…

1. Our emotions aren’t the enemy.

Many modern spiritual or new age teachings teach that anger, frustration, etc. are low vibrational emotions that should be avoided at all costs. Hmm… well what are you to do if you are a human being and you have these emotions? (which is all of us, by the way) By stating that some emotions are good and others are bad, teachings like these can sometimes unintentionally leave people feeling ashamed of their humanity, emotions, or inner experience.

As one of my favorite authors, Toko-pa Turner, says “We live under a kind of hegemony of positivity which emphasizes happiness over sadness, pleasure over pain, gain over loss, and the creative over the destructive.” And I don’t know about you, but to me, this feels like a really fractured way to live; it feels like a practice that further separates us from our true Self or soul rather than brings us closer to it (the intention of genuine spirituality).

We can’t heal by rejecting parts of ourselves and we can’t banish parts of who we are and expect to feel complete. We’ve got to find a way to include everything.

2. Discernment matters.

Related to the above, your judging mind is not out to get you. It’s here to help you.

In my latest experience that prompted me to write this article, I joined a program on a spiritual topic with a pretty well-known spiritual teacher and quickly saw that I would not be able to engage in the teachings with a sense of curiosity and ask questions about how the spiritual philosophy being taught aligns – or doesn’t align— with other truths that I hold close. Upon asking questions from a place of curiosity and a desire for greater understanding, I was reprimanded for judging and removed from the community. (I’ve chosen not to share the name of the spiritual teacher and community publicly, but if you are considering joining a spiritual program and would like to make sure it isn’t this one, feel free to reach out to confirm. We would be happy to.)

My current truth is that yes, of course our goal is not to walk through life judging rather than being kind and compassionate to everybody but there is a big gray area between judgment and blind compassion or blind allegiance. And that gray area is where our discernment lives. (Thank you to my dear friend and colleague, Tieg Alexander, for the conversation that brought forth and confirmed this understanding). And this is where discernment becomes not only important, but necessary. Without using our mind to discern whether people’s behavior is or is not in alignment with our personal values, we would entirely ignore the signals that our mind and emotions send us and leave ourselves vulnerable to emotionally unhealthy, manipulative, or psychologically unsafe dynamics, including the dangers of following spiritual principles and teachers that do not welcome discernment and critical questioning of the principles they are teaching.

Anyone who has been part of controlling, emotionally unsafe, manipulative, or psychologically unhealthy dynamics has likely learned the necessity of listening to your emotions as a guidance system rather than ignoring them altogether. They have also learned that nuances are important. Compassion is a state to aspire to, but not always. Judgment is something to shy away from, but not always. And so on.

3. You can’t escape your fears. You need to integrate and heal your fears.

In one spiritual community I came across, there was a strong emphasis on “challenging” frightened parts of ourselves in order to act instead from more loving parts. And while I deeply resonate with the intention of helping people live from greater love, compassion, and alignment, I’ve personally found that healing rarely happens through fighting, overriding, shaming, or dismissing the parts of us that carry fear.

In my experience, the parts of us that hold fear, anxiety, defensiveness, shame, or protection are usually carrying pain for a reason. They developed within us intelligently in response to life experiences, relationships, wounds, losses, environments, or moments where we didn’t feel safe, supported, loved, or emotionally secure. And often, real healing begins not when we challenge those parts into silence, but when we begin relating to them with greater curiosity, compassion, understanding, and care.

Healing, at least in my experience, is less about forcefully trying to transcend our pain and more about gradually changing the way we relate to it. It’s about learning, little by little, how to meet our fear, grief, shame, hurt, vulnerability, and protective responses with greater compassion, safety, presence, and understanding rather than rejection or self-abandonment.

Much of the work I explore inside Happy from the Inside Out® grew out of this very understanding — learning how to create a more compassionate, connected, and emotionally honest relationship with ourselves from the inside out.

4. You can’t will yourself out of unresolved emotional hurt and trauma.

While cognitive strategies are used in the field of psychology, you can't heal simply by changing your mind. I believe true change and healing begin in the nervous system, not in the mind. Hurt and trauma, after all, are experienced through our nervous system, and not just our mind. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Spiritual teachings, when not combined with psychological truths, are often over-simplified notions of change because they don’t take into account how trauma impacts the nervous system.

Because of this, spiritual (especially new age) teachings at times appear to be another bandage approach to true joy, where instead of healing the pain and trauma that causes us to act out on limiting beliefs and narratives, we focus our attention on not retelling those narratives using immense will and self-control— which, because our pain and trauma remain unhealed— just keep popping up over and over again. Saying for example, as the aforementioned community might, "You might think that your sorrow comes from the death of a friend, but it does not. It comes from the energy leaving your system in fear and doubt” doesn’t seem to support the soul that’s having a human experience and it does little for your psychological development because you can’t will yourself out of unresolved emotional hurt and trauma.

When we turn this understanding into a psycho-spiritual one, we can understand that what’s happening when we feel physical sensations in the body (like tightness in our chest, a rigidity in our throat, or a piercing feeling in the head) is that we are recognizing a trauma response in action… we are experiencing hurt, loss, anger, frustration, or grief (as in the example above). And this trauma response deserves our undivided and loving attention. Our spirituality deserves to include the fullness of our human experience, not just bits of it.

5. A safe container is vital for psychological and spiritual growth.

Becoming a more loving person out there in the world often begins with learning how to relate more compassionately to ourselves in here in our inner world. It becomes difficult to extend genuine compassion outward when we’re still relating to vulnerable, fearful, or protective parts of ourselves primarily through shame, rejection, criticism, or force.

And over time, I’ve come to notice how deeply the way people relate to themselves internally tends to shape the kinds of relationships, communities, and environments they create externally as well.

That’s part of why experiences like being removed from that spiritual community without dialogue or conversation beforehand stayed with me. Experiences like that only deepened my appreciation for communities and healing spaces that value compassion, communication, emotional safety, curiosity, and the ability for people to use their voices openly.

Over time, experiences like this have also changed the kinds of spaces, people, and communities I find myself feeling safest, most open, and most grounded around. I notice myself drawn less toward spaces that prioritize performance, certainty, blind positivity, or unquestioned agreement, and more toward spaces that make room for authenticity, curiosity, emotional honesty, discernment, compassion, and genuine humanity.

And interestingly, I think so much of that begins internally first. When someone begins replacing self-shame and self-rejection with greater compassion, understanding, and care internally, that shift naturally tends to ripple outward into the way they relate to other people too.

I don’t know about you, but I’d personally rather be surrounded by people who are authentic and genuinely kind — and who inspire me to be authentic too — than by people who appear loving and positive on the surface but don’t leave much room for real humanity underneath.

6. We grow spiritually not by ascending reality, but by learning to live in it.

Some spiritual spaces and teachings can unintentionally encourage people to disconnect from difficult emotions or bypass painful realities in the pursuit of positivity, transcendence, or “high vibration” states. To me, that sounds like a whole lot of spiritual bypassing right there. The term spiritual bypassing, if you haven’t heard it before, refers to using spirituality to bypass one’s emotional hurts, pains, and trauma. If we’re feeling pressured to or pressuring ourselves to maintain a certain type of “vibration” or positive mindset, then guess what? We’re bypassing our physical reality which, in case you haven’t noticed, is filled with all sorts of moments and emotions, everything from elation, satisfaction, and joy to deep sadness, sorrow, and grief. If we’re forcing ourselves to maintain positive feelings at all costs, we are engaging in emotional avoidance.

To me, being human was never meant to involve escaping the fullness of our humanity. After all, we are souls having a human experience, not souls accidentally having a human experience who need to desperately learn to get out of it. And so, it helps us to learn to live in the natural fluctuations of life, and that’s what gentle, loving healing work, that I’ve described in various ways above, is all about.

7. Sometimes it helps to separate the teachings from the teachers (and students).

There are spiritual communities whose teachings, from my heart’s perspective, could easily help create more love within us and around us in the world. But in practice, you may find that it is far from being the case. In practice, these spiritual teachings might actually lead to less love internally and externally… not because the teachings are bad or lacking in some way, but because human and fallible teachers and students likely misunderstood and/or misused them. So, sometimes it’s necessary to take the teachings and leave the rest. And that’s something that we can expect to do throughout our lives because as humans, we are likely to misinterpret and misuse information we come across from time to time.

In a similar vein, I think it’s really important to remember to take parts of teachings that resonate with you and leave parts that don’t. I hope that you will tune in to your own heart and intuition and do the same with these truths.

A few final words… There are many different paths that align with different people at different times for different reasons. Whatever path you choose, I hope it’s one that encourages rather than stifles your authenticity, that loves you in your fear rather than shames, blames, and talks you out of it, that makes space for the difficult, painful, messy, and deeply human parts of your experience rather than denying or bypassing them, that welcomes nuances instead of black and white thinking, and that helps you be more present to this always beautiful and sometimes confusing, unexpected, and messy thing called life.

More and more, I find myself drawn toward approaches to spirituality that are trauma-informed, psychologically grounded, compassionate, emotionally honest, and spacious enough to include the fullness of our humanity (thank you to my conversation with my dear friend and colleague, Kristen Chazaud, for this awareness).

I created The Soul Journal very much from the reflections explored in this article — as a gentle, grounded space for self-reflection, inner honesty, emotional awareness, and deeper connection with yourself that doesn’t require bypassing, shaming, or abandoning parts of your humanity along the way.

Note: This article was originally written several years ago and has been lightly updated to reflect my current work and offerings.