Spiritual growth is the slow, honest process of becoming more awake to what is actually happening — inside you, around you, and between you and the living world. It is not about collecting experiences or feeling peaceful all the time. It is about the gap between who you are when nobody is watching and who you are when everyone is, getting smaller.
Most people who write to me have already done a lot. They have meditated, journaled, read the books, been to the retreats. And still something feels stuck. Usually it is not because they lack practices. It is because the practices they chose are comfortable, and growth rarely is.
Below are nine practices that actually deepen a spiritual path — drawn from shamanic tradition and from years of watching what changes people and what only entertains them.
What Are Spiritual Growth Practices?
Spiritual growth practices are repeatable actions that change your relationship to yourself, to spirit and to the world — not just your ideas about them. A practice qualifies when it does three things: it is done regularly, it produces some resistance in you, and it changes how you behave afterwards.
That third point is the honest test. If a practice leaves your daily life completely untouched, it is a hobby, not a path. If you want the wider view first, start with what spiritual growth actually means.
1. Sit With What You Would Rather Avoid
The fastest deepening usually comes from the direction you have been carefully not looking. The grief you keep busy around. The relationship you describe as “complicated.” The anger you have spiritualised into “holding space.”
Set a timer for ten minutes. No music, no guidance, no intention beyond staying. Let the thing you avoid come and sit with you. You are not fixing it. You are proving to yourself that you can be in the room with it.
This is the opposite of spiritual bypassing — and it is where most real movement begins.
2. Journey With a Question You Do Not Want Answered
In shamanic practice, the drum carries you into non-ordinary reality to meet guides and receive images. Most beginners journey with safe questions: What is my power animal? What is my purpose?
Try the uncomfortable one instead. What am I pretending not to know? What am I getting out of staying stuck? The spirits are rarely cruel, but they are rarely vague either. Come back, write down what you saw before you interpret it, and let it work on you for a week.
3. Build a Daily Practice That Is Almost Too Small
People abandon forty-minute morning rituals within three weeks. Nobody abandons three minutes.
Choose one thing so small you would feel silly skipping it: three conscious breaths at the window, one hand on your heart before you open your phone, one sentence of thanks at the door. Do it for ninety days. The size of the practice does not matter. The unbroken thread does.
4. Go Outside Without a Purpose
Not a walk for exercise. Not a hike with a destination. Go into a piece of nature — a park will do — and let it choose where you stop. Sit down. Stay for thirty minutes. Notice what approaches you: a bird, a shift in wind, a memory.
Shamanic cultures never needed a word for “connection with nature” because there was no separation to bridge. This practice quietly dissolves that separation again, and it does more for most people than a year of reading.
5. Keep a Record You Actually Reread
Journaling deepens nothing if you never look back. The growth is in the pattern, not the entry.
Write short — three lines a day is plenty. Then, once a month, read the last thirty days in one sitting. You will see the loop you are in, the fear that keeps returning in different costumes, and the small changes you would otherwise never have noticed.
6. Let Someone See You Unedited
Solitary practice has a ceiling. At some point the ego learns to meditate beautifully and stay entirely intact.
Tell one trusted person the thing you have shaped into a nicer story. Join a circle where you speak without performing. Being witnessed — messily, without your explanations — undoes knots that no amount of private work will touch.
7. Study Something Properly, Not Just Widely
There is a kind of spiritual consumption that feels like growth: a new modality every month, a new teacher every season, endless beginnings.
Depth comes from staying past the interesting part. Choose one path and give it a year. That is exactly why the Elements of Shamanism training is structured in five parts over time rather than one weekend — the material is not hard to understand, it is hard to live with long enough to change you.
8. Practise Reciprocity, Not Just Receiving
Much of modern spirituality is arranged around what you get: healing, abundance, alignment, peace. In every traditional shamanic culture I have learned from, the movement goes both ways.
Give something back with no audience. Leave an offering at a tree you sit under. Do one anonymous kindness a week. Tend a place nobody thanks you for tending. Reciprocity changes the character of a practitioner faster than almost anything else.
9. Integrate Before You Add Anything New
After a strong experience — a journey, a ceremony, a healing session — the temptation is to book the next one. Integration is the unglamorous work that turns experience into growth.
Give yourself a week of no new input. Sleep more. Move your body. Ask one question daily: what would change in my ordinary life if I took that seriously? Then change that one thing.
Which Practice Should You Start With?
Start with the one that produces a small flinch when you read it. That flinch is information. The table below matches common situations to the practice that usually moves things.
| If this is where you are | Start with | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Busy, well-read, but nothing shifts | Practice 1 — sit with what you avoid | Movement is blocked by avoidance, not by lack of knowledge |
| You start practices and drop them | Practice 3 — an almost-too-small daily practice | Consistency builds trust faster than intensity |
| You feel disconnected and flat | Practice 4 — time outside with no purpose | Reconnection happens through the body and the land |
| You practise alone and feel stuck | Practice 6 — be witnessed | Solitary work has a ceiling the ego learns to live under |
| You collect modalities | Practice 7 — study one path deeply | Depth only appears past the interesting phase |
| Big experiences, small changes | Practice 9 — integrate first | Growth lives in what you do on Tuesday, not in the ceremony |
If you are unsure where to begin at all, the free spirit animal guide is a gentle first step: a workbook, a quiz and a first meditation to meet the ally that walks with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does spiritual growth take?
There is no endpoint, but most people notice a real shift within three to six months of consistent daily practice. Insight can arrive in a single evening; the change in how you actually live takes seasons.
How do I know if I am actually growing?
Look at your behaviour, not your feelings. Do you recover from difficulty faster? Do you tell the truth more often? Are you kinder when it costs you something? Those are reliable signals. Blissful states are not.
Can I grow spiritually without belonging to a religion?
Yes. Shamanism itself is not a religion but a practice — direct experience rather than doctrine. What matters is a repeatable method, honest self-observation, and some form of relationship with something larger than yourself.
Why does spiritual growth sometimes feel worse before it feels better?
Because practice removes distraction, and what was underneath the distraction becomes visible. This phase is normal and usually passes within weeks. If it becomes overwhelming or destabilising, slow the practice down and seek support from a therapist or an experienced practitioner.
Is a teacher necessary?
Not at the beginning. A teacher becomes valuable when you hit the parts you cannot see yourself — usually after a year or two of independent practice, or when working with deeper healing material.
How many practices should I do at once?
One or two. Nine practices done poorly deepen nothing. Choose one, keep it for ninety days, and add a second only when the first happens without effort.
Begin Where You Actually Are
You do not need a better version of yourself to start. You need one practice, kept honestly, long enough to become inconvenient. Everything else grows out of that.
Which of these nine did you flinch at? That is your starting point — and I would love to hear about it in the comments.
