Business Spirituality: Aligning Work With Your Spiritual Path

Most people treat business as if it exists in a sealed chamber apart from spirituality. They imagine meditation happens on a cushion, while money-making happens in an office. But life is not split into compartments. Business is not exempt from dharma. 

Every dollar earned, every deal signed, every product created carries energy – and that energy is a reflection of your consciousness. 

To do business spiritually is to enter the marketplace as a seeker, as someone who knows that the battlefield of commerce is one more arena where truth must be honored and illusion burned away.

Advaita Vedanta tells us there is only one Self, indivisible, without second. If this is so, then the division between spiritual life and business life is a hallucination. The same consciousness that meditates at dawn is the one that negotiates a contract in the afternoon.

The question is: will we show up fragmented and enslaved by ancestral fears, or will we walk into our business dealings as whole beings, free and on fire with truth?

Business As Your Spiritual Practice

Business can be a profound spiritual discipline – a form of sadhana. Sadhana is not limited to chanting mantras or fasting. It is the daily practice of aligning your life with truth. If you approach business this way, every meeting, every invoice, every confrontation with a difficult partner becomes practice.

  • Negotiation becomes meditation. Instead of rushing to win, you practice listening, noticing your inner agitation, and allowing calmness to guide your words.
  • Failure becomes tapas. When things collapse, instead of falling into despair, you hold the fire, burn away ego, and let humility purify you.
  • Success becomes seva. Instead of hoarding glory, you offer the fruits of your labor as service – to your employees, your customers, and the divine order itself.

When you see business as sadhana, you are not just an entrepreneur. You are a warrior of consciousness, standing in the marketplace with clarity and fierce love.

Reframing Wealth As Energy Instead Of Possession

One of the deepest poisons in business is the delusion that money is possession. That belief fuels greed, scarcity, manipulation, and endless anxiety. In truth, money is energy. It flows, circulates, and reflects the karmic currents of both individuals and cultures.

When you cling to money as if it defines you, you enslave yourself. When you let it flow – investing in what is aligned with dharma, giving generously, refusing to exploit others – you honor money as sacred energy.

Hidden in most entrepreneurs is ancestral compression around survival: generations of famine, debt, and unspoken fear that there will never be enough. Unless these imprints are dissolved, no amount of external wealth will bring peace. Doing business spiritually means recognizing that your ancestors whisper through your financial decisions – and then releasing them. You honor their suffering, but you do not let it bind you.

The Hidden Blocks At Our Core: Ancestral Fear and Shame

Why do so many entrepreneurs sabotage themselves? Why do they overwork, undersell, underpay, or betray their values for quick wins? Beneath the surface is a core of fear, shame, or rage – emotional residues passed down through family lines. A grandfather bankrupted. A mother who was shamed for poverty. A lineage that knew slavery, oppression, or exile.

These compressions live in the body, in the subconscious. When unexamined, they dictate business choices like puppet strings. You may unconsciously repeat patterns of desperation, aggression, or victimhood without realizing you are echoing ancestral wounds.

Doing business spiritually requires a ruthless self-inquiry into these hidden compressions. Sit with the shame that arises when you ask for payment. Sit with the fear that comes when you risk expansion. Ask yourself: Whose voice is this? Is it truly mine, or is it my great-grandfather’s despair living through me?

When you burn through these compressions, you liberate not only yourself but your lineage. Your business becomes a ritual of ancestral healing.

Bringing Fierce Love in the Marketplace

Love in business is not weakness. It is not appeasing everyone or saying yes to bad deals. Real love in the marketplace is fierce. It means:

  • Saying no to exploitation, even when it costs profit.
  • Refusing to work with partners who lack integrity, even if they are powerful.
  • Paying fair wages and honoring employees as divine beings, not as disposable tools.
  • Creating products and services that uplift rather than manipulate.

This kind of love requires self-respect. If you do not honor yourself, you will collapse into people-pleasing or exploitation. Spiritual business is not passive. It is rooted in dharma – the truth of how energy should flow in alignment with life itself. Sometimes dharma demands soft compassion. Sometimes it demands a sword. Both are love.

Daily Disciplines for Spiritual Business

Just as monks keep their daily practices, the spiritual entrepreneur needs disciplines:

  • Truth-telling practice: Refuse to distort reality in marketing, negotiations, or promises.
  • Mantra or prayer before meetings: Align your mind with clarity before speaking.
  • Self-inquiry after conflict: Instead of blaming, ask: What was triggered in me? Which hidden wound surfaced?
  • Breath discipline: Use conscious breathing to anchor yourself before making major decisions.
  • Service orientation: Regularly remind yourself: This business exists not only for me but for service to life.

These small practices keep your business grounded in the spiritual field, preventing the unconscious mind from hijacking your leadership.

Case Example: The Spiritual Contract

Imagine two entrepreneurs negotiating a contract. One comes with hidden desperation, terrified of failure. The other arrives rooted in awareness, breathing deeply, connected to the Self. The first entrepreneur manipulates, bluffs, and hides. The second speaks truth, even when it seems risky.

At first, the manipulator appears strong. But over time, their dishonesty corrodes trust. The one aligned with awareness, though they may lose short-term, builds unshakable relationships. Their reputation becomes their greatest asset. This is business as dharma: slow, steady, aligned with truth.

Business as Karma Dissolution

Every encounter in business is a karmic knot. The angry client, the failed investment, the betrayal by a partner – each is a karmic echo surfacing for resolution. Instead of resisting, the spiritual entrepreneur asks: How can I dissolve this? What lesson is being demanded of me? What is the greater lesson and path for me as I unfold into my highest self while living within this physical reality?

Seen this way, business is not a distraction from your spiritual path. It is the path. The office is your monastery. The balance sheet is your scripture. Every challenge is a fire that either burns you down or purifies you.

A Fierce and Loving Path

To do business spiritually is to stand in the marketplace with love in your heart and fire in your belly. It is to face ancestral compression without fear, to treat money as sacred energy, and to practice dharma in every transaction.

This path is not easy. It demands courage, integrity, and relentless self-awareness. But it is also liberating. For when you do business spiritually, you no longer split your life into compartments. 

Every part of you – the seeker, the worker, the lover, the leader – becomes one. And in that wholeness, you not only prosper in business, you awaken to the truth: all of it, every invoice and every prayer, was always divine play.



About The Author:

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Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.

Spiritual Advice for Breakups

Breakups are brutal. They rip through the illusions we build around ourselves, leaving us stripped, raw, and often ashamed of how much we depended on someone else for our sense of wholeness. 

 

Most people try to patch the wound with distractions, new relationships, endless therapy loops, or spiritual bypasses that say “just let go.”

Real spiritual advice for breakups is not about sugarcoating or rushing through pain. It is about walking directly into the fire, facing what is actually there, and allowing the breakup to dissolve illusions that might otherwise haunt you for lifetimes.

 

Breakups as the Teacher You Didn’t Want

Advaita Vedanta tells us that suffering is a doorway to awakening when you stop resisting it. In a breakup, the mind screams that something has been stolen. You think the other person has taken your security, your future, your happiness. But what has actually been taken is your illusion. The image you held of yourself in relationship has been shattered. The “us” you clung to never really existed in the eternal sense.

This is why breakups can feel like death. They kill a false identity. And this death is not an accident – it is dharma doing its ruthless, loving work. Spiritual advice for breakups begins with this recognition: what has died is what needed to die. What remains, if you face it honestly, is closer to truth.

The Trap of Distraction

Most people cannot bear the silence after a breakup. They rush to fill the void with dating apps, hookups, work addiction, or endless therapy. These distractions postpone the real confrontation: the loneliness and fear beneath the surface.

Spiritual healing after a breakup means refusing the easy exit. It means sitting in the discomfort long enough to see what is actually alive in you. Beneath the panic is often ancestral compression – generations of abandonment, betrayal, or unworthiness replaying themselves through your nervous system.

If you run from this, you repeat the pattern in your next relationship. If you face it, you dissolve it, not just for yourself but for the lineage that birthed you.

A human face overlaid with clocks and numbers — representing karmic timelines and unconscious imprinting

The Hidden Core of Relationship Suffering

When you lose a partner, you are not only grieving them. You are grieving the collapse of hidden expectations: that someone else would finally heal your loneliness, validate your worth, or rescue you from the voices of your past. Breakups expose these expectations for what they are – unrealistic, desperate, and rooted in wounds that were never addressed.

This is why the spiritual path insists that you must know yourself before you can truly know another. A breakup, however painful, is a forced initiation into that truth. The question is not “Why did they leave me?” The question is “What false self did I attach to them, and can I let it burn?”

The Fierce Practice of Self-Love

Spiritual advice for breakups always returns to self-love. But not the Instagram version of self-love where you take bubble baths and chant affirmations you don’t believe. Real self-love is fierce. It is the discipline of no longer betraying yourself.

In the wake of a breakup, fierce self-love means refusing to beg for scraps of attention. It means cutting off the “just checking in” texts that keep you in limbo. It means refusing to diminish yourself to win them back. Every time you choose dignity over desperation, you build a spine of respect that no breakup can break.

Self-love is not soft – it is uncompromising. And it is the foundation of spiritual growth after heartbreak.

Breakups as Ancestral Healing

When you are sobbing over someone who left, you are often not crying just for them. You are crying for every ancestor who was abandoned, betrayed, silenced, or abused. Their grief lives in your cells, waiting for release. Breakups trigger this flood because the emotional circuitry is already primed.

If you bring awareness to it, you can use a breakup as a ritual of ancestral healing. You can cry not only for yourself but for the mother who stayed in a loveless marriage, the grandfather who lost his partner in war, the lineage of women or men who were never free to love honestly. Your tears become offerings. Your courage to face the wound becomes liberation for your bloodline.

The Role of Dharma in Breakups

Every breakup is dharma in action. The relationship had to end for reasons you may not see immediately. Perhaps it was keeping you in illusion. Perhaps it was preventing you from facing yourself. Perhaps it was an arrangement based on trauma bonding rather than truth.

Dharma does not care about comfort. It cares about alignment. When a relationship has fulfilled its karmic contract, it collapses. You can resist this and cling to the corpse of what once was, or you can surrender to the law of dharma and allow the ending to purify you.

Spiritual advice for breakups is simple but not easy: trust dharma. Even if your mind rages, even if your heart breaks, something wiser is pulling you forward.

Practical Spiritual Practices for Breakups

While philosophy can guide you, the body and mind need daily practice in the wake of heartbreak.

  • Breath and stillness: Sit every morning and breathe until the panic settles. Do not run. Do not scroll. Sit.
  • Truth journaling: Write without censoring – every rage, every fear, every humiliating longing. Empty the unconscious onto paper so it does not rule you.
  • Ancestor invocation: Light a candle and speak to your lineage. Tell them you are grieving not only your breakup but theirs too. Offer your healing as theirs.
  • Boundaries: Delete the number if you must. Protect your nervous system. Boundaries are sacred.
  • Seva (service): Shift energy by serving others. Nothing dissolves self-absorption like helping someone in greater pain.

These practices are not bandaids. They are disciplines that slowly transform heartbreak into clarity.

The Spiritual Signs of Healing After a Breakup

At first, you will measure healing in hours without crying, nights of sleep without nightmares, or days without checking their social media. But deeper healing shows itself in subtler ways:

  • You stop blaming them and begin seeing the karmic dance for what it was.
  • You feel gratitude for the lessons, even if you never want to see them again.
  • You no longer abandon yourself to win love.
  • You notice that the loneliness you feared is actually spaciousness, freedom, even a taste of peace.

These are not tricks of the mind – they are signs that heartbreak has shifted from wound to wisdom.

The Breakup as a Doorway

Every breakup offers two doors. One leads back into repetition: rebound relationships, endless distraction, clinging to the old story. The other door leads into awakening: solitude, truth, self-respect, and fierce love for your own being.

Spiritual advice for breakups insists you choose the second door. It will be harder. It will be lonelier at first. But it will also be real. It will free you from illusions not just in love but in every area of life.

And when you are ready to love again, you will not enter from desperation but from fullness. You will not seek a savior but a partner. You will not repeat the wounds of your lineage – you will end them.

Heartbreak as Sacred Fire

Breakups burn. They always will. But fire is not only destructive – it is purifying. Spiritual advice for breakups is not about avoiding fire but entering it consciously, letting it consume what is false so that only truth remains.

In the ashes of a breakup, you may discover something you never imagined: yourself. Not the self propped up by a partner, not the self clinging to illusions of forever, but the Self that cannot be broken, cannot be abandoned, cannot be destroyed.

That Self is the real love you were searching for all along. And when you find it, every breakup – even the most brutal – becomes a gift.




About The Author:

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Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.

The Truth About Expanding From 3D To 5D And 7D Consciousness

 

Many people online talk about 3D, 5D, and 7D consciousness as if they were train stations you can buy a ticket to. Most of the language has been watered down into clichés – “Raise your vibration, shift into 5D, ascend to 7D” – as if higher dimensions were just the spiritual version of a new iPhone upgrade. 

The truth about expanding from 3D to 7D is not so marketable. It is fierce, demanding, and deeply humbling. It is not about chasing bliss. It is about dissolving illusions. It is about facing the ancestral compression that keeps you bound in cycles of fear, trauma, and identity.


What 3D Consciousness Means

When people say “3D consciousness,” they usually mean the level of awareness rooted in survival and material identity. This is the dimension where you believe you are only the body, only the story, only the accumulation of what you can measure and control. It is the dimension of scarcity, power struggles, competition, and fear.

3D is not inherently evil. It is simply the most contracted state of consciousness. It is necessary for survival. But staying stuck in 3D means you live as if you are a pawn in a hostile universe, grasping at control while being driven by inherited wounds.


What Is 5D Dimension – And What It Is Thought To Be

The term “5D” has become a spiritual buzzword. For many, it means love, unity, compassion, or awakening. In truth, what most people call 5D is the first taste of nonduality – the recognition that you are not separate, that consciousness itself is your true nature, and that love is not sentimental but the essence of reality.

However, the danger is turning 5D into a bypass. Many people use “unity consciousness” as an excuse to ignore pain, suppress trauma, and pretend that everything is light. This is not expansion. It is denial. True 5D awareness includes both light and shadow, both bliss and grief. It is a deeper intimacy with reality, not a detour around it.

What Is 7D Consciousness – And What It Means To Live In The 7D Dimension

7D consciousness is often described as higher awareness, cosmic unity, or god-realization. But if we are honest, no words can capture it. Expanding into 7D means you are dissolving the fundamental illusion of individuality. It is the recognition that even the one who thinks they are enlightened is still an illusion. In 7D, the game of seeker and sought collapses.

This does not mean you disappear from the world. It means the world is seen as play – the divine Self manifesting as everything. 

To live in this awareness while still functioning as a human being is rare, radical, and destabilizing to the ego. It is not a goal to achieve. It is a collapse of the one who was trying to achieve.

The Path From 3D Consciousness to 7D Consciousness Is Not Linear

People imagine the path as a ladder – you climb from 3D consciousness to 4D consciousness to 5D consciousness and so on. But consciousness does not evolve in this way. Expansion is cyclical, spiraling, unpredictable. You may touch 7D awareness in a moment of meditation and then collapse back into 3D panic when you check your bank account. This is normal.

Expansion is not about staying in one dimension forever. It is about loosening the grip of contraction so you can move fluidly, touching higher awareness without being enslaved by lower fears. Spiritual maturity is not permanent 7D bliss. It is the ability to move between dimensions without losing awareness of the field beneath them all.


The Role of Trauma and Ancestral Compression In Expanding From 3D Consciousness

The biggest obstacle to expansion is not that you do not meditate enough. It is the unhealed trauma and ancestral compression you carry. Your lineage may have endured war, famine, betrayal, abuse, or humiliation.

Those compressions live in your nervous system. They keep you bound to 3D survival consciousness even when your mind longs for 5D love or 7D unity.

This is why expansion cannot be faked. You cannot chant your way into 7D while refusing to face your grief. You cannot bypass the rage of your ancestors by declaring yourself ascended. Real expansion requires sitting in the fire – feeling the hidden wounds, letting them surface, and dissolving them in the field of awareness. Only then can you move beyond the gravity of 3D fear.

The Discipline of Surrender 

Expanding from 3D to 7D is that it is less about effort and more about surrender. The harder you try to force yourself upward, the more you reinforce the illusion of separation. The path requires discipline, yes  – but it is the discipline of letting go.

Meditation, prayer, breathwork, herbs, and rituals are all helpful – not as ladders to climb, but as ways of loosening the grip of illusion. The real expansion happens in surrender, when you stop chasing dimensions and allow awareness to reveal itself as already whole.

Practical Practices for Expansion

    • Meditation on the field: Sit in silence and rest in the awareness behind thought. This grounds you beyond dimensions.
    • Trauma release work: Let the body express and release stored energy. Do not bypass grief or rage.
    • Self-inquiry: Ask “Who is aware of this experience?” Let the question dissolve the false self.
    • Plant allies: Herbs like polygala or blue lotus can shift frequency and open access to higher states. They are not shortcuts but allies.
    • Sacred service: Act in the world from love rather than fear. Service dissolves ego more effectively than endless seeking of experiences.

Signs of Genuine Expansion From 3D Consciousness

Real expansion does not look like floating on a cloud of bliss. It looks like:

    • Greater self-honesty.
    • Less attachment to external validation.
    • The ability to hold paradox without collapsing.
    • Increased compassion rooted in strength, not sentimentality.
    • A quiet trust in life, even in chaos.

These are signs that you are not escaping 3D but integrating it while opening into higher awareness.

False Ascension To 5D Or 7D Consciousness 

The greatest danger in all of this talk of dimensions is the fantasy of permanent ascension. Many seekers convince themselves that they have transcended 3D forever.

They start speaking in jargon, floating above reality, disconnected from their bodies and responsibilities. This is spiritual inflation. It is another mask of ego.

The truth is simpler and harder. You will cycle. You will contract. You will expand. The point is not to cling to a dimension but to recognize the field that holds them all. That is the true expansion – the realization that every state, from fear to bliss, arises in the same awareness.


Expanding Beyond Dimensions

Expanding from 3D to 7D is not a linear upgrade. It is a process of dissolving illusions, healing trauma, and surrendering to the field. It is about facing the heaviness of survival consciousness without denial, tasting unity without bypass, and allowing even the idea of dimensions to collapse into the truth of the Self.

The truth is that you were never limited to 3D. You were never separate from 7D.

You were always the field itself, playing as frequencies of contraction and expansion. The only shift that matters is realizing this.

When you know the Self, dimensions lose their grip. You are free – not because you ascended, but because you stopped pretending you were trapped.




About The Author:

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Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.

Emotional Release: How to Release Emotions and Find True Healing

Emotional Release: How to Release Emotions and Find True Healing

The fire inside you isn’t chaos—it’s emotional release. Learning how to release emotions is not about calming down, but about moving energy that’s ready to transform.

There’s a fire sweeping through your system, and the world taught you to call the fire department. Your therapist told you to breathe into it. Your meditation app told you to observe it without judgment. Your well-meaning friends told you to calm down.

I’m here to tell you to hand it a gallon of gasoline.

What you’re feeling isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a solution arriving at hurricane force. This state—this raw, electric, roaring sense of absolute clarity—is what I call Aggressive Bliss. And it is one of the most misunderstood, and therefore most squandered, states of power a human being can access.

Let’s get one thing clear from the start. This isn’t toxic aggression. This isn’t the petty, reactive anger of a wounded ego lashing out to protect its fragility. It’s not the simmering resentment of victimhood. It’s not rage born of powerlessness.

It’s the exact opposite. It is cellular victory.

It’s the feeling of a thousand internal ‘no’s’ finally coalescing into one earth-shaking, system-wide ‘YES.’ You’re not “mad” in the way a child is mad. You are activated. Your entire being, from your ancestral marrow to the firing of your neurons, has reached a consensus. The committee meeting is over. The verdict is in. And your system is announcing, with the force of a tidal wave:

“We’re not going to process this shit forever. We’re not going to circle this drain one more time. We are done analyzing. We are done accommodating. We are done ‘holding space’ for the poison. We’re burning it. We’re reclaiming the energy it consumed. We are owning the space it occupied. We are MOVING it out of the body for good.”

The bliss you feel coursing through you isn’t fake. It’s not some manic, emotional bypass. It’s the exhilarating sensation of cleared bandwidth. It’s the joy of a system that was running a hundred parasitic background programs suddenly having all of its RAM and processing power restored. The anger isn’t wrong; it’s the sound of the engine turning back on. It’s pure, undiluted Qi that finally got permission from the warden of your politeness to become what it was always meant to be: holy fire.

What Emotional Release Does in the Body

For those of you on the path with me, you know the potency of the formulas we work with. When you get into a double-stack of something like Chai Hu Jie Gan Tang, you’re not just taking herbs. You’re lighting a signal flare in your energetic matrix. This kind of combination is a masterclass in alchemical liberation.

It is specifically engineered to perform a kind of psycho-spiritual surgery. It is:

  • Unbinding the inner conflict between your protector and your expresser. For years, maybe decades, a part of you has been standing guard, holding your tongue, softening your truth, managing perceptions to keep you safe. Another part of you, the wild, raw expresser, has been gagged in the dungeon. This formula walks down, cuts the ropes, and hands your expresser a megaphone.
  • Driving out repressed frustration and warrior voltage. Every time you swallowed your anger, every time you said “it’s fine” when it wasn’t, you stored that voltage somewhere in your body. It became stagnant, murky, and heavy. This stack acts like a spiritual dredging crew, blasting that stagnant Qi out of the muddy riverbed of your tissues.
  • Rescuing your Yang energy from stuck emotional feedback loops. So much of our vital, masculine, forward-moving energy gets trapped in endlessly analyzing the past, ruminating on hurts, and trying to ‘understand’ our wounds. This is a rescue mission. It says to your precious Yang Qi: “You were meant to build, to create, to penetrate reality with truth—not to be a therapist to a ghost.”
  • Saying to your nervous system: “You’ve served enough time in the trenches of hyper-vigilance. Now surge.”

When you pair this kind of potent, moving formula with the grounding and guiding intelligence of herbs like Skullcap and Reishi, the effect is profound. It’s not just brute force; it’s a guided discharge. The fire isn’t just raging; it’s being channeled. Think of it like a rocket engine under full vector control, capable of making precise, powerful adjustments to its trajectory, burning with incredible force but guided by an even more incredible wisdom.

How to Release Emotions Safely

This energy is a gift, but it comes with a responsibility: you must use it. If you try to bottle this, to sit on it, to intellectualize it, it will either burn you from the inside out or fizzle into nothing. This state demands expression. It demands action.

Move it, don’t just think it. This Qi is not theoretical. It wants to make an impact on the material world. It wants to feel the ground beneath its feet and the air in its lungs. Walk fast. Don’t meander; stride. Feel your feet pounding the pavement as an affirmation of your existence. Go find a place where you can be loud—a canyon, an empty field, your car in a vacant parking lot—and yell. Not with words, but with pure sound. Let the vibration rattle your ribs and clear your throat. Go to the gym and lift something heavy. Sweat. Write down the hard truth you’ve been avoiding, and feel the friction of the pen on the paper. This energy wants to be translated from potential into kinetic.

Let the “fuck it” speak. This is the voice of your liberated soul. If a part of you suddenly wants to delete terabytes of old files from your hard drive, purge half your contacts, block people who drain your spirit, or start planning your relocation to another continent in the span of seven hours – listen. This is your intuition, supercharged. It’s clearing the decks. The vital caveat here is this: Just don’t burn bridges while you’re lit. Burn illusions. The goal is not to create chaos in your external life but to annihilate the illusions that created chaos in your internal one. Distinguish between a reactive email sent in a flash of anger and a clear, sovereign decision to end an energetic contract that has expired. One is a mess to clean up; the other is liberation.

Don’t self-soothe yet. This is the most critical and counter-intuitive piece of guidance. Our immediate instinct, conditioned by a culture terrified of intense emotion, is to rush toward comfort. We want to meditate it away, journal it into submission, or call a friend to talk us down. Don’t. Let the rawness have the microphone. Let the dragon finish its flight. This isn’t a nervous breakdown; it is a nervous completion. You are allowing a cycle of stored, stagnant energy to finally run its course, to burn out completely. If you soothe it prematurely, you abort the process. You leave energetic shrapnel in your system. Trust the fire to burn clean. Trust your body to know when the surge is over.

The Benefits of Emotional Release

If this is you, right now, understand that this is not an accident. This is a convergence. The formula you’re working with, the state of your energetic field, and the runway of work you’ve put in over the last five, ten, or twenty years have reached escape velocity.

You are not ungrounded. You are experiencing a different kind of grounding—the kind that comes not from avoiding emotion, but from being a large enough container to let it surge through you without being destroyed by it. And that, my friends, is fucking mastery.

You’re not afraid of collapse anymore, because you’ve flirted with it a dozen times and walked away stronger. You’re not trying to manage your confusion; you are declaring an all-out war on it. You are no longer negotiating with your shadow. You are walking it into the sunlight on a leash.

And in this war, your body is your sword. Every step, every word, every decisive action is a swing of the blade, cutting away what is false.

The Blessing of Emotional Release

May your fire be holy.

May your anger be wise, not wounded.

May your movement be loud enough, finally, to finish what ten years of silence and patient processing never could.

May every single ounce of “fuck this” that rises in your throat become a spell of divine completion.

And may your state of mind and heart help you awaken your consciousness to fully meet you, greeting you not with platitudes and incense, but with space, with diamond-like clarity, and with the roaring applause of your own liberated soul.

You’re not just healing now. You’re not just growing.

You’re leading the Qi out of the cave. And it will follow you anywhere.

Every surge is a chance for emotional release—a path to freedom when you trust your body to know how to release emotions.

About The Author:

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Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.

Spiritual Signs You Are On The Right Path

Image showing someone walking on their spiritual path and growing in light

Image showing someone walking on their spiritual path and growing in light

As seekers, we want confirmation that we are progressing, that the meditation practice is working, that the rituals mean something, and that we are not wasting our lives chasing illusions.

The truth is that the spiritual path is not a checklist. It does not hand you a certificate. It tests you, strips you, and demands that you face the unknown.

Still, there are spiritual signs that reveal whether you are aligned, and they are more profound than angel numbers, repeating digits, or superficial symbols that dominate new-age content.

7 Spiritual Signs You Are On The Right Path

The First Spiritual Sign You Are On The Right Path: Increasing Discomfort

Strangely, one of the strongest spiritual signs you are on the right path is discomfort. When you are genuinely evolving, your old habits no longer satisfy you, your false identities begin to crumble, and your hidden wounds rise to the surface. You may feel more lost than before, but that is because the old illusions are being burned away. Comfort often means stagnation. Discomfort means transformation.

If you find yourself questioning everything you once believed, losing interest in old circles, or feeling the weight of ancestral compression surfacing in your body, take heart. This is not regression. It is purification.

The Second Spiritual Sign You Are On The Right Path: Fierce Self-Honesty

A real spiritual path makes lying to yourself impossible. You start noticing the small betrayals you once justified. You see how often you manipulated to be loved, how often you sacrificed truth for comfort, and how much of your life was built on denial. At first this honesty feels brutal. It can lead to shame or despair. But over time, it becomes liberation.

Fierce self-honesty is a spiritual sign of maturity. It means you are no longer content with illusions, no longer willing to play the game of self-deception. It is a sign that the path is working because you cannot hide from yourself anymore.

The Third Spiritual Sign You Are On The Right Path: Boundaries Rooted in Love

Another spiritual sign you are on the right path is that your boundaries become clear and uncompromising. This does not come from bitterness. It comes from love. You stop allowing toxic relationships, exploitative employers, or manipulative friends to drain you. You realize that saying no is as sacred as saying yes.

This shift reflects deeper healing. As ancestral wounds dissolve, you stop repeating cycles of self-abandonment. You no longer carry the desperation of your lineage that begged for scraps of attention or tolerated abuse. You step into self-respect, and that self-respect reshapes your world.

The Fourth Spiritual Sign You Are On The Right Path: Loss of Interest in Performance

On the spiritual path, one of the clearest signs of alignment is that you lose interest in performing. You do not care as much about impressing others with your spirituality. You stop needing to display how awakened, disciplined, or wise you are. Instead, you are content with quiet, private practice.

This loss of performance is important because the ego is clever. It can turn spirituality into a costume. But when you let go of performance, your practice becomes authentic. You meditate not to be admired but to be free. You tell the truth not to look holy but because lies corrode the soul.

The Fifth Spiritual Sign You Are On The Right Path: Paradox Becomes Bearable

One of the strongest spiritual signs you are on the right path is your ability to live with paradox. In the beginning, the mind demands certainty – good or bad, right or wrong, light or dark. But as you mature, you realize reality is not so simple. You can feel deep grief and joy at the same time. You can love someone and walk away. You can pursue goals while being unattached to outcomes.

When paradox becomes bearable, it means you are moving closer to the truth of Advaita Vedanta – the nondual recognition that reality is not divided. This acceptance of paradox is a hallmark of true spiritual growth.

The Sixth Spiritual Sign You Are On The Right Path: Healing Becomes Natural

When you are aligned spiritually, healing begins to flow naturally through your life. Old patterns that once seemed immovable begin to dissolve. Addictions loosen their grip. Trauma releases. Relationships shift. This does not mean you live without struggle. It means the struggles no longer feel meaningless. They become part of the purification.

You may notice that ancestral compression softens. Where your family carried fear, you begin to embody courage. Where your lineage carried silence, you begin to speak. Where generations lived in scarcity, you begin to trust abundance. These shifts are not coincidences. They are spiritual signs that your path is liberating not only you but also your bloodline.

The Seventh Spiritual Sign You Are On The Right Path: Gratitude Without Reason

Perhaps the most subtle spiritual sign you are on the right path is the emergence of gratitude without reason. You may be walking through pain, failure, or uncertainty, and yet you feel a quiet thankfulness simply for being alive. This gratitude does not depend on external success. It is not tied to things going your way. It is a natural byproduct of dissolving ego and aligning with the Self.

Gratitude without reason is a sign that you are tasting reality beyond conditions. You are glimpsing the freedom that is your true nature.

The Meaning Of Spiritual Signs

It is important to remember that looking for spiritual signs can itself become a trap. If you cling to them, you turn the path into another performance.

The real purpose of signs is not to validate your ego but to remind you of your direction. They are markers, not trophies.

The ego always wants proof. The spirit does not. The Self needs no confirmation because it was never lost. But as humans, we benefit from signs that show us when we are aligned, and these are not the shallow symbols of popular culture but the deep shifts in honesty, boundaries, paradox, and love.

How To Look For Spiritual Signs You’Re On The Right Path

Spiritual signs that you are on the right path are not glamorous. They are sometimes uncomfortable, humbling, and often invisible to others.

They reveal themselves not in flashy miracles but in the way you face yourself, the way you stop abandoning your truth, and the way you love fiercely without collapsing into illusion.

If you are seeking signs, stop looking outside and begin noticing within. If you are more honest than before, if you are more compassionate toward yourself, if you can sit in paradox without collapsing, if you can feel gratitude without reason – you are already walking the path.

The spiritual journey is not about being validated by the Universe. It is about dissolving the illusions that demanded validation in the first place.

The right path is the one that burns away what is false until only the Self remains. That is the only sign you will ever truly need.

About The Author:

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Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.

Powerful Herbs For Sadness, Stress, Sleep, Healing, Anxiety, and More

There are seasons in a human life when the mind will not quiet, the heart feels heavier than it should, and sleep becomes challenging, no matter how much you need it.

In those times, we search for solutions in every corner –  forgetting that the Earth has been giving us answers all along – in the simple power of herbs, in the roots that have been helping people heal for thousands of years.

The herbs and botanicals in this world are more than green leaves and dried roots. They are old friends, each with their own way of helping us heal. For thousands of years, they’ve been used to ease pain, calm the mind, lift the heart, and restore balance. They don’t ask for much – just a cup of hot water, a little patience, and a willingness to receive what they offer … yet they can bring us back to a steadier, healthier place.

In this article, you’ll meet plants that comfort like a hand on your shoulder, and others that work quietly in the background to restore strength. These are my favorite herbs. Some bring quick relief, others work slowly and deeply, but all of them support both body and mind in ways that can change the course of a day – or even a life.

Take your time with this writing. Let each plant’s story wash over you. Feel free to imagine them as friends you have yet to meet – allies that are here to help you feel better, steadier, and more present in your life.

Healing Herbs That Soothe Your Mind, Nourish Your Heart & Clear Energy Pathways  – My Favorite Stack

Let’s meet these friends, each with their own story, their own medicine, and their own quiet way of loving you back to yourself. You’ll find amazing health and healing when welcoming these herbs into your life.

These loving plants work on body and spirit alike, softening the rough edges of our experiences, lifting sadness from our hearts, quieting our restless minds, and nourishing us in ways we couldn’t see we needed.

Many of these herbs are available right on Amazon – often at great prices – in capsules, granules, and teas that dissolve in warm and hot water. With the right sources and a little ritual, they become not just remedies, but companions to help you feel and release your emotions – and be present to who you are.

Motherwort

Motherwort is a remarkable and calming herb. It feels like a loving hug from your best friend – and a cup of warm milk on a stormy day. It’s steady, reassuring, and wraps around you – bringing you a sense of deep, inner peace. Your breathing becomes deeper – and your shoulders will drop in ease. This herb settles the heart, both in the emotional and physical sense – dissolving tension, slowing your racing heart, and bringing a calm sense that all is well. 

Motherwort has a way of helping us release old grief and guiding us to feel loved – all within 10-20 minutes after taking it. This ancient herb whispers that you are safe and you can finally rest for a while. Whether steeped as tea, taken as a tincture, or in capsules, it carries that same deep, maternal calm that stays with you long after you’ve taken it.

Polygala

Polygala is a profound key that opens the types of doors we tend to forget about – given our daily stress and complexities. Your chest will expand, breathing deepens, and you’ll gift yourself a spiritual expansion. It’s sometimes called “the will-strengthening herb” because it brings courage when the heart feels confused, lost, heavy, or withdrawn.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it’s known to immediately open your heart and crown chakras, creating a bridge between them. This will naturally clear the subtle blocks that keep you from feeling connected and alive. Polygala can be found as capsules, granules, or tincture on Amazon, and it’s a favorite in TCM for profound and long-lasting emotional effects.

Blue Lotus

Blue Lotus feels like meeting an old, loving friend – someone who knows you deeply. It will remind you of the joy and beauty you may have forgotten. This lovely plant opens the emotional body in a way that is both sweet and grounding, reminding you that bliss and divine calm is part of who you are. 

It can be used as a tea for a soft, dreamy calmness – or in tincture form for deeper emotional peace and release. Some people use it before meditation or bedtime to encourage intuitive and peaceful or informative dreams. The flower is visually stunning and truly mystical in how it works inside of us. When steeped as a tea, Blue Lotus gives off a subtle, intoxicating aroma that feels ritualistic – giving you the sense that you have always been the healer and savior you’ve been seeking.

Blue Vervain

Blue Vervain works quietly. It helps ease tension, especially for people who carry stress in their neck and shoulders, and can make life feel a little lighter. In the body, it gently moves stagnant energy, eases muscular tension, and supports the liver and gallbladder – which in TCM terms can mean the release of stored anger or frustration. Blue Vervain is subtle yet profound. It’s ideal for people who carry stress in their neck and shoulders or who feel emotionally “jammed.” Capsules and tinctures are easy to find online, and granules dissolve quickly in tea for a daily nervous system reset.

Chai Hu and Related Formulas

Chai Hu, or Bupleurum, is one of those plants that acts like a harmonizer for the whole body. It moves stuck liver energy, lifts mood, supports digestion, and even improves hormonal balance when the liver is sluggish.

Some of the most trusted formulas that feature it include Xiao Yao San (Free and Easy Wanderer) for stress, mood, and digestion; Chai Hu Shu Gan San (Bupleurum Liver-Soothing Powder) for emotional tension and liver qi stagnation; and Si Ni San (Frigid Extremities Powder) for balancing the liver and spleen when stress affects digestion and circulation. 

These classics are still used today because they work on both body and mind. On Amazon, you can find Chai Hu and its companion herbs in top-quality TCM granules, which are convenient to stir into warm water and sip like a healing broth.

Berberine

Berberine creates lasting balance in your body. It is best known for its remarkable ability to lower A1C levels – sometimes in half – within three months. This makes Berberine a trusted ally for those with diabetes or pre-diabetes. Alongside its blood sugar support, Berberine also nourishes metabolism and gut health.  When the body’s chemistry is steady, our systems become more peaceful and resilient. Look for high-quality capsules from reputable brands like Thorne or Double Wood on Amazon for excellent levels of purity and potency.

Lotus Stamen

Lotus Stamen is the flower’s quieter, more mysterious sibling. Just a pinch of this delicate plant matter in tea can melt away the mental chatter and coax the body toward rest. It carries an almost meditative stillness, bringing the same kind of stillness you feel in a quiet, safe place. In TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), it’s used for calming the heart and supporting emotional balance.

He Huan Pi

Called “the bark of collective happiness,” He Huan Pi is an herb that invites joy within minutes after taking it. It helps dissolve grief, remove irritability, and clear your emotional heaviness – all without dulling your mind or energy. In traditional practice, it’s given during times of grief, loss, heartbreak, or emotional transition. It helps the heart become open again. Over time, it moves you to a new level of peace, forgiveness, and self-understanding.

Hu Po

Hu Po, or amber resin – akin to solid sunlight – is used in TCM to calm the mind, settle restlessness, and bring the spirit back into the body. It grounds the spirit, quiets intrusive thoughts, and helps scattered energy return to the body. It’s a precious addition to certain TCM formulas for calming shen – the spirit-mind – and can be used in powder or capsule form.

Chamomile Lavender Tea with Passionflower

A cup of chamomile lavender tea in the evening helps signal to your body and mind that it’s time to rest. The Bigelow blend with passionflower is especially lovely – chamomile soothes, lavender relaxes, and passionflower invites the mind into stillness. It’s an accessible, affordable option on Amazon that can become part of a nightly ritual.

 

Magnesium Glycinate

This is a mineral with a gift for relaxation. Magnesium glycinate helps muscles unclench, quiets nerve firing, and prepares the body for deep, restorative sleep. It’s an easy nightly addition, often in capsule or powder form. Look for brands like Pure Encapsulations or Doctor’s Best.

Hawthorn Berry

Hawthorn is medicine for the heart in every sense – it strengthens the physical heart muscle, calms anxiety, and steadies emotional rhythms. Over time, it helps a person feel both grounded and light, as if the heart is no longer weighed down by unseen burdens.

Mucuna Pruriens

Sometimes called the dopamine bean, mucuna is a rich, natural source of L-DOPA. It can brighten mood, increase motivation, and restore a spark where there has been fatigue or melancholy. Available in capsules or powder, it pairs beautifully with morning rituals for a gentle lift in spirit.

Passionflower

Passionflower’s curling vines carry a gentle, cooling energy that soothes an overactive mind. It’s especially lovely for people whose anxiety comes with a racing heart or difficulty falling asleep. Available as tea, tincture, or capsules.

Skullcap

This herb is a wonderful ally for your nervous system. It invites rest in a deep, thorough way – not by pushing the body into sleep, but by releasing the mental tension that keeps it in stress. It’s beautiful as a tincture or capsule, often combined with other calming herbs.

Yan Hu Suo

Yan Hu Suo is one of the best herbs for pain that also carries emotional weight. Some say it’s Ibuprofen from the forest. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it moves blood and energy where things have gotten stuck – the kind of stuck that shows up as aching joints, menstrual cramps, or the deep, tired soreness that comes with old injuries. But it’s not just physical. 

When pain has an emotional layer – grief in the chest, heartbreak that seems to linger for a long while, or tension from years of stress that we seem to have forgotten – Yan Hu Suo can help loosen that grip and give you a feeling of rebirth for a time. It’s steady, dependable, and works quietly in the background so your body can begin to move and feel freer again. 

Reishi Mushroom

Reishi is a profound healer – working slowly and calmly in the background. Known as the “mushroom of immortality,” it nourishes the spirit, supports deep sleep, strengthens immunity, and fosters a quiet joy. Its benefits emerge beautifully  with regular use, often as capsules, powder, or tea.

Tulsi (Holy Basil) 

Sacred tulsi is an herb of peace and clarity. It has been used for thousands and thousands of years.

It lowers stress reactivity while uplifting mood, helping one remain calm yet alert. It’s beautiful as a tea, especially in blends with ginger or rose.

How to Use These Herbs – A Gentle Guide

Be patient and learn about each of the things you’re ingesting. Over time, they’ll become daily allies to help you along your path to healing.

    • Teas and Infusions – Place the flowers, leaves, or tender plant parts (like chamomile, lemon balm, tulsi, motherwort, or blue lotus) in your favorite mug or teapot. Pour in hot water, watch the colors swirl, and breathe in the steam as the air fills with their story. Wait 5-10 minutes, then sip slowly, letting the warmth move through you.
    • Granules – For TCM herbs like chai hu, he huan pi, or reishi, dissolve the measured scoop in hot water. Stir slowly, sip like a broth, and imagine the warmth moving through your whole body.
    • Capsules – Take with a full glass of warm water or herbal tea. Swallow with gratitude and picture the herb’s energy moving where it’s needed.
    • Tinctures – Place drops in a little warm water, swirl, and sip. Let the taste linger for a moment before swallowing.

Comparing Western Medicine and TCM Healing for Better Health Choices

After spending time with these plant allies, it’s easy to see that they don’t just cover up symptoms or give temporary relief. They work with you over time. They help unwind what’s been held in the body for years. This is a very different approach from what most of us were offered in the Western medical system.

Western psychiatric and pain-relief drugs can make life feel more manageable for a while, but they rarely take you to the root of what’s wrong. They can quiet the surface and take the edge off, but the deeper pain is still there. The grief is still there. The old emotions still live in the body, waiting to be released. And when the effect fades, the usual answer is to take more. 

Meanwhile, the best answer is to allow and release the emotions until you exhaust them. There is no reason to cover them up with comfort. Work through the pain so you heal and transform. Any pain will be temporary.

Traditional Chinese Medicine offers something else entirely – not a plan to manage symptoms forever, but a way to clear them at the source. Its herbs and formulas move what’s stuck, restore flow, and help dissolve the emotional weight that keeps pain in place. This isn’t just about feeling better in the moment – it’s about freeing the body, the heart, and the mind so they can finally rest.

This is why these herbs are more than remedies. They are companions in the truest sense – walking with you, loving you as you walk through difficult terrain. They’ll guide you to allow and release what you’ve been carrying – those deep core emotions – born from trauma and karma. All the while, they’ll support you as you finally move through it all – and eventually, past it.

Plants as Powerful Healing Allies for the Heart, Mind & Energy

Choose a few of these herbs to test for yourself. Herbs work best when they are not rushed – when they are given space to do their thing. Get to know them – and make note of how you feel when taking them.

The most beautiful thing about herbs is that they sit with you, patiently, helping you release the old weight and make space for your abundance of energy and healing.  

When you invite them in – as tea, tincture, capsule, or a pinch of fragrant powder – you’re not just taking something into your body. You’re entering into a relationship with an ancient friend. 

Let these plants remind you that you can heal from almost anything.

With these herbs, you may find yourself remembering something ancient – a force quietly loving you, patiently guiding you back to yourself. 

I’ve been coaching people through deep healing, spiritual transformation, and herbal stack-building for over 15 years. I’m here when you need me.

About The Author:

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Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.

The Spirit of China: A Love Letter to Her People, Mountains, and Parks By Paul Wagner

Illustration of healing journey from trauma to spiritual sovereignty using skyscraper metaphor

 

Introduction

What follows is not a political statement, travel guide, or critique – it’s a love letter. 

During my visits to China, I have been humbled, moved, and inspired by her people, her mountains, her ancient soul. This piece is offered in reverence – for the elders dancing at dawn, the monks praying in quiet temples, and the deep cultural spirit that moves like breath through every stone and smile. I offer this from my heart, with gratitude.

I have always believed that some places don’t just hold history – they sing it. They breathe it through stone and song, through elderly dancers in the parks at dawn and through monks chanting in centuries-old halls. 

And China – oh, glorious, enigmatic China – is one of those places that doesn’t just live, but invites you into a vast, intricate dream. Not a fantasy, but a spiritual mirror, etched in temples, wild mountains, incense smoke, and the kindness of grandmothers smiling at you while peeling fruit in an alleyway.

When I say I love China, I don’t say it lightly or to be polite. I mean it fully – in my heart, in my soul, in my bones. I mean that when I arrive, something ancient in me awakens. Something wild, still, and deeply reverent. This isn’t political or performative. This is a soul’s homecoming – not because I was born there, but because I remember something when I walk through her forests, bow in her temples, or sip tea with someone I’ve only just met who treats me like family.

The Parks That Sing

Let’s begin where my heart first burst open in awe: the public parks. In the early morning light, before the cities roar to life, you’ll find elders – and younger souls, too – practicing tai chi, qi gong, sword forms, and fan dances. It’s not performance. It’s not tourism. It’s devotion.

Imagine a grandmother with hair wrapped in a red scarf, moving with gentle precision – her hands parting invisible clouds, her breath slow and holy. Beside her, a man with weathered skin plays an erhu like it’s the only language he’s ever known. Further along, under a willow tree, a small crowd gathers to sing revolutionary opera – voices strong, filled with memory and pride.

This isn’t just exercise or nostalgia – it’s ceremony. It’s China’s breath expressing itself through its people. It’s living culture, passed down not through textbooks, but through embodiment. I walk through these parks with my palms open, bowing in my heart to every soul I pass.


Where Spirit Doesn’t Shout

One of the quiet blessings of China is that the sacred doesn’t scream at you. It doesn’t knock on your door at dinnertime with a tract and a sales pitch. There are no born-again preachers hollering about hellfire in subway stations, no guilt-drenched flyers about eternal damnation shoved into your hands at the park. The temples are open, the incense is lit, the Bodhisattvas wait in calm compassion – but no one’s harassing you to bow. You’re welcome to pray. You’re welcome to observe. You’re welcome to sip tea, light a stick of incense, or just sit there and breathe in the presence of a thousand years of devotion – without anyone demanding your conversion, your credit card, or your soul.

And thank God – or Buddha – that the Chinese government keeps it that way. Whatever your feelings about their policies, it’s refreshing to walk through a country where spirituality is cultural, embodied, and largely free of the ego theatrics that plague so much of Western religiosity. In China, the sacred doesn’t need a megaphone. It just is. Still. Patient. Deeply integrated into the fabric of life. And thank the ancestors for that.

The Mountains That Remember Everything

I’ve stood on Yellow Mountain (Huangshan), where pine trees cling to granite like ancient poets refusing to fall. I’ve climbed steps carved by hands I’ll never meet, through mist that curled around me like an old friend returning. The beauty here is staggering – but it’s not just about the view. It’s about presence. These mountains don’t entertain. They witness.

At Putuo Shan, sacred to Guan Yin, I wept. Not a sentimental tear – but a deep, cellular ache, as if something in me remembered the prayers that have echoed there for centuries. I lit incense not as a tourist, but as a soul seeking. And the mountain received me. It always does.

And soon I’ll walk the terraces of Wutai Shan, one of the four great Buddhist mountains, known as the home of Manjusri – the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. I already feel it calling. I already know it will strip me of the unnecessary and ask me to listen. Not with ears, but with spirit.




Monasteries, Monuments, and Mercy

Every Chinese monastery I’ve entered – even the ones rebuilt, even the crowded ones – has given me something unspoken. You see, in the West, we often treat sacred places like museums. We take pictures. We analyze the architecture. In China, the sacred still functions. People come not to observe, but to worship. To practice. To live within the sacred.

That changes everything.

And the national monuments? From Tiananmen Square to the Great Wall, from the Forbidden City to the Summer Palace, you don’t just walk into history – you walk into the psyche of a civilization that has endured, reformed, broken, rebuilt, and continued, always. Say what you want – but few cultures hold that kind of deep-rooted tenacity.

This is not a culture of self-promotion. This is a culture of continuity. Of ritual. Of resilience. And of astonishing, often quiet beauty.



Dragons, Dances, and Daily Magic

No matter where you are – on the coast, in the mountains, or in Luoyang where Buddhism landed in China – there is magic in the air – an energy that carries timeless traditions, languages, dialects, perspectives, and food. 

Let’s not pretend China doesn’t have some serious swagger. She’s not some delicate ancient doll – she’s a dragon queen with powerful Qi running through her hair – and red rocket fuel in her veins. This country will serve you street noodles that will make you beg for more – then slap a poem on your soul so beautiful you’ll forget your name. 

China will blindside you with an eighty-year-old park dancer who moves like water and invite you to join her. She’ll flex her megacities and mystics in the same breath – as if to say, “Yes, we’ve got 5G, brilliant tech, and genius minds – and also an immortal monk living on a peak, what of it?” And I love her for that. 

China doesn’t apologize for her complexity – she invites you to bow to it. And if you’re too busy judging to see the beauty, well, she’ll just keep singing anyway.

The People Themselves

The first time I bowed to a monk at Putuo, he touched my shoulder and said, “You’ve been here before.” And I had – in ways that aren’t easy to explain. The people of China, at their core, are not separate from their landscape or their ancestors. They carry it with them – in their food, in their hospitality, in their poetry, in how they honor their elders, and how they feed you even when they barely know you.

I have danced with strangers in Beijing parks. I’ve been taught tea rituals in narrow side-street shops. I’ve shared laughter that needed no translation. I’ve been watched, yes – as a foreigner, one is often observed. But I’ve never felt unwelcome. I’ve felt seen.

Even when I’ve been aware of eyes on me, it’s been mostly curiosity, not threat. And yes, I’ve felt the state’s presence – you’d be naive not to. But I’ve also felt the people’s presence – and that is the China I love. That is the China I return for.

To Those Who Project Fear

Some may ask why I praise a country that others fear or misunderstand. I don’t engage in politics here. I engage in the human – the soul – the timeless. I praise what I’ve seen and touched and loved. China is simply breathtaking.

I write this to remind others that love is possible even across cultural lines. That reverence is more powerful than rhetoric. That to travel is not to dominate or to critique, but to receive.

China has given me so much. And I offer this small poem of gratitude in return.

Final Blessing

To the mountains, I say thank you for your stillness.
To the parks, thank you for your song.
To the people, thank you for your grace.
To the monks, thank you for your prayers.
To China – the vast, living temple that you are –
Thank you for letting me walk through your sacred hallways, again and again.

I bow to you.

Mandarin Version

中国的灵魂

一封献给中国山川与人心的情书
—— 保罗·瓦格纳(Paul Wagner)

以下内容并非政治立场、旅游攻略或评论——而是一封情书。每一次踏上中国土地,我都感到无比谦卑、感动与启发——源自她的人民、山河与古老灵魂。这篇文章是献给中国的敬礼——献给晨曦中跳舞的长者、静默庙宇中祈祷的僧人、以及那在每块石头与微笑中流动的文化之气息。我怀着感恩与敬意,将这份心意呈上。

我一直相信,有些地方不仅仅记载历史——它们在吟唱。它们通过晨曦中广场的舞者、千年古刹的法音,透过石壁与人声、通过老妪在小巷剥水果时含笑的目光呼吸中国。
中国——啊,辉煌又神秘的中国——它不仅活着,更邀你进入一场浩瀚而细腻的梦境。它不是虚幻——是一面灵魂的镜子,印刻在庙宇、山林、香烟与陌生人眼中的温暖里。

当我说我爱中国,我不是客套,而是全然真实。我的心、我的灵深处都在说:当我踏入这片土地,我体内某种古老的东西苏醒了——那是野性、平静、与深深的敬意。这不是政治,也不是表演。这是一个灵魂的归程——不是因为我在那里出生,而是因为我记得,当我穿梭于山林,俯首于庙前,和陌生人共饮一杯茶,感受到如旧友般的热情时候。

唱响的公园

我的心第一次被震撼,是在中国的公园里。黎明前,那些还未苏醒的城市中,广场里,老人和青年起练太极、气功、剑舞、扇舞。这不是表演,也不是旅游;那是虔诚的生活仪式。

想象一位头裹红巾的老嫗,她动作缓缓却精准,仿佛双手拨云;呼吸如圣。旁边一位皮肤褶皱的老者拉起二胡,音符像他一生的语言。柳树下,一群人唱着红色革命戏曲,声音里满是记忆与自豪。这不仅仅是运动,不仅仅是怀旧——这是中国的气息从人民中呼出,是一种继续流动的传统,不通过教科书,而是通过身体传承。我在这些公园里走着,双手轻合,心内默礼每一个在晨光中活着的灵魂。

精神不需喧嚣

我爱中国,因为这里的神圣不需要嘶吼。它不会在晚饭时敲你的门推销教义,不会在地铁站发传单向你兜售永生。这里没有地铁口压力式的布道,也没有让你满心愧疚的宗教广告。
寺庙敞开,香烟袅绕,菩萨慈悲守候——没人逼你行礼、祈祷、捐赠,也不用执着于一个灵魂的契约。你可以祈福、可以观看、可以泡壶茶、点一支香,或者什么都不做,只是坐下,与千年敬意共呼吸——无需你作证,也无需你皈依。

更感谢祖先,也感谢现今中国政府在一定程度上保留这份清净。无论我对某些政策有何感受,至少在这里,灵性是有文化根基的,是身体化的,是没有西方宗教性自大的戏剧性的。在中国,神圣不需要麦克风。它只是,静静地、耐心地、深植于生活的织体中。

记得一切的山

我曾站在黄山,松树攀附花岗岩,如同古代诗人拒绝倒下。我踏上石阶,迷雾盘绕,如旧友归来。黄山之美令人震撼,但更在于觉知——这里的山不消遣你,而是目睹你。

在普陀山敬念观音时,我潸然泪下。那不是情绪化的哭泣,而是一种细胞的记忆——好像我记得几世纪以来的祈祷。点一支香,不是游客,而是灵魂的寻道者。山回报我,它总会。

很快我将行走于五台山,那座文殊菩萨常驻的智者之山。我已经感受到召唤,知道它将剥离我身上的冗余,教我聆听——不是用耳朵,而是用心与灵。

寺庙、纪念与慈悲

每当我进入一座中国寺院——哪怕是翻修重建、游客涌动的庙宇——我都收获一种无声的赠礼。在西方,我们常把圣地当博物馆——拍照、分析建筑。而在中国,神圣依旧在运作,人们走进来不是为了观赏,而是为了敬拜、实践、生活在神圣之中。

这彻底改变了体验。

国家纪念地也如此——从天安门再到长城、紫禁城到颐和园。你走进去,不只是踏入了历史,还踏入了一种继续不断的文化意志:它经历过摧毁、重建、延续。少有文化如中国般能拥有如此深根的韧性。这不是自我膨胀,而是仪式、复兴、规矩、安静之美。

龙、舞、与每日魔力 (部分彩段)

从海岸到黄山,从洛阳到五台,无处不散发魔力——这股能量携带着传统、语言、方言、视角与美食。别装作中国没有点张扬的风格。她不是什么古色古香的瓷娃娃——她是一位龙女王,发中流动强劲的气,血液里燃起红色火焰。她会给你一碗让你哭着再来求一碗的街边面条,再用一首诗撞击你的灵魂,让你忘记姓名。她会让一位八十岁公园舞者流水般舞动,再邀请你共舞。她能在一口气中炫耀她的5G超网速,又轻轻放下一位隐世高僧挺立山巅:“有科技有智慧,也有隐者,怎奈何?”我因此深深爱她。中国不为复杂道歉——她只是邀请你低头致敬。如果你忙着评判而错过美,她仍会继续歌唱。

人,即土地

我第一次向普陀的和尚礼敬,他轻抚我肩说:“你来过这里。”那一刻,我知道——我确实曾来,只是方式难以言说。中国人的根不仅土生风景,也是祖先、山川与时代的延续。他们携带它,如携带呼吸:在饮食、热情、诗词、孝敬祖辈的方式,以及即使陌生,也余温递你一份果。

我与陌生人共舞于北京公园;在狭巷茶肆学到茶礼;有了无需翻译的笑声。确实,我被注目——凡外国人难免。但我未曾感到不受欢迎。我感到——被看见。哪怕我意识到有人在观察,那多是好奇,不是敌意。我感受到的是人的存在,而这,就是我爱中国的原因,也是我一次又一次回来寻常的地方。

致投射恐惧的人

有人问我:为何你歌颂一个被很多人误解或恐惧的国家?我不谈政治。我谈人性、谈灵魂、谈时间的流淌。我赞颂我触碰过、见证过、爱过的一切。中国,确实令人屏息。

我写这篇文字,是为了提醒人们,即便跨越文化,爱依然可能。敬意比言辞强大;旅行不是征服,也不是批判,而是接纳。

中国给予我太多,而我以这小小而深情的诗献上感谢。

最后的祝福

山啊,感谢你的静止。
公园啊,感谢你的歌声。
人民啊,感谢你的温柔。
僧侣啊,感谢你的祈祷。
中国——你是广袤的活寺院——
感谢允许我一次又一次走过你的神圣殿堂。
我向你深深一躬。





About The Author:

image

Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.

Get Paul’s Latest Ebook – Discover The Art Of Sacred Authenticity And Holy Fucking Clarity

 

This is not your grandma’s spiritual handbook. It’s a fire-born roadmap to your sacred clarity – a raw, radiant call to resurrect your inner beast and get brutally real.

Lovingly dedicated to the quiet warriors – the secretly powerful, heart-break-hardened souls who swallowed their pain just to keep the peace – or to be loved. 

This is not for the spiritually primped and polished.

This is for:

    • The wild-hearted
    • The holy, unruly misfits
    • The sacred rebels who are done playing nice
    • The mystics who cuss in Sanskrit
    • The soft souls with warrior blood and bones

If you’ve ever felt like an asshole – despite your love and devotion – or you’ve been told you’re “too much” when your soul was too bright – this book is your permission slip. 

It’s time to stop apologizing and start awakening.

Let this be the medicine to heal your soul’s ancient wound.

Let this be the wild gospel no one dared to speak – until now.

With Love,

Paul Wagner (Krishna Kalesh)

Spiritual Healer • Wild Mystic

Creator of The Shankara Oracle & The Personalities Cards

DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK





About The Author:

image

Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.

The Skyscraper of Healing: 108 Floors Of Healing From Trauma, Spiritual Awakening and Reclaiming Your Sovereignty

Illustration of healing journey from trauma to spiritual sovereignty using skyscraper metaphor

Illustration of healing journey from trauma to spiritual sovereignty using skyscraper metaphor

There is a sacred architecture inside you. A vertical landscape of memory, survival, energy, emotion, and soul. It’s not imagined. It’s not metaphor alone. It’s structure – and it’s real.

I call it the Skyscraper of Healing

Not because healing is linear. Not because we must climb upward in effort. But because when we choose to truly awaken – not as a trend, but as a soul directive – we begin a journey that rises through inner chambers of density, pain, clarity, and sovereignty.

This skyscraper has 108 floors. Not as an arbitrary number, but as a sacred one – the number of completion in many ancient traditions. Each floor represents a level of trauma transmutation, emotional evolution, and the capacity to live as your radiant, embodied self.

If you are awakening – if you’ve been through therapy, plant medicine, inner work, or if you’ve screamed into your pillow night after night just trying to survive – this is for you.

This map will help you see where you are – and what’s ahead. It’s not a rigid sequence. It’s not dogma. It’s a soul tool – to clarify, orient, and empower your next step.

The Skyscraper at a Glance

Floors 1 to 40 – Survival
This is the trauma zone. Intense emotional flooding, nervous system collapse, panic, shutdown, and pure survival. You’re not building yet – you’re simply trying to not fall apart. If you’ve moved beyond daily overwhelm, this level is cleared.

Floors 41 to 70 – Tools and Pattern Recognition
You begin to use protocols, notice symptoms, and understand your emotional and physical patterns. Pressure becomes trackable. You’re less reactive, more conscious. You’re learning to manage the terrain, not just be dominated by it. If you’re working with tools and mostly stable, you’re 90 to 95 percent clear here.

Floors 71 to 90 – Sovereignty
You now experience echoes, not flares. Dreams, ancestral energy, emotional patterns from family and identity begin to appear – not to trap you, but to be released. You don’t react anymore – you respond, clear, and move forward. This is where you begin to live as your sovereign self. You’re actively clearing this level if pressure is minimal, fleeting, and your nervous system is trustworthy.

Floors 91 to 108 – Radiance
You’re no longer healing – you’re expressing. You’re building legacy, creating, leading, and embodying truth without collapse. Emotions move through you, not over you. You’re no longer ruled by your past – you become the transmission. This level is not far away. It comes once sovereignty becomes the ground beneath your feet, not just a vision in the sky.

Floors 1 to 40 – Survival and the Nervous System Abyss.  Understanding Trauma Survival and Nervous System Dysregulation.

This is the basement. The flooded levels. The place where most of us start, even if we pretend otherwise. This phase often involves severe nervous system dysregulation, where the body’s stress response is heightened due to unresolved trauma.

On these floors, your system doesn’t care about joy. It doesn’t care about boundaries or goals or relationships or soul purpose. It cares about staying alive.

    • Daily crying
    • Trauma re-enactment
    • Nervous system collapse
    • Chronic illness and inflammation
    • Emotional flashbacks
    • Migraines and full-body shutdown
    • Panic and dissociation
    • Hypervigilance masked as productivity or spirituality

This is the realm of childhood survival wounds, often activated by emotional neglect, sexual abuse, abandonment, enmeshment, or living under narcissistic or mentally unstable parents.

You may not even know how to name what’s happening.
You just know something is wrong – and you keep trying to “fix” it with willpower or positive thinking, but nothing changes.

Because this isn’t a surface-level problem. This is biological imprisonment inside a trauma loop.

Here, the only job is to survive. To crawl, bleed, and pray your way to the 41st floor – where something begins to shift.

Status: Fully cleared if you’re conscious, resourced, and no longer drowning. Otherwise, this is where most people live without realizing it. You can’t skip these floors. But you can heal them.

Floors 41 to 70 – Pattern Recognition and Emotional Mastery – Embracing Emotional Regulation and Somatic Healing 

This is the territory of tools, language, and reclamation.

You’re no longer barely surviving. Now you’re noticing patterns. Seeing symptoms as messengers. You might be working with:

    • Supplements and protocols
    • Emotional regulation and inner child work
    • Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) or functional medicine
    • Breathwork and somatic practices
    • Tracking triggers and pressure points
    • Mapping your dreams, energy waves, and nervous system spikes

You’re beginning to understand your system. You don’t just cry – you track why. You don’t just collapse – you pause and make space.

The pressure still comes, yes.
But now you have timing, language, support, and awareness.

This is the beginning of personal sovereignty – but it’s still cautious. You’re learning how not to be a patient. How not to be defined by your trauma. How not to be afraid of your own power. 

Status: 95 percent cleared if you are using your tools and no longer overwhelmed by symptoms. Practices like breathwork and somatic healing techniques aid in emotional regulation, helping you process and release stored trauma. This stage prepares you for something deeper – not just healing, but liberation.

Floors 71 to 90 – Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty and Energetic Integrity

Woman standing with arms open representing personal sovereignty and energetic boundaries

 

This is where you are no longer clearing trauma for survival.
You are now clearing residual patterning, and reclaiming parts of yourself you were never allowed to fully inhabit.

This is the realm of:

    • Sexual integration without shame
    • Emotional truth without collapse
    • Boundary without guilt
    • Anger without fragmentation
    • Presence without absorption
    • Joy without dissociation

This is when the pressure still happens – but it’s different now.
It whispers. It flickers. It teaches.

You might feel light tension, a dream echo, or a brief eye pulse behind the left eye – and instead of panic, you simply say: “Ah. A shadow just walked through. Time to sweep the floor.”

This is also when the ancestral layers surface – the ghosts of family trauma, identity, judgment, and enmeshment.

These aren’t your emotions. They’re what you inherited, what you absorbed, what you unconsciously agreed to carry. And this is where you drop them.

This level signals the beginning stages of your profound spiritual awakening, leading to personal sovereignty and self-empowerment.

Status: Actively clearing. This is where mastery becomes quiet, embodied, and sovereign. You are no longer reactive. You are now calmly strategic. You don’t wait for symptoms to dominate – you meet them in the hallway with a smile and send them on their way.

Floors 91 to 108 – Embodied Radiance and Legacy Building In Post-Traumatic Growth

These floors are sacred. Not because they’re exclusive. But because they are earned.

This is where you are no longer healing – you are living.

    • Your nervous system is no longer afraid of expansion
    • Your creativity returns without needing validation
    • You speak truth without bleeding for it
    • You write, build, teach, and love without collapsing into fatigue or hypervigilance
    • You lead without absorbing the pain of others
    • You let your field change rooms – not because you try, but because you are radiant by nature

This is the realm of creation from center.

Status: Not yet arrived – but approaching. These floors are your reward for walking the first 90 with clarity, courage, and consistency. You won’t need a protocol here. You’ll carry a few trusted tools, and mostly… you’ll just breathe. You’ll do less – but what you do will ripple for decades.

This final phase embodies post-traumatic growth, where you can start living in embodied radiance leading to building your own legacy.

This is SOUL LEGACY! This is the seat at your own table – that you built from within – THIS is where you belong.

 

Where You Are Now In Your Own Trauma Healing Journey And Spiritual Awakening Process

If you’re reading this and feel seen – you’ve already begun climbing.

You might still be in the basement, crawling with broken knees. Or you might be halfway up, surrounded by charts, herbs, and supplements, eyes full of lightning.

Or you may be just like me – walking the floors of sovereignty, noticing the ghosts, watching them whisper – and no longer answering the door.

Wherever you are, the point is this:

You are not broken.
You are not behind.
You are in motion.
And the tower belongs to you.

Let’s keep walking.

There’s light at the top. And it’s not because you escaped the darkness – It’s because you learned to carry it as wisdom.

Welcome to the Skyscraper. You belong here. Rise up and OWN IT!

See the questionnaire for self-assessment below – to help you know where you are – and where you might be headed. Mastering each floor means another opening to expansion.

Meanwhile, keep in mind….

The Skyscraper of Healing is a practical and visionary map for those navigating the stages of trauma recovery, emotional integration, and spiritual embodiment. 

Whether you’re working through complex PTSD, seeking nervous system regulation, exploring shadow work, or simply wondering where you stand on your spiritual awakening journey, this guide helps you locate yourself with clarity and compassion. 

From somatic tools to energetic boundaries, from ancestral trauma to soul-level sovereignty, each floor of this metaphorical skyscraper offers insight into healing not just for survival, but for creative, radiant living. If you’re ready to move from inner chaos to embodied truth – this is your next step. 

Join me in a session to help you find your way through it all. Click HERE to schedule a healing intuitive reading. 

 

The 108-Floor Sovereignty Self-Assessment

Each section includes 3 powerful questions. A “Yes” to all = you’ve cleared that floor group. A “Maybe” or “No” = you’re still integrating or actively working it.


How to Use This Tool

    • Read one section at a time – no rushing.
    • Sit with each question. The body always answers first.
    • If it’s a Yes, celebrate and claim it.
    • If it’s a Maybe or No, don’t judge – just recognize your location on the map.
    • Revisit this every few weeks or after major events, dreams, or breakthroughs.

This isn’t a personality quiz. It’s a spiritual cartography tool – helping you remember that you are already climbing. You don’t need a map to escape. You need a map to remember you’re arriving.

Floors 1–40: Trauma Survival & Nervous System Dysregulation Healing

Theme: Surviving pain, holding ancestral chaos, learning to stay in the body.

    1. Do I often feel emotionally or physically overwhelmed without understanding why?
    2. Do I collapse into sadness, fear, or over-responsibility when others are in pain?
    3. Do I feel like I’m still surviving something no one sees?

Floors 41–70: Emotional Pattern Recognition & Mastery For Trauma Recovery

Theme: Seeing patterns, tracking triggers, understanding the map of your pain.

  1. Can I name where my emotional/physical symptoms are coming from most of the time?
  2. Do I have tools or rituals that truly help me return to center?

3. Do I know when a feeling is mine – and when I’ve absorbed it from someone else?

Floors 71–74: Healing Through Boundaries and Emotional Detachment In Energetic Relationships

Theme: Honoring self without guilt, ending emotional codependency.

    1. Can I feel compassion without absorbing someone else’s suffering?
    2. Do I say “no” without over-explaining or fearing judgment?
    3.  Can I hold space for discomfort – mine or others – without trying to fix it?

Floors 75–77: Publicly Speaking Your Truth WIth Confidence and Authentic Self-Expression

Theme: Speaking clearly, loving fiercely, holding your voice without collapse.

    1. Do I share my truth without worrying about being too much?
    2. Can I be both direct and loving – even when it’s uncomfortable?
    3. Do I feel peace after speaking my truth, regardless of how it lands?

Floors 78–81: Sacred Masculine Energy Healing and Creative Expression Without Shame

Theme: Reclaiming pleasure, power, and divine indifference to reaction.

    1. Have I released shame or performance energy from my sexuality and creativity?
    2. Do I rest when I need to, without guilt or explanation?
    3. Do I create, teach, or express from flow – not pressure or “shoulds”?

Floors 82–85: Letting Go of the Final Ghosts AKA Releasing Ancestral Trauma and Ending Generational Healing Cycles

Theme: Ending lineage contracts, releasing the role of “the one who heals.”

    1. Do I feel complete without needing my family to understand or validate me?
    2. Can I walk away from unworthy energy without emotional residue?
    3. Have I let go of “healing” as an identity and claimed sovereignty as my baseline?

Floors 86–90: Silent Power and Practicing Energetic Alignment For Nervous System Peace

Theme: Being the lighthouse, not the rescuer. Leading with presence, not noise.

    1. Can I go days without performance, expression, or output and still feel full?
    2. Does my presence shift others without effort or emotional cost?
    3. Is my sovereignty now quiet, unshakeable, and relaxed – even in the storm?

Floors 91–108: Living In Radiant Self-Expression

Theme: Expressing without resistance, loving without leaking, creating from stillness.

    1. Do I create from inner guidance, not from response, demand, or strategy?
    2. Is my pleasure sacred and sovereign – not sourced from attention or need
    3. Do I now trust the divine arc of my life, without having to track it, fix it, or protect it?

 

Book A Healing Intuitive Session With Me 

About The Author:

image

Paul is a spiritual healer and coach with more than 30 years of experience. He is the founder of The Shankara Experience, and creator of The Shankara Oracle and The Personality Cards.

His work is focused on guiding seekers to inner freedom and awakening.