Unlocking Each Other: A Different Story About Spiritual Growth and Loss

We've been told the spiritual path is lonely. That transformation means leaving people behind. That to grow, we must lose.

We've each heard this about the spiritual journey - that you will have to make hard choices, shed relationships, outgrow the people around you. That you will be like the snake shedding its skin, and that it will hurt.

And it's not that this isn't true. It certainly can be true. The reason this story has taken hold - to grow you must lose - is that there are elements of truth to it.

Moving into alignment often means loss. But I want to pause us here and wonder if we're telling ourselves the wrong story about what is actually happening. Not to deny the loss, but to shift our lens a little when we talk about transformation, alignment, and grief.

And this matters! As long as we hold "to grow you must lose" as the main story, we cut ourselves off from a lot of growth. We can't go after transformation full-stop. We can't really be in it if we're scared of outgrowing others. We can't do what it takes because we're so afraid that we will lose people, that we will leave them behind.

A Problem of Contortion
In this pause, let's look at what happens when transformation begins. Often, we arrive here after a long period of fitting ourselves into our circumstances. Like a pair of jeans we've outgrown - who am I kidding, I'm talking about leggings here, I haven't worn jeans in years! - we've squeezed ourselves into a role, identity, or relationship that no longer fits. We can keep wearing those leggings, but the waistband digs in. The fabric strains. We're working really hard to hold a shape that doesn't want to be held anymore.

When we feel this squeeze, we begin to realize that we are out of alignment with our truest selves. The size we were is not the size we are now. We're contorting our body into a shape it no longer wants to hold.

Psychologically and spiritually, we may realize that we haven't been showing up as who we really are. The move toward alignment is a move toward more realness, more integrity. Here, I'm using the definition of integrity that Dr. Martha Beck uses in her Way of Integrity book: Integrity is believing what you feel, speaking what you think, and doing what you want. That is radical integrity, and often when we make a move to believe what we feel, to speak what we think, to do what we want, we realize that we have not done those things in an effort to protect our relationship with someone else.

We all have examples - big and small - of this. Maybe we don't tell our families who we love because it would break the relationship. Or maybe we simply don't speak up about something that bothers us until it drives us nuts! Whether it's a big or small thing, we begin to contort ourselves to stay in the relationship. And so when we look at shifting ourselves or growing in new directions, we think, oh my gosh, if I stop contorting, this relationship will end.

​And that might be true. But there is another reality to consider: if you are contorting yourself in a relationship, you are not the only one! It doesn't work that way. If you are contorting, so is the other person. You're both contorting to "fit" the other person.

When you are not aligned with what you feel, what you say, and what you do, the other person meets you in your contortion, and they contort as well. It's almost like a lock and key. You're locked into a collective shape that may not serve either one of you. You're in a mutual dance where neither of you is real.

Let me give an example here. Think about a friend who loves to talk through every detail of their life. Over time, you've learned to be the listener - the one who doesn't share much, who asks questions, who holds space. You've stopped bringing your own stories, your own struggles. You've contorted into "the steady one." And your friend? They've contorted too - into "the messy one who always needs help." Neither of you chose these roles explicitly, but you're both locked into them. When you finally say, "I'm struggling too and I need support," the whole dance has to change. You're both freed to be more than your assigned roles.

When you're both contorted, neither one of you can really show up fully. You're both protecting the relationship. You're protecting it rather than being in it.

This dance of protection has us mutually contorting. We're safe, but often we're exhausted because we're not just being who we are. We're not just saying the thing that we think. We're not voicing our truest selves. This dance that we're doing together actually keeps both of us small.

So the story that "if I move into alignment, that means I automatically lose the other person" begins to break down here. We might - it's true. But it's also true that we might move into a new kind of dance, a dance of unlocking.

Unlocking Each Other
​When you stop contorting yourself, when you move into alignment, you actually begin to unlock yourself. You unlock parts of yourself you didn't know. You experience elements of yourself you weren't aware of. You see things more clearly than you've seen them in the past. You understand yourself more fully because you begin to notice your patterns in a way that you couldn't when you were locked in and unaligned. 

When you are contorted, you can't be unlocked. The energy required to hold the false shape is the same energy you'd need to discover your true one.

But here's what we miss in the narrative of the personal growth and transformation journey. What we neglect to say is that when you unlock and align, the other person unlocks. They have to, whether willingly or not. They may not thank you for it, to be fair, but your alignment moves them out of the dance where you're both contorting to meet each other. 

When you stop contorting, they stop having to contort around you. They're free to choose: step into their own alignment, or find a new contortion. Either way, your unlocking opened a door. 

So here we interrupt the narrative that the spiritual path must be lonely. That to transform means that you "outgrow" people, that you shed relationships. What might shift if we understood that when we unlock and move into alignment, we could be offering freedom to someone else?

There's something a bit grandiose about the idea of outgrowing someone. It assumes that we are growing and changing for the better and they are not. It applies our measuring stick to their journey. Maybe they're just growing differently. Maybe they will find real relief in no longer having to contort to our misalignment.

It feels fair to say, though, that when you are in a mutual dance of pretending with someone, neither one of you can be free. When you step away from that dance, the other person now has the freedom to choose what's next for them without your contortion providing noise or a mixed signal for them to respond to. It's a gift.

Even if the relationship ends, it's a gift, because the other person no longer has to contort around you. The ending isn't the old story of outgrowing and abandonment, which is often the only way we know to share about endings. Rather it's a story of both being free now to decide where we want to align, where we want to contort, how we want to grow, who we want to be, what dances we each want to be in.

Our growth does not mean outgrowing, but instead means freedom for all involved.

Freedom's Grief
Being free doesn't mean not hurting. Often this unlocking is quite painful. Think about the ending of marriages, the ending of friendships, the ending of business partnerships. None of those are without pain and grief.

A few years ago, I found myself working really hard to maintain a friendship of many years that had seen me through both good and hard times. It took some time, but I realized that not only wasn't I being my truest self anymore in the friendship, I was also acting in ways that didn't fit the person I was growing into.I made the difficult decision to end the friendship, which was painful and lonely. I still grieve that relationship. 

I share this because I want to be clear that this idea that "we're both free now" doesn't undermine the fact that you may have losses to grieve when you move into alignment with yourself. But can you imagine that the grieving is quite different in this case?

The grief of "I'm in alignment now and we're both free" feels quite different from the grief of "I outgrew someone." One honors both people's freedom. The other makes growth a hierarchy.

The Sacred is Complicated
You can honor the grief as well as honor the unlocking. This powerful truth is complicated. It's big kid stuff.

The truth of spiritual growth is that it doesn't have to be simple. Simple says there's a right and wrong. Simple says "I outgrew." Mature says, "I'm stepping into my alignment." Mature says: There's a possibility for both of our freedom here that might hurt really badly.

It's complicated to hold both the gift of freedom as well as the pain of an ending. That's why we know that moving into alignment is actually sacred work. It's complicated and messy, and ultimately for the good - for the self and also beyond the self. It also explains why many folks stay away from coming into true alignment and the transformation it requires.

They know this "authenticity" work is not all bliss. Becoming more genuine doesn't always feel great. Unlocking your contortions doesn't always feel great. It is for our good and it is for our freedom, but it doesn't always feel good. But it becomes more possible if we can see that our stepping into alignment may free other people.

The Practice
So let's talk about what this looks like in practice. The first part of the practice is really understanding that we may need to shift our narrative from the belief that alignment and transformation equals loss to understanding that alignment can lead to unlocking and freedom. We shift from the self-referential "I outgrew you" to "We both can be free now." This initial part of the practice is the understanding that the story can shift, and then we can begin to hold a different, more complicated story of pain, possibility, and freedom.

The story of our unlocking is a mutual unlocking.

If it's a mutual unlocking, we can begin to imagine these relationships differently. The relationships may, indeed, have to end. But what if we held these relationships in our heart even after they leave our daily life? We may be ending a daily interaction, a friendship, a marriage, a business partnership, but what if we committed to holding that relationship in our hearts? Of keeping it alive and real without constant engagement?

What if we trusted that the ending could serve both people, not just ourselves?

What if we knew the break to be mutual, even if we're the instigator?

And then...we simply hold these realities: that our unlocking can benefit the other, that we can keep them in our hearts, that this could be good for both of us.

We can even make this into a mantra of sorts:
Thank you for helping me come into more alignment. I trust that this serves you as well.
Or: My unlocking is yours, too. Thank you.
Or: My growth means freedom for both of us. Thank you.

Dr. Gabor Maté talks about the wound of the young child of having to choose between authenticity and attachment. It's survival, and Dr. Maté is clear that because attachment is such a human need, we will always choose attachment. This seems to be true for children and adults. The difference is that now, as adults, we have the power to truly make that choice. And while we might have to choose between authenticity and attachment in some relationships, we never have to choose between authenticity and love.

We can love and wish well and see freedom for the person that we are actually detaching from. We don't have to make that choice to stop loving - even in leaving. Sometimes love looks like unlocking. Sometimes there's no way we could have seen these deep patterns within ourselves without that other person. And so the question becomes: how do we thank them for helping us see our need to unlock? How do we end things with authenticity and love? 

Sometimes the aligning and unlocking can only happen through letting a relationship go, and that's painful and hard. But it can also be supremely loving. This is one of those mature, sacred ways of thinking about a relationship: Relationships are not something to throw away. They are not something to disdain as if you have outgrown them.

The more spiritually mature way to honor the sacred in the relationship is knowing that this relationship helped to get us to where we are and then blessing it as we let it go. Holding it in our hearts as we carry forward. There's something quite beautiful there, if we allow it.

This is the shift: from seeing our alignment as something that separates us from others to seeing it as something that can free us all. From "I outgrew you" to "we're both free now." From spiritual path as lonely journey to transformation as collective liberation.

We don't have to choose between authenticity and love. We can love someone even as we unlock from them. We can honor what was even as we step into what's next. We can grieve the ending and bless the freedom - ours and theirs.

Aligning, unlocking, transforming - all of it - can be in service to the whole. Including the person you're letting go.

That's the sacred work. That's the mature path. That's how we grow without leaving love behind.