If something in you has been stirring, a quiet but persistent sense that you’re being called toward something, even if you can’t name what, you may have already asked yourself: what is this asking of me?

That question is one of the most important you’ll ever sit with. And in my experience, both personal and in working with others, it usually comes down to three things: three commitments the soul asks us to make when it’s ready to grow.

Not dramatic gestures or life overhauls. Quieter than that. But deeper.

Many people are awakening to the deep inner knowing that we’re more than our physical bodies and connected to something much larger than ourselves.

This realization came somewhat out of the blue and was a surprise to me. I had spent the first 30 years as a nurse tending to seniors and people who were dying. Even with some mystical things that happened during that time, I had no idea that perhaps I had a soul. I was curious, open and yet still very grounded in my scientific worldview.

When the energy of my soul started rising in me, I experienced symptoms that left me feeling lost, confused and stuck, which I later came to call soul hunger. The soul to me was the energy of my becoming. Like the acorn is meant to become an oak tree. I was meant to live the outer expression of my life in alignment with my inner truths rather than who I was conditioned to be.

Have you noticed any of the following signs that your soul is beckoning you to become the next version of yourself?

A sense that something is missing in your life?

An inner longing for more profound meaning and purpose?

A persistent hunger to feel more deeply connected with yourself, others, and the mysteries of life?

If so, these are all nudges from your soul. I wrote about the 10 signs your soul is speaking to you if you’re curious about other signs.

No longer satisfied by life’s material and superficial longings, our souls beckon us to grow and evolve so that we can become more fully our true selves.

Our soul is inviting us to embark on a new journey. One that shifts and expands our ways of knowing, often setting us on a path into the unknown.

Many people worldwide are confused by this call because they don’t know what the stirrings mean or how to respond. We often suppress this natural process and, as a result, feel that something inside of us is missing.

Our souls are like seedlings that need to be tended to. With the right conditions, our souls will grow and become the guiding light for our lives. When that happens, we live in more profound peace, alignment, fulfillment, and love.

The soul needs two essential things to grow: the integration of our life experiences, which becomes wisdom, and a growing sense of love and compassion.

How do we cultivate wisdom and grow love?

This is where the three soul commitments come in. These commitments require that we journey back home to ourselves. When we do, our load gets lighter, and our souls shine brighter.

A Word About Spiritual Bypassing

Before we explore the three commitments, there is something important to name, something I have witnessed both in my own journey and in working with many others.

When we begin to awaken spiritually, there is a natural pull toward the practices and experiences that feel expansive: meditation, presence, and connection to something larger than ourselves. These are genuinely transformative. But they can also, if we are not careful, become a way of floating above our lives rather than entering them more fully.

The clinical psychologist John Welwood, who pioneered the bridge between Western psychology and contemplative practice, named this tendency spiritual bypassing: the use of spiritual practice to avoid dealing with the personal and emotional unfinished business we all carry. In other words, waking up spiritually without doing the harder work of growing up psychologically.

The philosopher Ken Wilber describes what is required of us even more fully. He invites us to grow up (do the psychological and developmental work), wake up (cultivate genuine spiritual presence), and show up (bring that integration into the world in service of others). All three are necessary. None can substitute for the others.

I know this pattern intimately. When I began my own awakening journey, I needed first to wake up, to understand that I had a soul and what it was asking of me. Meditation and mindfulness opened that door. But with increasing awareness, I began to see clearly where I also needed to grow up: the conditioning I had carried from childhood, the patterns playing out in my relationships, the ways my conditioned self was quietly limiting the expression of my soul.

The soul asks us to do all of it. To wake up and to grow up. And ultimately, to show up more authentically in the world. That is what these three commitments, taken together, are designed to support. Not as a linear checklist, but as a spiral path we return to again and again, going a little deeper each time.

We must realize we can’t skip over any of them. How we move through them doesn’t matter as much as that we DO move through all of them.

What Is Your Soul Asking of You?

1. To Consciously Integrate Your Past Experiences — Growing Up

We all arrive in adulthood with childhood experiences that the soul needs us to integrate. For the majority of us, our youth pointed more to who we were not rather than who we were. This happens in all homes, even the most loving ones.

We must go through a process of knowing who we are not, and all the discomfort and suffering that goes along with that, to be motivated enough to uncover who we actually are.

What I mean by the conditioned self is everything we have accumulated on the way to becoming who we are: our personality patterns, our past experiences, our gender and cultural conditioning, the beliefs we absorbed about who we should be and how we should live. The conditioned self is not the enemy. It helped us survive and adapt. But it was never designed to help us thrive. And until we understand it, it quietly runs the show.

The process of integration involves cultivating self-love, forgiveness, and compassion, and becoming more aware of the impact our families and conditioning have had on us. This is the grow up work. Not dramatic or performative, but honest and patient. It requires intention, curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is difficult.

As we journey through the past, we also uncover the golden threads: the experiences that give us clues about our true path. What are our unique gifts? What has brought meaning even in hard times? What has always called to us beneath the noise of expectation?

One of the most powerful tools I know for this first commitment is the Enneagram, a psycho-spiritual map rooted in both ancient wisdom and modern psychology. It illuminates the personality patterns we developed in childhood, why we developed them, and how they continue to shape our choices, relationships, and sense of self. Understanding your type doesn’t box you in. It helps you see the box you have been living in, so you can begin to step outside it. It is often said that time heals all wounds. The truth is that age and years alone don’t do this work. Integration requires intention.

2. To Live in the Present Moment — Waking Up

This commitment asks us to develop a healthy relationship with our conditioned self so that it becomes an instrument for expressing our soul rather than suppressing it.

What seems to happen for many of us over time is that our conditioned patterns become rigid and less porous. The more rigid and dense our conditioned self is, the further removed we are from our essence and our presence. Our conditioned patterns are like life jackets: initially, they help us stay afloat, but as we grow older, they become constricting, restricting the flow of our life force energy.

This is the wake-up work. Not waking up to dramatic spiritual experiences, but to the quiet reality of this moment. Learning to notice when we are living from our conditioned patterns and gently returning to something truer.

Creating space to be present, even for a few minutes each day, is one of the most powerful ways to begin loosening that constriction. A simple meditation practice doesn’t just calm the nervous system. It creates the inner quiet where we can begin to distinguish between the habitual voice of our conditioned self and the steadier, quieter voice of our soul. It is where presence actually becomes possible.

This is also where the grow up and wake up work begins to inform each other. As we become more present through meditation, we begin to see our conditioned patterns more clearly. And as we understand those patterns more fully through tools like the Enneagram, our meditation practice becomes more intentional and more personal.

The truth is that we all need different things, and a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. What wakes one person up may keep another asleep. This is why personalized practice, practice that meets you where you actually are, matters so much.

3. To Express Yourself Authentically in the World — Showing Up

Ancient wisdom teachings believe that once a person’s soul begins to awaken, there is a deep desire to serve humanity in some way. Not in a grand or performative way, but in the quiet, honest way that comes from living in greater alignment with who you actually are.

This third commitment is about showing up, bringing the inner work into the outer life. It is where the integration of the past and the presence of the moment flow into authentic expression: in our relationships, our work, our creative life, and the ways we contribute to something beyond ourselves.

This commitment requires that we cultivate ways of knowing beyond our five senses. Intuition is the soul’s language. It develops naturally as our conditioned patterns become more fluid and permeable. When we pay attention, we begin to notice signs, synchronicities, and inner knowing that point us toward what is ours to do.

This is also the commitment where the spiritual bypassing risk is perhaps most subtle. It is possible to talk about serving the world from the soul while still using that language to avoid the harder personal work. The honest question to ask is: Am I showing up from a grounded, integrated place? Or am I using the language of the soul to bypass the reality of my life?

When you pay attention, you will notice that everything in your life points to an opportunity to revisit one or more of these three commitments. They are not a staircase with a top step. They are a spiral, and each time you return, you go a little deeper.

With time, patience, and the spirit of curiosity, we slowly return home to ourselves. We are on the path of awakening to our souls’ deeper needs, and our lives take on a whole new meaning.

These three commitments aren’t a checklist to complete. They are a way of orienting yourself toward your own becoming. And they don’t have to be walked alone.

If you’d like to understand how these commitments connect to a practical path forward, I explore that more fully in the 4 Keys to Inner Peace.

If you feel ready to explore this with someone who can help you understand your patterns, build the inner practices, and navigate what your soul is asking of you, I’d love to accompany you. My one-on-one Mindfulness Coaching is designed for exactly this journey. You’re welcome to reach out.

And if this post stirred something in you, I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment below. Our community would love to hear from you.