Why I Made My Spiritual Growth My NUMBER 1 Priority

I feel a lot of change happening in me and around me.

My spiritual growth in life is my number one priority.

Everything else in my life kind of falls into place as a result of the spiritual work and growth I do on and for myself.

What does that even look like- to do the “spiritual work”?

Sometimes it looks like letting go of everything you know, and allowing yourself to enter the discomfort of the unknown. To stop avoiding and stop running away.

To sit alone, preferably in nature, and allow everything you’ve been avoiding to come to the surface.

The anxiety, physical/emotional pain and discomfort, thoughts, everything.

To be a witness to it all and stop running away from it.

Sometimes it might feel overwhelming- like you’re entering a bottomless pit and you don’t know if and when you’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel. The fear that once you start to open things up, stop taking prescription drugs, and really face your demons, it will be a bottomless/infinite pit and you will never get out of it or reach the end of it.

But I’m here to tell you that’s not true.

A year and a half ago when I returned to Thailand, this time as a full-time “digital nomad”, everything in my life felt like it was breaking a part. Triggered by a break up, it was like a door was smashed open to all of the pain I had been holding inside myself throughout my entire life (and other lifetimes), without even realizing it.

The flood gates were opened, and the real journey of growth, healing, and transformation began.

So much pain and emotion were constantly coming to the surface it felt unbearable.

I was opening up my body every day with yoga, trauma release exercises, breath work, sauna/ice bath, massage, dance, and other practices, and my body started to let go.

Sometimes I would cry or feel such extreme emotion and it made no sense to my logical mind. I didn’t even know what I was upset about! And that’s part of the healing. Allowing emotions that have been stuck in your body for so long to come out and to the surface, continuously and consistently , so that eventually (and yes, this DOES eventually come) you feel so much lighter, and so much less effected by your outer world.

Because you’ve cleansed your inner world.

Pain, and challenging situations do and will continue to come, but when they come, they don’t feel nearly as heavy. They feel so much more manageable, even breezy in a way.

I’ve stopped running away from discomfort, because the discomfort feels so much less uncomfortable in my body and my mind compared to how it used to feel.

For me, that’s a huge sign of the work I’ve done- the fact that I can still feel good/normal, even happy, when there are things around me that in the past would have put me into such a low.

In Kabbalah, they say that God/the Universe wants you to have EVERYTHING.

When I choose to live my life this way, away from the hustle and bustle of society, the result is that I have so much more time and space in my life to look and go deeper inside myself. I am not distracted by 40 hours of work or the constant doing.

I live a more simple life, with time for the things that I enjoy, as well as healing & growth.

I don't find it normal or acceptable to just live my life with anxiety or constant stress/pressure. It might be normalized by society but that’s definitely not something I want to normalize for myself, or for my family that I may decide to bring into this world one day.

My advice to anyone who wants to make their wellness and spiritual growth a priority is to stop running away from whatever it is that you’re running away from. Let things fall apart if they need to, so that better things can come together as a result.

I’m not promising you that the path will be glamorous or pretty, in fact, it probably won’t be, but the result - your genuine happiness - is worth the turbulence you might have to face on your way there.

It’s been over a year and a half since I stopped running away and distracting myself, and I can say for a fact that things get better when you make YOU and your wellness your number one priority.

Someone once told me this and it made me uncomfortable at the time, most likely because I didn’t believe it back then, but YOU ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD.

And if that fact makes you uncomfortable, then I would maybe ask yourself why.