The Power of Mindfulness in Spiritual Growth

I remember reading somewhere that the average person has approximately sixty thousand thoughts a day, and that the vast majority of them are the same ones they had yesterday.

We walk around with these exquisitely sensitive nervous systems, these hearts that can shatter and mend, these minds that spin stories faster than a spider spins her web. And most of the time, we’re not even here for it. We’re lost in the past, rehearsing old hurts, or catapulted into the future, wrestling with anxieties that may never come to pass. We’re everywhere but here, now… in the only moment that is ever truly ours.

I remember a time, years ago, sitting by the ocean on a particularly grey Vancouver day. The waves were a relentless, churning grey, mirroring the turmoil in my own heart. I was caught in a loop of worry about a client, about a decision I had to make, about the endless to-do list that seemed to be the wallpaper of my life. My body was there, on that cold, damp log, but my consciousness was a thousand miles away, tangled in the thorny bushes of ‘what if’ and ‘if only’.

And then, a drop of rain landed on my hand.

Just one. Cold. Startling. And in that tiny, crystalline moment, I was pulled back. Back into my body. I felt the rough bark of the log beneath my legs. I heard the sharp cry of a gull overhead. I smelled the salt and the decay and the wild, wet life of the shoreline. I was… here. And in the being here, the churning in my heart didn’t exactly stop, but it settled. The frantic storytelling of my mind grew quiet. And in that quiet, a different kind of knowing arose. A deep, resonant peace that had nothing to do with solving my problems and everything to do with simply being present with them.

This is the threshold of mindfulness. And it is so much more than a tool for stress reduction. It is a gateway to the most profound spiritual growth.

The Sacred Neuroscience of Now

We often talk about mindfulness in the context of calming down, of managing the overwhelm of modern life. And it is wonderfully effective for that. But to leave it there is to miss the deeper invitation. True mindfulness isn’t about emptying the mind, but about inhabiting the present moment with a full and compassionate awareness. It’s not about stopping our thoughts, but about changing our relationship to them.

Here’s a very good thing to know: our brains are wired for survival. The default mode network, as neuroscientists call it, is our brain’s baseline activity. It’s the part of us that’s constantly scanning the past for lessons and the future for threats. It’s the storyteller, the planner, the worrier. And it’s brilliant at its job. But when we live there exclusively, we are living in a state of perpetual, low-grade stress. We are living in a story, not in our life.

When you practice mindfulness—when you deliberately bring your attention to the sensation of your breath, or the feeling of your feet on the earth, or the taste of your morning tea—you are performing a radical act of neural rebellion. You are consciously choosing to disengage from the default mode network and activate the present-moment circuits of your brain. You are, quite literally, forging new neural pathways. This is the miracle of neuroplasticity. The brain is not a fixed, static organ. It is a dynamic, living river of energy and information, and where you place your attention determines the course of that river.

With consistent practice, you begin to strengthen these pathways of presence. The space between a trigger and your reaction to it begins to widen. You’re no longer a pinball, ricocheting from one reactive thought to another. You become the spacious, compassionate witness to your own experience. You begin to notice the stories your mind tells without being swept away by them. You see them for what they are—stories. Not truth. Not you.

This is not just a mental exercise. It is a full-body transformation. As you shift your brain activity, you shift your entire physiology. The frantic, high-beta brain waves of anxiety give way to the calmer, more coherent alpha and theta waves of relaxed awareness. Your cortisol levels drop. Your heart rate variability increases. Your body, that sacred and wise messenger, begins to feel safe. And when the body feels safe, it can finally begin to heal.

My Crooked Path to Presence

My own journey with mindfulness wasn’t a straight line. It was a crooked, meandering path, full of detours and dead ends. For years, I approached meditation as another thing to be good at. I would sit, determined to have a “good” meditation, to achieve some state of blissful emptiness. And of course, my mind would have other plans. It would serve up an endless buffet of distractions, worries, and half-forgotten memories. I would end my sessions feeling more agitated than when I began, convinced I was a failure at this whole mindfulness thing.

The shift came when I encountered the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching. Verse 16 became my anchor: “Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return.” It took me years to stop treating meditation as one more thing to be good at, which is exactly the ground covered in why meditation was never about clearing your mind, a relief for anyone who has ended a session feeling like a failure.

Contemplate their return. It wasn’t about banishing the turmoil. It was about watching it. It was about trusting that everything, every thought, every feeling, every wave of anxiety, has a natural rhythm of arising and passing away. My job wasn’t to fight the waves, but to learn how to be the ocean—the vast, deep, unshakable presence in which the waves of experience could rise and fall without drowning me.

This changed everything. I began to approach my practice not with ambition, but with a gentle, loving curiosity. When a difficult thought arose, I would greet it softly. “Ah, there you are, old friend.” When my body ached, I would breathe into the sensation, not trying to fix it, but simply offering it my kind attention. I began to understand that every single thing that arose in my awareness was a doorway, an invitation to come home to myself.

Slowly, painstakingly, I learned to inhabit my own life. I discovered that the present moment wasn’t some boring, empty space. It was vibrant. It was alive. It was where the texture of my own soul could be felt. It was in the quiet moments of just being that the deepest spiritual insights would arrive, unbidden. A sudden, gut-level understanding of a client’s struggle. A flash of memory from my own childhood, finally seen through the lens of compassion. A profound sense of connection to the web of life that holds us all.

This is the spiritual dimension of mindfulness. It’s the gradual, tender process of unbecoming everything you thought you were, so you can finally rest in the truth of who you have always been.

The Healing is in the Being

It’s a paradox, really. We spend so much of our lives striving, fixing, improving, trying to heal ourselves. And yet, the most profound healing happens when we stop trying and simply allow ourselves to be. To be exactly as we are, in this moment. Broken, beautiful, messy, magnificent… all of it.

Your body holds the story of your life. Every joy, every sorrow, every trauma is imprinted in your tissues, in your cells, in the very way you hold yourself in the world. When we are disconnected from the present moment, we are disconnected from this deep, somatic wisdom. We treat our bodies like machines to be managed, and our symptoms like enemies to be vanquished. We numb the pain, we distract ourselves from the discomfort, we override the subtle signals our bodies are constantly sending us.

Mindfulness is the practice of returning to the body. It is the gentle, courageous act of turning towards our physical and emotional experience with a non-judgmental awareness. When you feel a knot of anxiety in your stomach, the invitation is not to immediately try to get rid of it. The invitation is to feel it. To bring your breath to it. To ask it, with genuine curiosity, what it has to say.

What you will often find is that beneath the surface of the symptom, there is a younger part of you, a wounded part of you, that is simply asking to be seen. To be held. To be loved. When you can meet that pain with presence, with the warmth of your own compassionate attention, something miraculous begins to happen. The energy that was locked in the pattern of resistance begins to flow again. The old, frozen stories begin to thaw. And the body, in its infinite intelligence, can finally complete the healing process that was interrupted so long ago.

This is not a quick fix. It is a lifelong practice of turning towards yourself with love, again and again. It is the understanding that healing is not about becoming a perfect, polished version of yourself. It is about developing a conscious, loving relationship with all of yourself—the light and the shadow, the joy and the pain. It is the slow, sacred work of integration, of calling all the lost parts of your soul back home.

So, I invite you to begin, just for a moment. Right now. Feel the chair beneath you. Notice the rhythm of your own breathing, this faithful companion that has been with you since the moment of your birth. Let your shoulders soften. You don’t have to go searching for a spiritual experience. The sacred is right here, in the simple, profound, and often-overlooked reality of this very moment. You are already here. You just have to arrive.

With infinite love and support on your journey, Susan