10/23/2025
Have you heard the phrases โwaking upโ and โgrowing upโ with regard to personal/spiritual development? Hereโs how I think of these things:
Waking up is the insight that there is more to life than you knew. Sometimes itโs spiritual: you have an unexplainable awakening โ for a moment, everything is made of love. Maybe you discover your lifeโs purpose, or you have an experience of knowing deep in your bones that life doesnโt stop when you die.
Waking up can also be a kind of rude awakening, for example suddenly seeing that your life is not your own โ that youโve been living for other people, youโre not fulfilled, nor do you know anything about how to be fulfilled.
Waking up is a flash of insight, a sudden knowing, a bones-deep taste of whatโs really really true for you.
So whatโs growing up? Well, itโs the much harder part. Growing up is the practice needed to integrate your awakening. For example, if you wake up one morning and realize youโve been living for others, growing up will mean learning what living for YOU looks like and then making real strides to do that. Growing up is heeding your wake-up call, not dismissing it just because no one else agrees or sees what you see. Growing up is HARD and it doesnโt happen on its own.
You can think of waking up as a taste of your potential, and growing up as the grit and grunt of birthing it.
In Healing Work, we do both. By exploring whatโs true for you, sometimes we bump into great awakenings, but most of the time we explore all of the thoughts and ideas and barriers to knowing and living whatโs really really true. It takes time, sincerity, and a certain kind of maturity to bother, since itโs definitely not the easy way. This is why I call it Healing Work, not Healing Fun! But even though itโs work, growing up satisfies like nothing else.