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Going Backward to Go Forward: The Challenges of Spiritual Growth

Writer's picture: Caroline AllenCaroline Allen

A town made of pink, green, orange, and blue squares, circles, and triangles.
Mystic Play: A simple art process for all ages

Spiritual growth looks nothing like normal "success." Often, spiritual success looks to the outside world like failure, like going backward, like giving up.


This is why spiritual evolution takes so much courage. You have to let go of so many of the normal world rules, and follow spirit wherever it leads.


I'm taking an international art class, and I've never been so challenged. While a lot of the other artists seem to be having breakthroughs in the real world, my breakthroughs seem to be internal. I seem to be pulled backward, again and again into childhood.


I've been noticing recently my expression in my visual art is too controlled. For months now, I've been going to the yurt daily to loosen up, trying new media, new techniques, new projects. Nothing was really working. Although it was fine, it was not "fiyah".


Today something started to shift.


Separate from my art course, I'm putting together a Mystic Play section on my website to promote the publication of my middle grade novel Blue in January 2025. I love how our healing often happens "accidentally".


This morning I was in the yurt videoing an art lesson for kids. You can watch it here. It's super simple, using circles and squares and triangles to create characters and cityscapes.


As my adult classmates are planning shows in galleries and museums and selling artwork to collectors, I'm in my yurt playing with construction paper shapes.


And it's the most fun I've had in a long time.


I realized this morning that I had to go backward to go forward. This has happened often on my spiritual path. I've had to turn around and go back to a time where I wasn't nurtured and spend months and even years reparenting myself -- looking like I'm not succeeding while my colleagues go on to succeed in the outside world.


I realized as a child, I wasn't allowed this kind of creative play. Don't get me wrong, we played a lot as kids, running and kicking balls and collecting lightning bugs, but this kind of play seemed to scare my parents, as if it would interfere with our subsistence farm life, as if it would interfere with our survival.


I realized this morning this childish activity was the only way I was going to loosen up and evolve as an artist (and a human).


I had to learn how to play.


This is one of the hardest things to deal with with spiritual growth. It looks NOTHING like outer world success. In fact, it can even look childish.


It can look like construction paper, a glue stick, and a pair of scissors.


Read more about my novel Blue here.

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