After nearly 15 years of healing and liberation work, this episode explores what still feels true and what doesn't. This is Part I of my 2026 birthday reflections, and I'm looking back at what years of spiritual practice, healing work, personal development, and lived experience have taught me. Specifically about grief, self-love, mysticism, stewardship, and being a human being in the "real" world. I begin with a prayer for anyone grieving — whether what has been lost is personal, relational, collective, or something you once deeply hoped for that simply isn't meant to be. One of the things I've come to believe is that grief is part of being in beautiful relationship with life: sorrow and pleasure can inhabit the same body, beauty does not need to wait for grief to end, and loving life does not betray what has been lost. From there, I reflect on the mystical orientation that has shaped my work from the beginning: direct relationship with God, the Beloved, and what I call the Beloved Unseen. We get into surrender, trust, spiritual practice, and why I'm increasingly less interested in proving or categorizing mystical experience than I am in asking whether something brings us more deeply into aliveness, humanity, connection, and right relationship with life. I also explore one of the biggest questions guiding me now: What has actually been entrusted to me to steward in this lifetime? That question has changed how I think about purpose, relationships, responsibilities, healing, and liberation. Not everything we care about belongs to us to carry. Not everything entrusted to us is ours forever. And something being ours to tend doesn't necessarily mean it will always be easy, ideal, or exactly how we want it to be. We also get into some of the distortions I've seen after years in self-help, spirituality, and personal development spaces — especially the idea that every choice we make is a direct reflection of our self-worth or how much we love ourselves. Human beings have bodies, limits, health issues, executive functioning challenges, financial realities, responsibilities, and lives shaped by systems. Self-love does not magically erase any of that. Ultimately, this first part is about a spirituality and healing practice spacious enough to hold both the mysterious and the mundane: miracles, grief, prayer, divine connection, grocery shopping, work, money, difficult relationships, and everything else that makes up an actual human life. This episode is for anyone who has spent years doing healing, spiritual, or personal growth work and is interested in what remains when some of the idealism falls away — and in building a relationship with spirituality that can hold grief, beauty, mystery, responsibility, imperfection, and everyday life all at once. Thanks for tuning in! CONNECT: Website: elizabethdialto.com Instagram: @elizabethdialto
