What You’re Here to Overcome - 25 Truths on the Spiritual and Personal Growth Path
Spiritual and personal growth is to become aware of your own biases, limiting thoughts, subconscious patterns, assumptions, and protective mechanisms - so you can free yourself from them. It’s making the conscious choice to actively participate in the evolution of humankind.
To realize that those who came before you endured challenges beyond comprehension. They lived through famine, war, disease, loss, and unthinkable physical labor. For most of human history, nearly half of all children died before adolescence. Just two centuries ago, three to five out of every ten children died before age five. Your ancestors carried the grief of losing children as part of ordinary life - and still they kept going. Without them, you wouldn’t be here.
To grow is to recognize that the best way to honor them — and the privileges you now have — is not by avoiding your own challenges. You have access to clean water, an abundance of food, warm shelter, modern medicine. The way to honor all that came before is to face what life asks of you.
You discover what life asks of you in the things you fear the most. What you’re meant to overcome is found in what’s hard, what’s vulnerable, in your discomfort — not in the polished, escapist idea of a perfect life.
Personal growth is realizing you are not who you think you are. You didn’t choose your language, your culture, your emotional patterns. You don’t even control your thoughts. If I tell you not to think of a pink elephant, you’ll think of one instantly. If you try to stop thinking for even ten seconds, you’ll fail. Thoughts appear. Most of the time, you don’t think your thoughts any more than you beat your own heart.
Until you make it your life’s mission to change, your life will be run by subconscious programs shaped by other people. Neuroscience suggests that up to 95% of your decisions, behaviors, and emotional reactions are governed by subconscious processes. Your subconscious can process around 11 million bits of information per second. Your conscious mind can only handle about 40.
That means almost everything you do — how you react, how you see others, how you speak to yourself, what you avoid, what you desire — happens without your conscious intention. Personal growth is taking ownership of the 5% of decisions made consciously. It’s using those 40 bits per second to create space — to reflect, to question, to act with intention. It’s choosing to rewire parts of the 95%, so that your subconscious starts working in alignment with who you choose to be - instead of who you were conditioned to be.
Personal growth is to understand that you are a biological being, shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Your nervous system wasn’t designed to make you happy, but to keep you safe enough to survive and reproduce. Most of what you do is not about truth or purpose. It’s about identity preservation, discomfort avoidance, and social belonging.
Spiritual growth is realizing that everything is intrinsically relational and relative. There is no final objective truth to reality as we know it. Your life does not have a single purpose you must go find. You are inherently meaningful, simply because you are here. When you feel life is meaningless, it’s because you’ve felt what meaningfulness is. Not because life is meaningless, but because life is experiencing a contrast. Spiritual growth is to see that not everything happens for a reason, but that everything you experience is meaningful, because it was experienced. You are a perspective. A fragment of consciousness that only sees a fraction of what exists. You are not meant to comprehend how it all fits together.
Personal growth is not about improvement, but letting go. Letting go of blockages, assumptions, the need to conform, cravings, control, other people’s visions of you, and the myths of what happiness should be. Letting go of your protective mechanisms and your biases. The more you let go, the more you grow. That is how you gain.
Spiritual growth is to realize that right now, life is living you. That God is seeing through your eyes. Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you. He tried to tell us that God is not out there and not separate from us, but a part of us.
Spiritual growth is to see that impermanence is what makes life meaningful. You are a finite event, yet completely irreducible. Because you are the one who experiences it all.
Spiritual growth is to understand that we don’t know anything, and that’s what gives meaning. If you were handed the meaning of life and the answers to every mystery in a document, you’d have nothing left to discover. Spiritual growth is realizing: you came here to forget, so you could remember who you really are.
Personal and spiritual growth is allowing suppressed, painful emotions to surface. To be felt, welcomed, and released, without indulging in them or surrendering as a victim.
Personal growth is becoming aware of confirmation bias - the tendency to seek information that confirms what you already believe, while dismissing what contradicts it. True critical thinking is not attacking others, but questioning your own views.
Personal growth is becoming aware of your negativity bias. You’re wired to focus on what’s wrong. But you can counter that, through journaling, meditation, reflection, noticing what you’ve learned and what you’ve overcome.
Personal growth is recognizing your status quo bias - the fear of change, even when change is good. We cling to comfort and avoid happiness when it requires stepping into the unfamiliar. But new comfort zones can form if you stay in discomfort long enough for them to form.
Personal growth is stopping the deterioration of your life and body through destructive habits. Seeing yourself as worthy of beauty, both physical and internal.
Personal growth is a process of brutal honesty and deep acceptance, untainted by self-loathing.
Spiritual growth is remembering: there is a last time for everything. The daily rituals we dismiss as annoyances are what life is made of. We long for highs like holidays, breakthroughs and wins. But they make up only a fraction of life. Life is brushing your teeth, taking out the trash, making coffee. Personal growth is realizing we aren’t present for most of it because we’ wanted to be somewhere else.
Spiritual and personal growth is to realize that the real dangers in life was never what we feared, but where we got too comfortable. That the most scariest thing of all is to die knowing that you did not even try, and that your excuses for not trying were made up by fear of things that were never really dangerous.
Spritual growth is to recognize and honer the fact that science cannot explain your subjective experience. It can describe neurons and light wavelengths, but not what it’s like to see green. Not why this moment exists at all. You are the only proof of your own existence.
Spiritual growth is not about dismissing modern science or medicine. Or to devalue their importance and impressive evolution.
It is not defined by psychic powers or superstition.
It is not about believing every intuitive, healer, or teacher you meet along the way.
It is not about attracting what you think you want by pretending to be someone you’re not.
And it is not about building a new, spiritual ego from a single profound experience that you had with psychedelics, meditation, or hypnosis.It is realizing that your ego will always try to claim ownership of your moments of waking up.
It will analyze, label, and reshape what cannot be described, or understood by the analytical mind.
It will dilute the understanding, translating the indescribable into the language of identity.Spiritual growth is to accept and honor your humanness, precisely because it is imperfect.
It is knowing that enlightenment is not a trophy. And to let the few truly awakened souls who have walked this earth, like Jesus and the Buddha, keep that title.Personal growth is to realize that you built your bad habits because you convinced yourself you needed them.
You couldn’t face the emptiness or the pain or the restlessness in their absence.It’s realizing that ending a habit isn’t about discipline, control, or pressure, but about acceptance and surrender.
About giving yourself a few seconds to truly look at what you’re trying to fill, escape, or numb.And to notice, when you do, that it was never as unbearable as your mind made it out to be.
That you can sit with the craving, the restlessness, the discomfort, even with a sense of curiosity.Because it’s nothing compared to the distress you create through your distractions: The overeating, smoking, drinking, drugs, binge-watching, or any other escape you once believed you depended on.
Personal growth is forgiving others, not always because they deserve it, but because you deserve to be free. Often, what others did to you reflects the pain they couldn’t carry. You don’t have to carry it either.
Personal growth is forgiving yourself and take responsibility. You acted from the level of awareness you had at the time. And you don’t have to let your guilt spread into other parts of your life or cast yourself as the victim.
Spiritual growth is remembering we all come from the same origin. The same source of life. We are not separate.
Personal growth is to realize that we’ll likely treat ourselves how we were treated as kids, and repeat the relational patterns of our childhood. But growth means seeing that love is not control, not possession. When love becomes conditional, it becomes a need. True love is freedom.
Personal growth is giving yourself now what others could not give you. It is learning that even in your loneliest moments, you are seen, you are guided, you are worthy, and you are loved.
