Spiritual Growth Isn’t Gentle: Why Hard Seasons Don’t Mean Failure

Why do we start doubting ourselves spiritually the moment life gets hard?

So many people on a spiritual path are told that alignment should feel peaceful, flowing, and easy. But when pain, loss, confusion, or uncertainty shows up, it often leads to one quiet question: “Am I doing this wrong?”

In this episode, we get real about why spiritual doubt happens during hard seasons — and why struggle is not a sign of failure, disconnection, or misalignment. We talk about the difference between initiation vs punishment, why real growth requires dismantling old identities, and how healing often stirs things up instead of smoothing them over.

This is a grounded, honest conversation about spirituality beyond aesthetics and platitudes — one that makes space for grief, confusion, faith, intuition, and the human experience.

If you’ve ever questioned your intuition, your faith, or your connection to God or Spirit because life didn’t turn out the way you expected, this episode is for you.

✨ In this episode, we explore:

• Why spirituality is often marketed as peace, flow, and ease
• How pain can feel like evidence we failed
• Why we internalize blame instead of asking better questions
• Initiations vs punishments on a spiritual path
• Why alignment doesn’t always feel peaceful
• How to stay connected to yourself during uncertainty

You’re not broken. You’re not behind. And you’re not doing it wrong.

THE RECLAIM INTENSIVE (3 month Coaching)

https://isabelhealing.com/the-reclaim-intensive/

Chapters

• 0:00 Year-End Reflections And Doubt
• 2:30 When Trust Still Hurts
• 5:10 The Love-And-Light Myth
• 8:20 Confusion, Grief, And Real Work
• 12:00 Pain Isn’t Proof Of Failure
• 15:30 Ask Better Questions, Not Blame
• 19:30 Initiation Versus Punishment
• 24:00 Dismantling Old Selves To Grow
• 28:00 Alignment Can Feel Chaotic

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hey and welcome back to Real Talk with Isabelle. Alright, so we're getting ready to end 2025, and it has been the craziest year. And I'm not gonna sit here and give you this like big motivational speech to go into 2026, but I do want to talk about something to let you guys know that you're on the right path, and just to really like trust yourself because I feel like we're constantly overthinking, overanalyzing, questioning, and wondering like, am I on the right path? Am I following my heart right? Am I trusting myself? And I want to talk about something that no one really admits when they're on the spiritual path. And that thing is that the moment that things get hard, the first thought we often have is I must be doing something wrong. And I'm bringing this up because who really hasn't had a hard 2025? I mean, this year I just feel like I would sit here and say, like, I lost a lot, but I don't think it was a loss in the perception that I have. It's just that relationships I didn't expect to fall away fell away. People that I expected to be closer to by the end of this year are no longer around. Um I had some relationship changes that happened, but worked through it, grew. It's just, it just was really an unexpected year. And it did leave me a lot of asking like, am I messing this up? Like, am I really doing something wrong? And I find that often even you guys ask yourself that same thing when we get like sidetracked or things don't work out, we we immediately look at ourselves, right? And the reason that we do this is because we we can only really control ourselves, and so it's easier to interpret things through our own self and perception. That's why we always are like, I must be wrong, or I did something wrong. And we don't usually say that part out loud. Like we don't usually be like to somebody like I must be doing something wrong. Some of us maybe, but like we don't. But the thing is, is like if you're spiritual, I think at times we feel bad thinking this because it's like I'm supposed to trust God, I'm supposed to trust spirit, right? Like I'm supposed to trust my gut, like all these things. But what happens when you did trust? When I trusted with all of my heart, and things just didn't work out. Like I'm not hurt right now. I might be sounding it because I'm just having a lot of thoughts come up right now in this conversation. It's like I'm in a good place in my life, but there has been very big decisions I've made in the course of my life throughout years, and they didn't play out the way that I wanted. It didn't play out the way that I expected. Am I happy? Yeah, did I gain freedom? Absolutely, but life still was a struggle. Life wasn't any easier, it was harder. And so what happens when we trust, but like it still hurts. I don't know. But this episode, I guess, like what we're talking about, is for anyone who has ever wondered if I was really aligned, if I was doing exactly what I should be doing, shouldn't this be easier? And I want to say this clearly before we go any further. This is not a teaching episode. I am not here to teach you. This is just a thought, it's just a conversation. So I'm gonna leave room for your experiences, and I'm gonna leave room for mine. I I I have right now, even before I go on, I love my my friend to to pieces. But you know, I have a friend that really lost, she lost a loved one this year. Um, and she's one of the most amazing spiritual people I know. Like, she's a healer, she's an intuitive, her heart is just amazing, just one of the most amazing hearts. If you if you're blessed to meet her, you're blessed. And she could sit here and ask her herself these questions, right? Like, shouldn't it be easier? I don't know. Most people don't doubt their spirituality when things are going great, right? When things are going well, you're like, I got this in the bag, this is great, I'm on point. But we doubt it when life starts matching the story that we told ourselves. When it's not matching the outcome that we have created in our mind. Like, we doubt it. You know, oftentimes we look at, and I think that's because like the spirituality market has been oversaturated with this like love and light and happy and peace, and uh, like if you're doing it right, there's no struggles and like anger's wrong and frustration's wrong and mad's wrong. Like that's not true. Like, that's not true. There's growth in pain as hard as that could sound. There's lessons to be learned in our anger and frustrations. Like, we are evolving spirits, we're not perfect, we didn't come down here as this perfect person. Like, Earth is school. I hate to say it, but it is, you know, and and we don't acknowledge that enough, we don't look at that enough. I hate the fact of like I've watched, you know, TikToks on people that are like condemning those that feel a certain way about things, like they're questioning or they're doubting, and they're like, you're wrong for that. It's like that's not that's not true. I do say that we're taught to trust ourselves, that I teach you guys to listen to yourself and and and trust that part of it. But the way that spirituality is marked is why we often create this self-doubt within ourselves, right? If you scroll through TikTok long enough, it can look like it's really calm, right? It can look like peace, it can look like flow, it looks like everything is finally making sense. Like we see the quotes, we see them, we hear the messages. What once you're aligned, everything falls into place. Once you heal, you stop struggling. You know, once you try, trust, life softens. That's bullshit. That's not real. It's not. How many times we mess up the burdens we carry on our back because we think it's our fault before any of anything falls into place. Nobody talks about the struggle. Nobody talks about how many times they messed up before things made sense. Like, I've done this job for over 10 years, and things still don't make sense all the time. So, what isn't marketed is the confusion. We don't talk about the confusion, the grief, the moments where you're doing the work and you're still crying on the bathroom floor, you're crashing out, you're you're just ripping shit apart, like none of these thoughts, right? Like when I got on this spiritual journey years ago, years ago, I did ride that love and light train for a while. Like I rode that train. And and it wasn't until like I was literally sitting on the floor in my house crying and realizing my life was falling apart. Like this life of perfection that I was looking on the outside was bullshit. Like I was calling myself out, like I'm not happy. I'm not happy, I'm not in love, I'm not happy, this isn't what I wanted. And I really had to like sit with that. Like I really thought that spirituality was the answer. But instead, it it showed me reflections of what I still need to heal. It showed me reflections of what I needed to work on, it showed me reflections of what wasn't in alignment. Spirituality is often sold as the absence of struggle, when in reality, it's the ability to stay present inside of the struggle. Like, think about that. That's that's the truth. It's it's not saying we're never gonna struggle, it's being able to be present in it. That's really what everything is about. Like when we have these hard moments in our life, when we're struggling, and and we start trying to figure out like what does it mean? Why am I going through this? What is the meeting? But instead of asking, like, what is this teaching me? We often go, what did I do wrong? So we create this look at pain, and we think that's evidence that we messed up. Evidence that we misread something, that we trusted too soon, that we our our intuition is wrong. That's that's so false. That is a hundred percent false. Like you know, I I think it was I this year I took a I took a break from doing um from doing uh entertainment entertainment stuff, you know. I did entertainment, I did entertainment events the year before, so like in 2024, I was doing events, I was hosting events, and things weren't going good. I wasn't profiting, I wasn't making money, but my gut was like, this is what you're supposed to be doing. And I didn't I was embarrassed. Like I was like, that was not that did not end the way I thought it was. That's not the way that I saw it, like at all. And I trusted my intuition and I felt like my intuition led me wrong. I made some great friendships, I made some great connections, but like it really kind of felt like it put more of a burden on me than than than was like what I thought it was gonna come from. It's interesting enough as we're stepping in 2026 and I'm like ready to step into more events, but I say that because sometimes like our intuition, you know, we think like the mess-ups or the mistakes or the pain is evidence that we were wrong. And this is where people start pulling away from their spiritual connection. It's when we start doubting and we start start not trusting it. We turn that blame inward, and that's that's the wrong part. We need to just learn to ask better questions, right? Like, let's say something happened to you. I don't know, relationship didn't work out, or friendships didn't work out, or vision that you had for yourself didn't work out, or whatever it is. You could, you know, ask yourself, like, why didn't I see this coming? Why can't I get it right? Why am I like this? These are the things that we start looking at, right? Those are that's creating the blame inward. We start looking at these thoughts of like, how why am I like this? Why can't I? Like, these are all I questions. Those aren't intuitive questions, they're survival questions. So a better question would be like, why did I fail? Right? What's what's what is spirit asking of me right now? Not how do I fix this, but how do I stay with myself in this moment? How do I stay present in this moment? How can I look at this from another perspective? And that's where the growth starts. That's where we start realizing like, just because I'm spiritual doesn't mean I'm perfect, just because I'm spiritual doesn't mean I'm right all the time. It's just I'm gonna be really honest with myself. I'm gonna be very honest with myself about this moment. That's what it's about. It's about the honesty and and trusting that honesty, being able to call yourself out. I don't want you guys to stop blame trusting yourselves. I see that over and over again. You know, and it's not because your intuition failed, but we don't trust ourselves because we don't like the pain. We don't want to let ourselves down, we don't want to be let down, we don't want to look as a failure. It's a lot to carry, it's a lot, guys. Like that's so much to carry. But no one tells you that learning to trust yourself also means learning to trust yourself through the disappointment. I don't know. It's it's a thought, I guess. It's a thought. You know, just know that pain is not proof that you're disconnected, that struggle that you have is not a sign that you failed. You didn't fail. You gave yourself an opportunity to learn, you gave yourself an opportunity to grow. One that if you never took this chance, you never took this moment, you never would have had that. I want you to look at like these hard seasons that some of you guys faced, because I know some of you guys did. And in the spirituality context that we're in right now, right? There's such things as initiations, and we can look at things as punishments. And I want to talk a little bit about the difference between initiation and a punishment because a lot of people confuse these two. A punishment says you did something wrong, you failed, you need to be corrected. An initiation says you're being invited into a deeper level of yourself. And initiations don't feel rewarding when you're in them. They feel like chaos. They're not stable, they feel crazy, they're they're they're not fun, but that's where the growth happens. Like that's where that's literally like you're right there on the like tip of it. You're like, you're right there, ready to make the leap. Like this is where that shift, that's the magic right there. Like that is the magic. It's when you're like, I'm ready to go to the other side of the fence. And these initiations don't arrive because you failed, they're arriving because you're ready to finally call yourself out. You're ready to finally see it, you're ready to make the shift, you're ready to make the change. Believe me, I've had so many moments in life where I was like, dude, life fucking sucks. Like, I am not in this right now. Like, I'm a fraud. I put on this front for other people, but I felt like life was just punishing me in so many ways. Like I felt like at times the spiritual struggle and being spiritual was more of a struggle than an actual like thing that I wanted. Do you know what I mean? Like it was like I felt like I chose to be spiritual and my family turned their back on me. I got a divorce. Like it was a struggle. It wasn't a joy. It was like, look at everything that happened. Like, is life punishing me? But I later realized it wasn't a punishment, it was a restructure. It was restructuring me. If it was punishment, I would have shrunk. I would have, I would have just, you wouldn't even, I wouldn't even be on this podcast right now. But I was allowing myself to be reshaped. I was allowing myself to just be more powerful and to show up a difference. And that's that's initiation. That's initiation. Sometimes growth looks like that. Sometimes growth means that it's gonna dismantle everything. It's just gonna, it's gonna wipe the board clean. Whether you're ready or not, it's just gonna wipe it clean. It's it's not growth, isn't like a a okay, you're here, so you're gonna grow and everything gets to stay perfect. Sometimes, yeah, but sometimes no. Because growth requires us to have a lot more confidence, maybe more clarity, maybe more alignment. And it means that in order to have that, our life has to do a 180. And in order to have that, sometimes our life has to be completely to be dismantled at first. We have to get rid of old identities, old belief systems, old coping mechanisms that we're keeping in our lives because they feel safe, because that's what we keep leaning on, and we're creating these old habits. So we're not growing, we're just going in a circle. You can't step into a new way of being, a new life while you're holding on to everything that belonged to the old one. I literally, I had a client, I know she's probably gonna hear this, but I had a client, and I remember I told her, like, you you you made the switch in your life, which was a huge, powerful switch, and you're stepping into this new version of you, but you're still trying to live with the old version of you at the same time, and it won't work. You can't be the new version of you while still living in the old version of you. It just it's never gonna work. It's you have to change, and it's uncomfortable and it's vulnerable, and it's it's messy. And I know I've done enough podcasts with that, so I don't even know, I don't even feel like I need to go down that way. I don't, I don't, but healing, growing, it stirs a lot up. It stirs a lot up, and it can feel like the universe, God divine, just blindsides us. And I think a lot of us were blindsided in 2025. I think a lot of us were just like, we did not see that coming. That was unexpected. What the heck happened? But here's a perspective shift. Here's where the gratitude has to come in. I mean, you can choose it or not, but I'm saying for me, that's where gratitude. I say, okay, spirit, all right. I was blindsided, but I know that you're creating space for something more. I don't know. Sometimes we start healing and you know things feel worse. That's real. That's real. I wish I could tell you it was different, but no, sometimes when you're healing, things do start feeling worse because your awareness is increasing. You're starting to learn how to listen to your gut, you're starting to realize all the things that you put behind that door you didn't want to open. You start realizing that maybe you were forcing alignment in situations that were definitely not an alignment. You're starting to Have old emotions come up that you never talked about, you never, you never addressed, you just buried. You start seeing the patterns that you have allowed people to keep in your life or you have kept in your life because again, they made you feel safe. So sometimes healing does make things feel worse. Healing isn't about numbing ourselves and going back into the old patterns, it's really about it allowing ourselves to it's about revealing. I couldn't word that better, but it's about letting things be revealed to us. That's what it is. It's not fun. It's not fun. I feel like the thing though, that with spirituality I will tell you is that the more that you learn to have the awareness and be present in these cycles, the easier it is to grow and make these shifts quicker. So you're not sitting in it for as long. I can tell you that. I can say that. But just because things don't feel perfect doesn't mean you're out of alignment. Because sometimes alignment doesn't look peaceful. Sometimes it looks like everything that no longer fits is leaving. That's what alignment looks like. Sometimes you're so on the track, on track in your life that the universe is going to pull up everything that's not meant for you to be there. Relationships, friendships, jobs just starts like not working. It doesn't fit anymore into who you are. And there's no way you can force it. And the universe just it's just gone. It's just gone. Blindsided. You can't go back. It's like the universe is like, you can't go backwards. You can't go back into that old version of you. You can't go back into keeping these habits of you because you're meant for so much more and you're growing forward. You're growing forward. You can't go forward and still be backwards. You can't. You can't. Sometimes it feels like you're standing in the middle of the truth with nothing to hide behind anymore. That's what it's like. Alignment doesn't always feel calm. If you're in this right now, if you went through this and life feels like it's just falling away right now, just know it doesn't mean you're off path. It just might mean you're standing at the threshold of who you're becoming. Because again, initiations don't ask for perfection. They ask you to be present, present in your growth, present in what's happening. And punishments don't make you grow, initiations do. So if you're in a way of life right now where it's just dismantling you, it's it's shaking you up like I'm imagining one of those, like, you know, those bulbs with the snow globes, it's just shaking it all up. So if life isn't really feeling very rewarding right now, ask yourself, what if this isn't happening to me, but for the version of me I haven't met yet? Game changer. Game changer. That that right there, I would I would love to know the answers that you guys get if you guys ask yourself those questions. I really would. I don't know. Just know that pain is not, like I said, it's not proof that you're disconnected. Hard seasons, we're gonna have them in our lives. We're gonna have hubs, ups, and downs for the rest of our lives. They don't usually break our faith, but they will show you where trust was still conditional. Did you just trust in something if it only looked a certain way, if the actions only happened this way? Like, is that really trust? Is that really trust? You only trust when it makes sense because I always tell you guys intuition and logic, not the same line. They they don't work the same way. They don't work the same way. And I can tell you one thing that when I am called to make a leap or a change, it doesn't make any logical sense. It makes none. It makes none. Recently, I just had to change my pricing. Now I changed my pricing because I was being overworked for myself. I was overworking, I wasn't getting to show up as much as in like the best I wanted to show up for my clients. So I had to raise my prices. But for me, that didn't make logical sense. But I felt that I knew it was time in my gut. I trusted, and I'm still trusting. Sorry. But I say that because again, intuition and logic don't always make sense, and you're not gonna have clarity sometimes right away. You're not gonna have clarity maybe till you make the change or make the switch, and that's where a lot of people just give up. We give up because it's like if I don't have all the answers, I don't want to do it. It's not the way it works, it's not the way it works. We have to trust our intuition, we have to trust ourselves even when sometimes it doesn't feel the greatest. Can you stay connected to yourself even when you don't understand what's happening yet? That's that's a lot right there. That's what it's about. That's what it's about. I don't always have the answers. I don't. Half the time, I'm walking around with like a blindfold on. I'm just literally like, okay, this feels right. I gotta go do this. This is right, I gotta go do this. And then later on, I'm like, oh, it works out. I've had a friend that tell me, like, Is well, you lead such a crazy life. Like, your life makes no sense. And then later on, it like makes perfect sense because and I'm like, yeah, like I trust what feels right. And that's that's literally why I teach you guys. If you're listening to this right now and thinking, this is exactly where I am, I want you to just pause with me for a moment. I want you to kind of look at these like things that I'm gonna say right now and just think them. Like think them, think about them. What are you disappointed about right now? What did you expect the season to feel like? What feels heavier than you thought it would. And you don't need the answers right today. You don't need to fix anything, fix your faiths, fits your fix your intuition. You don't need to fix anything. Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is stop pretending this doesn't hurt. Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is just listen, trust, feel, feel. Maybe that's all spirit wants, and in those feelings, in those quiet moments, is where you find that answer and that clarity. You finally acknowledge what you didn't want to acknowledge. You finally allow that awareness in. And you didn't fail spiritually because things didn't go as planned. Spirituality isn't proven when life is calm. It's revealed in how you stay with yourself when it isn't. Alright. I'm gonna let you guys be where you are. You don't need to rush having this clarity, nothing like that. Just know that you're not behind. I never want you guys to think you're behind. You're right where you need to be. You're right where you need to be. You just need to honor yourself. Honor yourself. You're not broken, you're becoming. You're becoming. Alright. If you guys have questions, send me an email. Ask me. Um, I do want to take this moment and let you guys know with that. If you're looking as you're jumping into 2026 for more connection, a deeper understanding of you, a deeper understanding of, I don't know, just how to move, how to change, how to grow, how to understand your intuition, your life. Sometimes maybe the voice inside you is telling you something needs to change, and you've been ignoring it, and you're afraid to speak your truth. I can go on. I just want to let you know I'm opening a three-month uh deep dive transformation where we're gonna heal your past, reclaim your power, you're gonna step into the life that you're definitely meant to have because it's yours. It is yours. And if you're wanting to join this three-month coaching one on one, um send me a DM. I will put um the link. If you go to my links, you'll find it there. So I'll put a link below as well. And with that, I hope you guys have a great day. Okay, bye.