awakening & healing

Stijn Smeets
Aug 5
3 min read

It's important to distinguish between the meditative path of awakening and the healing and self-development path.

The Path of Awakening

The path of awakening addresses the problem of everyday, underlying unhappiness (suffering) by training the mind to be present and by revealing the true nature of your mind’s awareness. It's built on millennia of research and transmission from yogis and saints who perfected a psycho-physical technology (mind and body) to cut through the mind's constructs and transcend the self.

The Path of Healing & Self-Development

The path of healing and self-development addresses developmental challenges that prevent you from living a satisfying and successful life. These challenges include attachment issues, emotional regulation, stagnated self-development, and more. When addressed, you are more likely to live a life that is aligned with who you are, you can feel more embodied, have healthy and mature relationships, find meaning, and achieve personally valued accomplishments. Left unaddressed, these challenges make life harder and can hinder your ability to meditate and make progress on the path of awakening.

These paths are mutually reinforcing

These paths are overlapping and mutually reinforcing. For example, training your mind to stay present can give you a more intimate connection with your body, which in turn grants you deeper access to past traumas and limiting beliefs. Conversely, resolving attachment insecurities and developing a mature sense of self can allow you to access deeper levels of awakening and surrender.

The Risks of Confusion

Each path has its own logic, and confusing them can be counterproductive.

When self-development or healing techniques—which often focus on fulfilling unmet needs in a safe environment—are used as a form of meditation, they risk reinforcing the cycle of seeking more of what you like and less of what you don't. Additionally, using meditation to reflect on and cognitively restructure emotional or social issues is considered a distraction in traditional concentration meditation and can lead to bad habits.

Conversely, using meditative or spiritual techniques (such as "being with what is") to deal with dysfunctional relationships or disempowering life circumstances is spiritual bypassing. It means that you avoid problem-solving or seeking help and instead use emotional or spiritual coping to simply reduce the emotional impact of a solvable issue.

Combining both paths

At House of the Beloved, we combine both paths and carefully discern which issue requires which approach.

Some common challenges that benefit from the path of healing and self-development include:

False-self: Defining yourself based on what others want you to be.
Private self: Hiding your true essence out of fear of rejection or destruction
Incomplete self: Becoming a chronic caretaker due to early-learned hypervigilance of others' needs, at the expense of your own.
Feeling disconnected, tense, or stressed in your body.
Difficulties establishing and maintaining satisfying relationships.
Low self-esteem or difficulties with trust.
Feeling stuck in life.
Difficulty expressing anger or a fear of anger.
Difficulties setting boundaries.
Not knowing who you are or what you want.
…