The Hardest Part of the Spiritual Path

“Leaps forward are often preceded by desperate, regressive steps backward.”
— Don Beck / Chris Cowan

Plateaus are common on the path to mastery—in a craft, or an intellectual or physical discipline. Spiritual or healing work is uniquely punishing in that we don’t just plateau—we violently regress.

I wanted to explicate this phenomenon for anyone struggling with these contractions (including myself), because they can be punishing and deeply discouraging.

What Is a Contraction?

It’s half of the pulsation of life—your lungs expand and contract, your heart beats, your muscles flex and extend. Flexibility (the ease of movement through different physical and emotional postures) is what makes life sustainable and pleasurable.

In spiritual, somatic, or any kind of personal development process, a contraction might look like:

• the seeming erasure of any previous progress

• a complete lack of hope about the future

• the evident failure of the process/path itself

Unlimited growth is cancerous—but boundless expansion is forever tempting, especially if we’ve been riding high on the fruits of our labor: deepening relationships, showing up in new ways, setting strong boundaries.

Why Is Contraction a Crucial Part of Transformation?

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: contractions serve a few essential functions.

1. They test our resolve while accessing new states of healing and consciousness.
Our systems—energetic, physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional—are extremely conservative. We are creatures of habit, especially when it comes to lessons learned through traumatic experience.

Each contraction asks us:

“Are you sure you want to change? Are you sure you want to level up? There’s still time to turn back.”

Satisfying change might take 100, 1,000, or 10,000 micro-affirmations that we are, in fact, committed to change. To us, this answer may seem obvious. But to our system, it’s a matter of life and death.

2. They bring us inward.
If you’re like me, you may sometimes cling to the rush and pleasure of an expansion, casting contractions as painful threats to your progress. But they also invite further rounds of introspection and insight.

In Buddhist terms, the suffering of the contraction is the resistance to losing our previous, “better” life circumstances and emotional state. But contraction is actually a redirection toward what most needs our attention. A refocusing on what truly needs transformation. It’s a sacred injunction not to grow complacent—and to reach, again, for an extraordinary life.

3. They transform us.
This is the hardest pill for me to swallow—particularly when I’m in a contraction. But these frustrating, discouraging, maddening, and scary troughs of the spiritual path are the purifying fires that real change is built on.

If you find yourself in a contraction, I invite you to ask:

• What would it mean to tend to yourself in this state?

• If you were to accept and submit to this phase, what would that look like?

• What forms of support would you need?

• What current activities might no longer be appropriate, given this new lens?