The Truth About Spiritual Growth Nobody Talks About | Shams Tabriz

The version of spiritual growth that gets talked about is the attractive one.

The insights. The openings. The moments of genuine contact with something larger that briefly reorganise everything. The beauty of the path — and there is genuine beauty in it — gets shared freely. What gets shared far less freely is the rest: the long unglamorous seasons, the losses the growth requires, the particular grief of becoming more honest with yourself. The modern spiritual marketplace has a commercial interest in the appealing version. And the result is a landscape populated by people who feel privately that they are doing it wrong — because the reality of their experience does not match the picture they were shown. At shams-tabriz.com, we hold a different commitment: to say what is true about the path, even when what is true is not what most people hoped to hear.

This article is an honest account of what spiritual growth actually involves.

1. It Costs You the Life You Were Living

Nobody adequately warns you that genuine spiritual growth involves genuine loss.

Not the loss of what was bad for you — that part sounds manageable. The loss of what was comfortable. The loss of the version of yourself that fit the life you had carefully assembled. The loss of relationships that cannot survive the change in you. The loss of certainties that had organised your sense of who you are and what you are doing here. These are real losses. They do not feel like liberation while they are happening. They feel like loss — because that is exactly what they are.

The spiritual path does not take from you only what was never yours. It takes what you were clinging to. And the distinction between those two things is not always clear from the inside of the losing.

What genuine growth commonly requires you to leave behind:

• The identity that was organised around being acceptable to people who could not accept what you actually are
• The relationships that were maintained through the management of yourself rather than through genuine presence
• The beliefs about who you are that were formed in conditions requiring you to be smaller than your actual nature
• The version of spirituality that offered consolation without demanding genuine change
• The life-shape that fit the previous version of you but can no longer contain the one that is emerging

The losses are not punishment. They are the natural consequence of genuine movement toward what is more essentially true. But they are losses. And treating them as anything less dishonours the real courage required to sustain the path.

2. The Growth Happens in the Difficult Seasons

This is the truth most consistently withheld — because it is the truth most consistently unwelcome.

The expansion seasons of spiritual growth are real. The opening, the clarity, the periods of genuine contact with what is most alive — these are not manufactured or imagined. They are genuine, and they are among the most significant experiences available to a human consciousness.

But they are not where most of the growth actually occurs.

The growth occurs in the difficult seasons. In the dark night that follows the expansion. In the return of the pattern you believed you had completed. In the long, unglamorous period of faithful continuance when nothing seems to be happening and every rational argument suggests that it would be reasonable to stop. In the grief of the identity that has outgrown itself but not yet found its replacement.

The difficult seasons build what the expansion seasons cannot:

No one talks about this because it does not sell. It is not the version of the path that fills retreat centres or moves books. But it is the version that actually produces what every genuine tradition describes as the fruit of the spiritual life.

3. You Will Grieve the Self That Is Leaving

This is the season most people are least prepared for.

At some point in genuine spiritual growth, the previous version of yourself — the one that fit the previous life, that was organised around strategies that no longer serve, that knew how to navigate the world you were living in before the growth began — starts to feel foreign. The old certainties feel hollow. The old ways of finding comfort stop working. The old version of you is leaving. And before the new one has arrived, there is an interim period of genuine grief.

Not the grief of having done something wrong. The grief of genuine transition — of something real that was genuinely part of you releasing its hold. The Sufi poets understood this well. Rumi’s reed flute does not grieve because the reed was bad. It grieves the reed bed — the original ground from which it was cut, which was genuine and which is genuinely missed.

You are not grieving because you are failing.

You are grieving because you are genuinely moving — and movement requires leaving the ground you were standing on.

What makes this grief navigable is not its elimination but its honest acknowledgement. The grief that is allowed to be grief — rather than being diagnosed, managed, or spiritualised into something else — completes in its own time. What is completed can then be genuinely left behind.

4. Your Relationships Will Change

Genuine spiritual growth does not only change you. It changes what is possible between you and the people in your life.

Some relationships will deepen. The ones built on genuine contact rather than the management of mutually performed selves will, in many cases, become richer and more honest as the growth progresses. The people who can meet the more genuinely present version of you tend to do so with relief as much as adjustment.

But some relationships will become impossible to sustain. Not because the other person is wrong or bad or spiritually inferior — because the relationship was organised around a version of you that is no longer operational. The role you played, the way you managed the dynamic, the careful distances you maintained — these were the architecture of the relationship. When the architecture changes, the relationship must either evolve or end. Often it ends.

Signs a relationship is under the pressure of your growth:

1. What used to be enough is no longer enough. The depth of contact that previously felt satisfying now feels like something is consistently missing.
2. The management is becoming unbearable. The careful self-editing required to maintain the relationship is costing more than the relationship provides.
3. Honesty is not welcome. The more genuinely present you become, the more the relationship requires you to be the previous version of yourself.
4. The connection is based on who you were rather than who you are. The relationship is maintained through shared history rather than through genuine present-tense resonance.

The ending of relationships that cannot survive the growth is not failure. It is the path doing what it does — clearing what no longer serves to make room for what is genuinely aligned.

5. Genuine Growth Makes You Less Special, Not More

One of the more uncomfortable truths of genuine spiritual growth is that the further it actually progresses, the less it tends to feel like an identity to be claimed.

The early stages of awakening often produce the particular spiritual inflation that Chögyam Trungpa named spiritual bypassing — the use of spiritual framework and spiritual identity as a way of avoiding, rather than engaging, what the path is actually asking for. The newly awakened are frequently the most certain of their advancement. The genuinely far along are almost always the least interested in positioning themselves as such.

This is not an accident. Genuine growth dissolves the parts of the self that needed the spiritual identity to be significant. What remains — after the inflation, after the identity, after the frameworks that were accumulated and eventually released — is something quieter, less impressive, and far more genuine.

What the genuinely mature seeker tends to look like:

• More interested in being honest than in being seen as advanced
• More available to ordinary human experience than to peak states
• More humble about what they know than certain about their position on the path
• More present with others in their difficulty than offering frameworks for transcending it
• More likely to say I don’t know than to provide the answer that positions them well

The spiritual ego is real. And the path, genuinely walked, eventually dissolves it — not through the seeker’s effort but through the accumulated weight of enough genuine humility-producing encounters with their own limitation.

6. It Never Finishes

This is perhaps the most countercultural truth the spiritual path carries.

There is no completion. No permanent arrival at the state that requires nothing further. No point at which the work is done, the growth is complete, and the extraordinary ordinariness of genuine spiritual maturity can be maintained without continued honest engagement.

The mystics did not describe a destination. They described a deepening — an ever-further movement into the same territory, each passage through revealing new dimensions of what was always present, each genuine engagement producing the capacity for the next.

This is not discouraging news when it is genuinely received. The path that never finishes is also the path that never runs out. The one that offers no permanent arrival also offers no ceiling. What is possible — in depth of presence, in quality of compassion, in genuine contact with what is most essentially real — continues to expand beyond what any single lifetime can exhaust.

As the truth of the path is genuinely received:

• The comparison with others on the path becomes less interesting than honest engagement with where you actually are
• The destination stops being the measure and the quality of the present engagement becomes the thing that matters
• The difficult seasons become less evidence of failure and more the recognised texture of genuine movement
• The grief of the transitions becomes honourable rather than shameful
• The path, seen clearly for what it is — not what was sold — becomes something you would choose again

You were not promised an easy path.

You were promised a real one.

And the real one, walked with genuine honesty and genuine care, produces something that no amount of comfortable spirituality can approach.