Imbalances Caused by Spiritual Growth

I frequently get questions from people when they feel imbalanced in some way. What do I mean by imbalanced? I mean the mind is upset, or there are a lot of turbulent emotions. Sometimes people have very strong physical sensations or energetic experiences. These experiences are not part of the person’s usual set of experiences of themselves, or they’re lasting longer than usual.

So if someone is processing through a lot of fear, it may last longer than they’re used to feeling scared. This fear isn’t a “balanced” state. It’s an agitated state, and sometimes people get into these imbalanced states for awhile as they grow. Many people worry that something is going wrong.

In general, most painful experiences that people have in life get judged as being a sign that something bad is happening. For anyone who has ever had a difficult workout, you already know that pain and difficulty is not necessarily a sign of something bad. It can be a sign of growth. In many regards, this metaphor works well for certain aspects of the spiritual path and for spiritual growth in particular. So let’s use it as we explore spiritual growth and transformation.

Misunderstanding Spiritual Growth

There is a lot of effortless spiritual growth that arises on the spiritual path when we’ve been dedicated to our inner work and broken out of a layer or 5 of the ego. Interestingly enough, this growth can be deceptively quiet. It’s like you’re a peach tree growing with nothing to get in the way of your branches or your roots. You don’t really understand how much you are growing at times because there isn’t any resistance or external reference points to mark how “big” you’ve grown. It’s beautifully easy.

Many times, this easy time is misunderstood. People think that:

• Nothing is happening; or
• It’ll always be this easy; or
• They’re not growing in the right way

But our growth knows what to do with itself. When we’re truly surrendering, this spiritual growth decides when and how things should arise. It also decides when things are going to be more intense.

5 Qualities that Emerge from Effortless Spiritual Growth

Breaking Down Subtler Ego Levels

There are a lot of levels to our ego self, and it’s quite a journey at times to confront our most basic, primal instincts on which the ego is built. The Divine seems to understand that most people need to work up to that, and so we are lead to shed the ego through different layers. Some are easier, and some are harder. When things are harder, that usually means we have a lot more attachments to that layer of ego. And by “harder,” I am speaking to these times when we feel imbalanced in some way in our heart, mind, body, and/or energy, e.g. lots of emotions, upset thoughts, challenging sensations, and so forth. In general, if you’ve done serious inner work, you should be familiar with how breaking down issues causes you to feel these different kinds of disturbances.

How to Let Go of Your Ego

The ego is a kind of structure, and like any other structure if built improperly, you have to break it down as well as the stuff around it and rebuild it. If you built a wall incorrectly in your home, you have to tear out the stuff around it to get to the wall and then tear that down while possibly creating temporary supporting structures before putting in the new wall. Things get messy. But then you fix the wall. After which, the wall is in better alignment with your home, and a lot of temporary structures are no longer needed.

Yet these repeated times of ego messiness continue to be something that even long-time spiritual seekers struggle with (I know; I get a lot of questions from them). Assuming that they have learned to do inner work correctly (and a lot learn incorrectly), there are ways where we get expanded through spiritual growth that also create imbalances of all kinds. It’s not just about inner work. Spiritual growth and the way our Divine self takes over lead to all kinds of new changes and imbalances to be faced. So let’s talk about a few.

Weeping the Tears of Your Divinity

There is nothing quite like expanding the heart to evoke tears. The heart space gets stretched as someone comes into greater realization of their inner divinity, and that stretching can be intense. That intensity can call forth unexplainable tears. Going back to the workout metaphor, perhaps this is simply “heart-sweat” from this kind of spiritual workout. The person is being pushed and expanded to understand deeper levels of love, and that intensity can get expressed as a kind of sadness. You’re just overloaded.

However, you may not necessarily be overloaded with the feeling of love itself. In this way, this kind of heart expansion can be mysterious for many until they understand how this kind of spiritual growth works. This is also not about feeling sad for the world or anything else. If this unexplainable weeping experience arises for you, it’s best not to try and label it. It is, like so many other experiences on the spiritual path, something to surrender to.

Usually what happens after a period of this kind of sadness is an ending to the tears and a new depth in the heart space. Whether that depth expresses itself as a kind of emotional clarity, greater ease with difficult emotions, or a more overt sense of loving-kindness depends on the person and the specific spiritual shift. But with most of these intense destabilizing spiritual growth moments, there is a sense of having shifted after they’ve completed.

To be sure, there are mental health issues, and I do recommend people to see therapists when they have lots of uncontrollable emotions. In this above scenario and the others I am talking about today, there is usually a spiritual teacher, spiritual awakening, or some other level of energetic support that is moving the person.

Burning Sensations and Disturbances in the Groin

Because some of our most primal and powerful energy centers are below the belt, people can feel all kinds of intense sensations arising out of the pelvic region. As I’ve often mentioned before on this website, any chronic physical problem should be investigated with a licensed doctor. Furthermore, these disturbances and imbalances that I am discussing don’t stay in the area. They often move to different areas of the body, and they resolve as we surrender to them and support ourselves with the appropriate spiritual practices.

Since people are particularly sensitive to this area, any sort of burning, heat, pressures, tensions, sudden sexual urges, and so forth can be particularly worrying to people. But in the context of energy, things are being pressured and imbalanced to break the person out of their current energetic state. If we think of our ourselves like Russian nesting dolls, spiritual growth will grow easily until we run up against the next doll. Then we break through it, and we can grow again until we expand into the next bigger doll (in this metaphor we start out as a very, very, very, very tiny doll in the center of all these other Russian dolls, meaning these layers of ego and subtle energy fields).

When it comes to intense experiences in the groin region, it can be a lot to sit with. Assuming no actual physical issues nor any issues with physically sitting, meditating and breathing into those sensations is enough. The energy is smart enough to expand that energetic space in the pelvic region and then go where it needs to when someone is in these stages of spiritual growth. If the energy is getting stuck, you may need some outside support, but those who really understand this type of energetic transformation are rare. That’s why it’s usually better to surrender on your own rather than to have an energy healer who doesn’t understand these deep spaces of transformation tinkering in your energetic space.

Also when energy from the pelvic region releases, this type of energy likes to move upwards, and it’ll flow until it runs up against another area that isn’t open enough to receive it all. Then the pressure will resume there until it expands, and the flow can continue uninterrupted.

Getting Stuck at the Same Spaces Again and Again

Because of how people are, we tend to have some spaces that grow more slowly than others. Because of how dense the pelvic region is, we often return to that space again and again to transmute the energy there. If it’s helpful, you can think of the lower half of the body like iron. It takes a lot of heat to get that melted and flowing. The gut is like wet wood. The heart is like dry wood, and the mind really is just brittle, dry grass. It’s always read to burn up. What this means is it’s actually easiest to change a mind, although the ego makes it seem like this is difficult.

With that said, people often have different areas that are more shutdown for whatever reason. For example, some people have very closed hearts, and so that becomes an area that traps energy again and again. Other areas of the body and mind are far more open in this example, and so the person finds that they have to keep dealing with their heart over and over again.

Heart expansions often follow a certain pattern. First, a person expanding in the heart space often learns to open more lovingly to close family and friends. Then the heart opens more towards friends, and then it moves on to people the person is neutral towards. It continues to open to those that the ego does not like and then eventually to everyone. This is a common progression of truly opening the heart.

So a lot of growth already goes on there, but if someone has had a lot of violations and pain from loved ones, then this person is going to have had a lot of heart injuries to heal first. Other areas of themselves may be much more open already. So they keep returning to the heart space again and again, widening their capacities for love. Each time that happens, more emotions are likely to come out. Once again, this kind of energetic widening doesn’t necessarily bring up wounds; it’s just the intensity of spiritual transformation.

Spiritual Transformation and Seeking Spiritual Help for Your Process

Surrendering to Imbalances

Again and again, we learn to accept the imbalances that come. When the mind is imbalanced, thoughts run rampant, usually in the old unconscious thinking patterns. When the heart is imbalanced, all kinds of emotions come up. Maybe there is a lot of confusing emotions with love and joy intertwined. When the body is imbalanced, a lot of powerful and uncomfortable sensations can move through someone. When energy is imbalanced, any of the above can be happening along with a lot of pressures, buzzing, and tingling.

Energy-caused Involuntary Muscle Spasms or Kriyas

Truly, any part of us can be imbalanced, but the more we surrender, the more the process of spiritual growth takes care of us. The deeper states we realize on the spiritual path truly get realized for us after a certain point in our development. It’s like it’s all being given to us, and all we have to do is be willing to hold out our hands to receive from it.

Yet, as you may have experienced, it’s tough at times to be with these powerful body sensations, emotions, mental outbursts, and so forth. But if you’re at this stage I’m describing today, this shouldn’t be your first rodeo. You should know by now that this is how it goes.

Getting Energetic Support

The deeper we go on the path, the less spiritual tools mean much of anything. We surrender. We observe as presence. One of the few things that does seem to remain important is energy. Sometimes the right energetic support from a teacher, friend, community, or even nature can help boost us through something.

However, that does tend to cause further de-stabilization and worsen the imbalances at times. That should be seen as a good thing, actually. That’s a sign that things are being worked on. The next “Russian doll” is being ground down. Once again, the realizations and experiences that come after a period a spiritual growth will tell you what exactly was being worked on…sometimes. That said, it’s not necessarily explicit what the lesson is. You often only get vague senses of what moved, and that’s fine too. Sometimes, you figure it out years later. Profound shifts can take awhile to fully understand.

In short, energetic support tends to be the most useful of anything, and I don’t mean like most typical energy healers. Usually by now, you either have to let a true expert help you or go sit in nature where the energy feels strong to you. We’re not talking about trying to clear energy. We’re talking about truly listening to where it is flowing and supporting that intelligence, and that’s a level of expertise few energy facilitators understand.

Expanding Further and Farther Than You Thought Possible

Because our ego only knows what it knows, you will go far beyond levels of love, clarity, insight, humility, and so forth than you ever thought possible. That’s the beauty of spiritual growth. Your divinity already knows how you should grow just like your body knew how to grow when you were a child. In surrendering to that divinity, the growth continues as it wants to. Both these moments of imbalances and moments of realizing a new expanded state will rarely have anything to do with what your remaining ego self wants or expects. As I said, it knows only what it knows, and the ego, by and large, only knows a very limited number of experiences.

That ego ignorance is what continues to cause people problems when they have deeper and more intense transformations as well as expansions into intense love, connection, compassion, peace, and all those wonderful things. The ego self confined you. Spiritual growth is unlocking you, freeing you, and revealing amazing aspects of yourself and life beyond your ego’s imagination.

So surrender. Let the imbalances come. It’s okay, and allow your spiritual path to grow you.

Deepening Into Stillness and Inner Peace