9 Core Questions to Map out and Deepen Your Spiritual Path (EP49)

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This episode covers the foundational framework for deepening your spiritual practice and moving into embodied awakening. This is a core episode that provides an umbrella context of multiple maps within one, that can give you an overview of your spiritual path and where you are within it, so that you can see which levers you may want to pull to balance or deepen your path. 

Many spiritual practitioners don't have a clear framework for how all the pieces fit together—or how to integrate spiritual practice into daily life where it actually matters. In this episode, I share nine core questions that are foundational to the work I do with clients in private practice and in the spiritual community I lead in our online group program and in retreats. These aren't abstract philosophy. They're the exact questions that determine whether your spiritual journey leads to real transformation or stays locked in your meditation practice, vagueness, imbalance, cultural wounding or attachment wounding.

What we'll cover:

In this episode we look at the foundational framework for spiritual growth for sustained spiritual awakening and integration of spiritual experience into daily life. We focus on depth of spiritual practice, applying spiritual learnings to daily life, getting and giving support in spiritual community, growing inner strength and resolve as well as spiritual surrender, and sustained awakening. Some topic we'll cover are: Genuine spiritual development vs spiritual bypassing (the #1 trap that keeps seekers stuck), the paradox that holds your entire spiritual path together. Meeting difficulty as a context for spiritual awakening, how spiritual community and sangha are non-negotiable for deepening your practice, and practical approaches to spiritual awakening that centers trauma healing as a path of spiritual awakening and shows you how you can do self-healing on a very deep level - it helps with balancing the energy field, moving stuck emotion, spiritual healing, mindset, all at once.

Who This Episode Is For:

Spiritual practitioners and spiritual seekers committed to deepening your path. Anyone ready to move beyond surface-level spirituality into embodied transformation. Those seeking clarity on where to focus your spiritual practice and energy. Spiritual community members and anyone exploring sangha and spiritual friendship.

Ready to deepen your spiritual practice? Explore one-on-one spiritual healing work and join my spiritual community at www.thegroundoflove.com

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Timestamps:

2:13 - Q #1 - Intention

3:16 - Q #2 - Path

5:57 - Q #3 - Traps

9:39 - Q #4 - Resolve

12:26 - Q #5 - Surrender

18:05 - Q #6 - Perception

18:46 - Q #7 - Self Healing (The Ratio)

20:57 - Q #8 - Context (the 3 life moments)

24:16 - Q #9 - 3 Relationships

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This podcast show is for people dedicated to spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, psychology, healing work, collective healing and awakening, and global positive social change. 

For free meditations, private sessions, and the Ground of Love Healing School, see www.thegroundoflove.com

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This podcast show explores meditation, mindfulness, consciousness, spiritual awakening, and spiritual growth, with a strong focus on personal healing, trauma healing, emotional healing, and somatic healing. We dive into nonduality, embodied spirituality, the true self, life purpose, and spiritual practice, while also addressing shadow and integration themes like spiritual bypass, ego-death, root causes, and holistic healing. 

www.thegroundoflove.com

Transcript

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We actually want to make sure that our spirituality is something deeply embodied and integrated into our daily life. I'm going to talk about the great paradox of, strength and intention and personal will. And surrender release and Giving of ourselves where there's safety of belonging in the great order of things, where we are held by the divine itself. Welcome to the Ground of Love. I'm your host, Olivia Frazao. This is a podcast for people who are deeply dedicated to the spiritual journey. You are here for self-growth care, for others, and being of service to the world. This podcast is in service to you to help you remember who you are and why you are here, you will receive inspiration, clarity, and no BS Love. We are walking each other home. Let's begin. In this episode, we are going to look at the nine main questions that we can ask ourselves to strengthen our spiritual path. These I would consider to be questions that point us towards our highest focus, our highest values, where we are going on the spiritual path, and how we are getting there. By reviewing these questions, you can consider for yourself what is something that I already have very solid within me and what is something that I can strengthen in terms of, oh, this is a piece that I haven't developed yet, or this is something I haven't thought that much about, or this is something that I need support on. You're also gonna learn about my own views of how I see the spiritual path, and I'll also share here how this shows up in my work. I am a healer. I work one-on-one with people. I also have a group program online and run retreats in person, and all of these core tenets show up in my work. So I'll be able to also show some examples. Let's start. Number one What is your intention? When you say that you are on a spiritual path, what does that actually mean? What is your goal? Are we actually knowing what we want? And the next step would be, are we actually walking our path in a way that will get us to what we say we want so when I work with people, we center very deeply here. Your own inner motivation needs to be present. There is a center core in your being that is calling you home to yourself. This isn't anyone else's voice. This isn't anyone else's path. This isn't what you do to look good for other people. This is not a coverup for other feelings that are hard to feel. This is not a defense mechanism. This is your deepest calling to yourself. So everything that we do ultimately is fueled from this place. Number two, so what is the path? What is the path that you're walking? And most importantly, as I said, where is it leading you to? The way that I work is in the understanding that all lineages lead to the same place It doesn't matter what culture you're from, it doesn't matter what religion you're into or not into, it doesn't matter what practices you do, as long as they are truly in the understanding that God is love, unity, and oneness. You can call it wisdom, compassion. You can call it nothing and everything. You can call it Shiva and Shakti. You can call it the Dao. You can call it co-arising reality. You can call it the great mystery. You can call it great spirit. You can call it father- mother, God. Ultimately, we are talking about oneness. We are talking about life beyond life and death. We are talking about ultimate reality. We are talking about truth, not the truth that each culture wants to fight for, each person wants to fight for, which is really just a mind creation, but ultimate truth. The truth that is everything, that holds everything. We're talking about love, not human relational love, but love that is the essence of everything. And we're talking about power, the power of life force itself, not the hierarchical power and the power over, power under games that we play as humans. So we're talking about truth as love, love as beyond anything we could imagine, and the power of love itself So the group program that I lead is a multi-lineage program. Everyone in it, we are all bowing to the same thing, which is the great mystery beyond all mental construct, and we all know ourselves as the same one beingness So all paths lead to this oneness. A path is a means to an end. It's not an end in itself, so we need to be very careful about that. We wanna get to the end here, not get stuck in the means. Yes? What is the end? Self-realization. Full liberation. Liberation from ignorance, from suffering. What's the result? Freedom, truth, love, actual beingness, peace. As a result of an understanding that we are not the solid, separate self. It is that direct experience so let's look at number three. What are the traps that we want to avoid? Now, I already talked about the means confusing itself with the end. Yes? I wanna talk about the trap of spiritual bypass that I see very often. We are here to live heaven on earth, not to run away from earth looking for heaven somewhere in our avoidant attachment system. It's very important for us to realize where our personal wounds are co-opting our understanding of spirituality and the spiritual path. We all have a tendency to avoid pain, and we need to be very careful that our spirituality is not an excuse for us to avoid pain. We actually want to make sure that our spirituality is something deeply embodied and integrated into our daily life. So this isn't about having a great time meditating on the cushion or at a retreat and then coming back to your daily life and still having difficulty in relationships, still having self-judgment or victimizing yourself towards others, et cetera. Embodied spirituality inevitably includes self-healing. Spiritual awakening becomes the result of trauma healing. When we are safe in our body, when we are clear in our mind, when we are coherent in our emotions, when we have the capacity for psychological health and we have cleared past traumas, past projections, past pains that give us a lens of victimization and ignorance and distorted view onto our reality, when we've cleared all of that, that's when direct spiritual experience is possible. Not just in a momentary way, but in a way where we are actually living the reality of being a being of love and of compassion in our daily life So all the work that I do with people is about integration of spiritual practice and spiritual experience into daily life. We do esoteric spiritual practices. We are in the transmission fields. We do experience things that are very multidimensional. And what is the point of all of that? The point is so that we can live our true path in service in the world. The point is so that we can be in our life purpose, so that we can be vessels of divine love. And this is on two levels, physical and non-physical. Our emanation itself is a blessing to the world. Simply being who we are being, sitting quietly, but our field is in coherence. We are grounded, we are centered, and we are in our heart. That sends out a radiance that is of support to anyone around us, to the collective consciousness fields of the collective. So we are of service in local ways and we are of service in non-local ways. So I had said physical and non-physical. I just talked about the non-physical, which is our emanation. The physical is of course being of service, being kind, being helpful, showing up for people. So we simultaneously, in holding our center, in being who we truly are, on the level of transmission are being of service, and being of service means showing up. Somebody needs you, you show up. Yes? Okay. Next. How do we actually walk the path? We've spoken about our intention, we've spoken about what the path might be, and we've spoken about traps to avoid. How do we actually live through the thing that we're saying we're doing, which is our spiritual path? Here in points four and five, I'm going to talk about the great paradox of, strength and intention and personal will. That's number four. And surrender and release and Giving of ourselves. You could also include a devotion or a bowing here as number five. So basically, personal will and God's will, if you wanna call it that. The great paradox, right? So let's go through each of these. Number four, what is strength? What is the role of personal will on the spiritual path? This is all about basically the first point that I had said around intention, right? What is your intention? Now, in point number four, we're talking about how we are actually upholding our intention. How are we fighting for what we say we want? Now, when I say fighting, I don't mean an antagonistic fighting, okay? I don't mean you're fighting against the world. What I do mean is that you're having discernment and you're having alignment. And so you got your eye on the ball. You know what is important, and you know what is true. So what you're fighting is your own inner tendencies for self-sabotage, for distraction, for throwing yourself off your path, In all of your habitual trauma responses and emotional pains and collapses, et cetera. Okay? You are fighting to stay up, to get up, stand up, and stay up, and when you fall back down, you get up again. It's that inner resolve that I'm pointing to, okay? That's the archetype of what you could call, instead of the fighter, I could call it the spiritual warrior, okay? Or the divine masculine. This is I have strength and resolve so we go through hard times, we go through distractions, we experience self-sabotage, we experience all the hard things, and yet our strength is the strength of choice. It's the strength of courage. And in this case, yes, it is the strength of effort. We need to put in effort. So our effort is to get back on track when we have fallen out of our alignment. Our effort is to reach our personal will back towards alignment with God's will, if you wanna use that language. So now we're gonna go to number five, surrender. Here we're talking about being in the full embrace, being in the full compassion, full acceptance, where there's safety of belonging in the great order of things, where we are held by the divine itself, where we can surrender and know ourselves as what some people would call God's children. Right? We get to be the child here. We get to be held. We get to know that there is something greater running the show, and we are not the ones who have to do it, or realistically, we're not even the ones who can do it. So you see how this starts feeling like the total opposite of what I said before? This is total surrender. This is knowing and realizing that nothing is actually in our hands, that everything is in God's hands. And this is also in that feeling of being held, that feeling of safety, to be exactly who we are as we are. That we are loved and safe and okay exactly here now as we are. Because that other archetype, the one that needs to effort at certain times, it can become over-efforting. It can become over-controlling, and it can say, "Oh, I'm not good enough. I have to do better, better, better," because our culture is all about overachievement. So the issue with the strength one is that our culture co-opts that idea and turns it into all of this performative, achievement-based, success-based mentality. I'm not good enough as I am. I have to improve. The world isn't good enough as it is. I have to change and control it. That's not what I'm talking about. When I'm talking about strength, I'm talking about the resolve to find your heart when you have lost your way, when you have lost your center, when you've lost your feeling of alignment, rootedness, embodiment, safety, and love. That's what the strength is for. Not for being overly controlling and judging and all of that stuff. To heal the one that controls and judges and everything, we need to understand that actually reality is not in our hands. We are the children of greater reality. We are the little molecules of the great river that takes us forward. That's the understanding of the surrender piece. Now, if we are in surrender some people might perceive this incorrectly as passivity. That's not what it is. Total surrender doesn't mean inaction. In the Bhagavad Gita, they talk about how you show up fully for wherever you are divinely placed in the great order of things to act. You do take action, a lot of it. The surrender piece is not about inaction. It's about surrendering your attachment to the fruits of your action, to the consequences of your action. It's basically surrendering expectation. So we show up fully and yet without expectation, without a sense of control or grasping towards what our actions will actually result in because the result is not up to us One more thing about the surrender piece. This is where we must learn to bow. Now, the concept of bowing in Western culture is usually feared or judged because there is a wounded understanding of what power is and authority is. I'm not talking about any of the wound-based stuff here. So we're gonna make it really simple right now. The heart is the boss. The heart is the big boss. But in our culture, the mind has become the big boss, right? I'm gonna say this in a different way. Love is God. And yet in our culture, we've made the thinking mind our God in certain ways. This is how I'm using this language. So instead, we're gonna put things back in order, and the mind is gonna bow to the heart. The mind is going to surrender to the heart. The mind is going to understand that the heart is actually the one with the true authority, the true seeing, and the true capacity. So when I lead groups or retreats, either online or in person, we're working simultaneously with both of these qualities, these two main archetypes. The strength of resolve, of choosing the truth of the heart's knowing over all illusion, distraction, doubt, self-sabotage, and as I said, that deep bow, that deep devotion and humility and trust. Trust in that which is greater. Whatever you call it, whatever your name for that which is most true is. Whatever you call divinity. Whatever you call the, the God spark within you. Whatever you call greatest reality and compassion and the truth of being. Whatever you know is grace Whatever you know truly sustains you, that's what you bow to. Not what somebody else constructs for you and tells you with all these rules what to do, none of that. But what is that inner bow? What is that which you can truly trust So we work with that place of inner surrender. That's what I'm calling humility. That's what I'm calling devotion. That's what I'm calling a bow as a path of through that softness a path of knowing and feeling viscerally how we are held in love Okay, we're gonna zoom through the last three. Here we go. Number six. So how are we going to perceive now? Because we're not perceiving with the mind. The result is perception beyond the mind after this bowing, this surrender of the head to the heart. So we're now feeling transmission-based, field-based, heart-based. There is a subtle fields capacity of perception. There is a direct knowing capacity of perception that's happening beyond the thinking mind and the five senses. So the meditations that I lead are transmission-based. We are open together in open-heartedness, receiving from the greater field direct experience. Number seven, how do we find capacity and support for all of this, for our whole path? There's something that I teach my private clients as well as help the people in my, group membership grow as capacities within themselves for self-healing that I call the ratio. Okay, we're gonna go through this super quick, just surface level explanation of this. In the ratio, we have three factors. Number one, we have pain or wound. Number two, we have what we're gonna call resource or truth, coherence, capacity, true self. Okay? Number three is those need to contact each other for healing and integration and resolution and coherence to happen. So the ratio is that we need more resource than wound. Anytime we're upset about something, anytime we feel stuck or blocked on something, the ratio is off. We need more resource. We need more capacity. So then we can talk about all the different ways that we can have access to greater capacity. And these are all self-healing skills that I teach. Nervous system regulation, balancing, grounding, and centering your energy field, receiving attunement from your greater nature, from someone supporting you in a healing capacity, from those who guide you in the higher non-physical fields, and so forth. And then we work with inner attunement. In this ratio, this coherence, these coherent fields are now going to be in contact with the pain or wounding, the incoherent fields, through attunement. This is where one frequency comes into contact with another frequency and coheres it to the highest coherence level. So this is a massive summary of what I can call healing work or self-healing. And I help other people with this as a healer, but I also help people do this by themselves Next question, number eight. What is the context in which we are doing all of this work? We're gonna look at three levels. Level one I'm calling on the cushion. Okay? This is your personal practice, let's say your daily practice. You're literally sitting on a meditation cushion meditating. This is the easiest and safest environment for you to try something new and for you to build your habits, build your skills, your neural pathways, build your muscle memory this is where you start building new capacities Then we need to bring it into the world. That's number two. Okay? We wanna bring it into the world in easy ways first, in what I call peace time. Peace time is when things are going generally fine, and we're having our regular small daily interactions, and we get to start acting differently. We get to start choosing from a place of creator, not victim. We get to start practicing cohering and balancing our field, showing up in a new way of communicating, remembering direct experience of divine connection more often throughout the day, et cetera. So this is where we continue our practice, and now we're doing it in daily life Number three Difficulty, hard times Sometimes you get the phone call that a loved one is in the hospital. Sometimes you wake up to the news that there is a natural disaster. Sometimes there is a financial disaster in your own life that completely throws you upside down, et cetera. All of a sudden, the school of hard knocks of life is at your door This is where we bring all of our practice into play. This is what all of our practice was ultimately for. Because we are going to show up in our strength, in our capacity, in our resolve, that spiritual warrior energy. We're gonna get up, and we're gonna stay up, and we're gonna be strong for ourselves, and we are gonna be available as support to those who need us And we are in total surrender. We know that God has us. Whatever God is to you, the divine plan, life, the great order of things, whatever your word is for that which you can most trust, for that which you can surrender to and know that you are held by. Know that in any of these most difficult life moments, we are never alone So in peacetime, we practice this understanding so that during these hard times, we can truly know that we are held because we have already experienced it. And this is what that deep belonging, this is what that deep safety, this is what that deep interbeing is ultimately for, for these hard times, so that rather than suffering, we might experience pain, but not suffering. The difference being, yes, pain hurts, but suffering is all the stories that we make as a result, and those stories get much worse when we think that we're alone and when we feel incompetent to handle what's there. But we can handle pain when we know that we are supported by that which is greater and when we have our own inner support. So that brings us to number nine, the last question. How do we get strength and support? In the group program that I lead, we look at three main pillars of relationship that strengthen us. The first is self-to-self relationship. This is all about growing resilience. We look at how can we get into our empowerment, creatorship, and choice. How can we be gentle with ourselves rather than judgmental? How can we truly feel and experience self-love? Self-to-self relationship. Number two, self-to-other relationship, human-to-human. This is where Sangha, sacred friendship, spiritual community is so important. So in our group, we are a group of spiritual practitioners, of all different lineages and cultures who all have the same intention and who are all doing spiritual practice and who all have a paradigm of seeing what is most important in the same way, which is love and oneness. And so everyone is mutually supporting each other in spiritual practice, even if they have different spiritual practices And people are able to actually see each other on a much deeper level, provide true reflection and true mutual support, really able to hold each other because of these deepened capacities for resilience and for surrender to that which is greater. So there is a huge mutual support available in sangha, in spiritual community and spiritual friendship, and that's extremely important Number three The relationship between ourselves and the divine. I've spoken about this. This is the feeling and the knowing, direct knowing that we are always held. And when we experience the divine as relationship, this is where we can play with the divine as absolute beingness formless, and we can see the divine through all of its forms, our angels, our guides, our deities, our saints, our masters, our gurus, our ancestors, all those in the non-physical fields who hold us and guide us. And in that sacred relationship, in that relationship of love and of guidance and of protection, we can feel that connection that belonging and that safety, and we can feel how we are held, and that can give us an immense amount of strength and support So these are our nine questions. We can review them, feel where is it that I am strong and what are some areas that maybe I could use more focus on or more support on? And for those who are interested in talking to me to learn about either one-on-one work together or to be a part of this spiritual community that we have, this group that I lead, where we work on all of these nine things and more, you can write a message to me directly in the show notes. If you scroll down, there is a link where you can contact me. And you can also go to my website to see more at thegroundoflove.com. Blessings thank you for being with me in The Ground of Love. You can follow this podcast to receive the next episodes, and who is it that comes to mind to share this episode with? Please go ahead and pass this along to them and go ahead and leave a review or a rating if you wish. I thank you for that. For one-on-one healing sessions and a group membership. you can go to www.thegroundoflove.com Blessings to you. May you be protected, held, regenerated centered. And taken forward with all light, love, truth and highest and best health and wellbeing on all levels and taken forward to make the greatest, most beautiful impact doing exactly what you're here to do. God bless you. Protection, grace, protection, grace. So it is.