Spiritual Unfoldment
A contemplative approach to spiritual coaching grounded in awakening, discernment, and heart-centered living.
The Call of Spirituality
Something in you may be calling you toward depth.
Perhaps you’ve had moments when the ordinary world suddenly felt permeable: walking in nature, sitting with loss, or in an unexpected instant when something vast touched you. Maybe a life event brought existential questions to the surface. Or perhaps it’s quieter: a persistent intuition that even your best frameworks, however sophisticated, don’t quite account for the fullness of your experience.
And yet… the word spiritual can feel uncomfortable.
It carries baggage: crystals and incense, gurus and absolutes, the pressure to believe things you don’t believe, or to abandon discernment. It’s been stretched to mean too many things.
So let’s begin clearly. What we’re speaking about here has nothing to do with belief systems or adopting new ideas. It’s about letting what’s false fall away. It’s about learning to attune to the field of awareness that’s already here.
Pause for a moment. There’s seeing. There’s hearing There’s knowing. There’s the quiet sense of being aware, right now, before any thought names it.
It’s the simple immediacy of being.
This is a way of engaging consciousness that honors both the movement toward transcendence and the fullness of being human.
If you sense you’re standing at such a threshold — between what you’ve known and what’s quietly calling you forward — you’re not alone. This is the invitation: to step through with discernment, curiosity, and care, allowing what’s deepest in you to unfold.
Spiritual unfoldment is one of several doorways within my work, woven alongside coaching, meditation, and other offerings. Continue below to explore nondual meditation in more depth.
What is Spirituality?
Right now, as you read this, there's awareness happening.
Not awareness as a concept, but the immediate knowing of these words. The sense of being present to this moment. Before you name it or interpret it, there's simply... this.
That's the territory.
It’s difficult to speak about spirituality without reducing it. The word itself is porous, pointing to something that refuses containment — a felt dimension of aliveness that touches meaning, value, and mystery all at once.
For some, this dimension is named God or Spirit. For others, it’s experienced simply as awareness, depth, or the quiet sense that reality is more than our concepts can capture. The language matters less than what it points toward: something real, immediate, and available in your direct experience.
In this work, spirituality isn’t about belief. It’s not about subscribing to any cosmology or escaping the human condition. It's about discovering what's actually here when you look closely, and the mind relaxes its grip on certainty. It cultivates a quality of attention that allows experience to reveal its own depth.
Spiritual unfoldment points to the natural movement of consciousness toward greater inclusion, coherence, and intimacy with life itself.
Spirituality is not only an inner realization. It moves in every direction at once: inward into self-recognition, outward into the living world, across into relationship, and upward into the vast mystery that holds it all. To live spiritually is to participate in the wholeness of life, where self, others, nature, and the sacred are facets of one continuous field.
I honor each person’s background and beliefs. Some of my clients approach this work through contemplative practice, others through a strictly secular worldview. What matters is a shared resonance: a sincerity of inquiry and a willingness to stay close to lived experience, even when it outgrows our familiar stories.
Is Spirituality Compatible with a Secular Orientation?
Absolutely.
In secular terms, we might say that spirituality works with how consciousness represents itself to itself. It’s the practice of noticing the difference between direct experience and the stories we tell about experience; between the raw texture of this moment and the concepts we layer over it.
But here’s what’s interesting: that noticing isn’t just intellectual. When you clearly see that thoughts are thoughts — rather than reality itself — something natural happens. The cognitive model becomes transparent. The mind no longer needs to grip so tightly.
And in that transparency, a different quality of knowing emerges: a felt sense of participation in the living field of experience. It’s a shift from standing apart from reality to recognizing that you’re already woven into it.
This is where a contemplative and a secular orientation converge: both invite the same movement toward clarity, humility, and intimacy with what is.
From here, we can begin to explore how this dimension of being reveals itself in practice and experience
What’s Awakening?
Awakening is another loaded topic. For many, it’s been mythologized into a final, exalted state: what some call “enlightenment.” That framing is misleading. It suggests a secret you can attain, a binary of enlightened/unenlightened. It can easily fuel striving, hierarchy, and spiritual inflation.
Many traditions avoid the term altogether for that reason. Others speak of it carefully, as a real possibility that’s neither perfection nor escape. I follow the pragmatic line here, informed by teachers who approach awakening as a recognition rather than an accomplishment.
Experientially, there are somethings we can say. The scaffolding of “me looking at the world” relaxes, and experience reveals itself as a single, self-knowing field. The familiar contents — identity, thoughts, stories — are seen as movements within awareness rather than what you fundamentally are. The world feels strangely transparent and intimate; ordinary, yet vividly alive.
It’s not a single switch. Think of it as a spectrum of recognitions that can arrive suddenly and deepen gradually. Moments of clarity and moments of contraction coexist. We are already awake and simultaneously blocked from realizing it. Both movements are part of one unfolding.
Across lineages, the arc is often similar: seeing through the constructed self and its concepts; softening the felt sense of separation; recognizing the ground in which all experience appears. But it’s also true that different orientations lead to unique realizations, shaped by culture and practice.
There’s also growing documentation: phenomenologists have catalogued varieties of selfless experience, and neuroscience continues to explore correlates in self-referential processing, attention, and affect.
Finally: awakening begins something. Its depth shows up in integration: how insight permeates relationships, work, ethics, and care. Without integration, even powerful glimpses fade or become new identities to defend. With integration, the recognition matures into a quieter intimacy with life.
From here, we can begin to explore how this dimension of being reveals itself in practice and experience.
The Three Journeys
I like to think about the spiritual path in terms of three interwoven journeys. These journeys often circle through one another, guided by something deeper than our plans: the intelligence of the heart.
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The first movement is the recognition of what’s always been here.
At first, this may come as a glimpse: a brief moment when everything shines with the same clarity that knows it. Over time, those glimpses stabilize. This is the movement from identification with the contents of experience to recognition of the field in which all experience appears.
Eventually, the recognition becomes effortless. Awareness perceives itself in all forms; a quiet knowing that the ordinary world has never been separate from awareness. This is the beginning of a new intimacy with life.
The heart, in this stage, begins to open as a mirror of reality’s vastness. Love becomes less about preference and more about resonance with truth itself.
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For many people, awakening brings a kind of spacious peace. Life wants to fill that space with color and texture.
This is the movement from emptiness into fullness, from transcending the world to falling back in love with it.
Here, awareness turns toward the imaginal, the poetic, and the particular. The soul begins to speak in symbols, dreams, and callings. The world shows up not as illusion to escape, but as a living expression of meaning.
Drawing from teachers like Bill Plotkin and Rob Burbea, we might say that the task here is ensoulment — discovering your unique way of belonging to the world, the beauty you alone can bring forth.
In this journey, the heart becomes a translator between the infinite and the intimate. It learns to embody the ineffable through creativity, relationship, and service.
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Eventually, these currents meet and begin to move as one.
Here, realization and ensoulment mature into spontaneous presence: wisdom expressed through action, compassion, and integrity.
Awakened living isn’t the end of the path but the integration of all paths: awakening that cooks slowly in the fires of everyday life. It’s how the vastness of being learns to navigate emails, conflict, and uncertainty with tenderness.
This is where spirituality becomes ecology: where your inner coherence supports the wider coherence of the world. The heart becomes the organ of attunement, sensing what serves wholeness moment to moment.
How We Might Work Together
My work offers several interrelated doorways into spiritual unfoldment:
Unfolding is the heart of it, an integrative field that includes psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. It supports the process of realization and its integration into daily life.
Meditation cultivates the contemplative dimension of awakening: stability, clarity, and direct insight into awareness itself.
Purpose discovery enters through the imaginal and soulful layer of being, exploring how life wishes to express through you. This is the territory of soul initiation.
Consciousness work engages the edge of mystery, exploring subtle and non-ordinary states of awareness.
Together, these doorways form an ecology of practice that extends beyond the psychological into the contemplative.
Ultimately, this is a kind of meta-spiritual coaching: a contemplative and integrative approach to spiritual coaching that supports discernment, awakening, and embodied integration. However the work unfolds, the orientation remains the same: to meet life as it reveals itself.
Note on Context and Care
While the exploration of spirituality presented here draws from a blend of contemplative traditions and secular insights, it is inherently interpretive. It’s shaped by my own experiences and those of countless others who have inquired into the nature of awareness.
It is not a definitive map, nor does it claim universality; cultural, historical, and personal contexts inevitably color how these ideas resonate. Factors such as neurodiversity, trauma, or socioeconomic factors could make this kind of introspective work challenging or inaccessible for some.
Potential risks include emotional disorientation, over-idealization, or using these ideas to avoid real-world responsibilities. These are real and deserve care and discernment.
This work is best suited for those drawn to direct experience, curiosity, and sincere inquiry, free from rigid expectations of belief or guaranteed outcomes.
Do You Feel Called?
If you feel drawn to explore, I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute consultation. We'll explore what's alive for you, whether this approach feels aligned, and how we might work together.
