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Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, Showing Up: Four Kinds of Growth That Do Not Move Together

Why awakening, maturity, shadow work and everyday embodiment can each grow without the others — and how to notice which one you have left behind

What do waking up, growing up, cleaning up and showing up mean?

In Ken Wilber’s later writing, waking up means contemplative awakening (states of awareness, as trained in meditation), growing up means moving through stages of psychological development, cleaning up means working with the disowned feelings and impulses he calls shadow, and showing up means bringing all of it into your body, relationships, work and community. His central claim is that these can develop separately, so a person can be deeply awake and still immature, or mature and still run by old wounds. It is a heuristic synthesis rather than a tested model, though a small 1980 study found that meditators their teachers judged enlightened still showed ordinary psychological conflicts.

Ken Wilber spent decades trying to relate the stages that meditative traditions describe to the stages that Western developmental psychology measures. In Integral Spirituality (2006) he concluded that they are different things: a person at almost any stage of development can have a profound meditative or peak experience, and will interpret it through the stage they are at; and meditation, whatever else it does, does not reliably reach the parts of ourselves we have disowned. In later books he gave these separate strands plain names. Integral Meditation (2016) is subtitled "Mindfulness as a Way to Grow Up, Wake Up, and Show Up in Your Life"; The Religion of Tomorrow (2017) argues that a complete spirituality needs waking up, growing up, cleaning up and showing up; Finding Radical Wholeness (2024) adds a fifth, opening up. The phrasing has a shared history: the integral teacher Dustin DiPerna wrote in 2014 that he had introduced "wake up, grow up, clean up, show up" into the integral vocabulary a few years earlier. The useful core is the claim that these are separate kinds of growth that do not automatically pull each other along. The practices below are about the balance between them — noticing which one you have been investing in and which you have quietly left behind. The techniques of shadow work and of meditation themselves live on their own pages.

Prácticas

Cómo se conectan estas prácticas

Every practice on this page rests on one claim: waking up, growing up, cleaning up and showing up are partly separate kinds of growth, so progress in one does not automatically carry the others with it. Because each strand has its own blind spot, the work is less about any single technique and more about seeing where your effort has pooled, which strand has been left behind, and whether what you have realized actually reaches the people and places in your life — using honest comparison, outside eyes, and one concrete step in the neglected direction.

Can someone be spiritually awakened and still be psychologically immature?

Wilber argues they can, and that this is the main reason to keep waking up and growing up apart. In Integral Spirituality he proposes that meditative and peak states are available at almost any stage of development and are interpreted through the stage a person is at, so a profound state experience says little about maturity. The clearest data point is older and small: Brown and Engler’s 1980 Rorschach study of practitioners their teachers judged enlightened found them less defensive about their conflicts but not free of them, and the authors suggested psychological maturity and enlightenment may be complementary but not entirely unrelated lines of growth. A practical response is to compare what you touch in practice with how you actually treat people, and to ask those who live with you.

What is the difference between waking up and growing up in Ken Wilber’s work?

Waking up refers to contemplative awakening: training attention through states of awareness, as meditative traditions describe. Growing up refers to moving through stages of psychological development, the subject of a century of Western developmental research. Wilber’s argument, set out in Integral Spirituality (2006) and named in this form in Integral Meditation (2016) and The Religion of Tomorrow (2017), is that the two are different axes: someone can be far along one and not the other. That cuts both ways — a meditator can remain immature, and a mature, capable person may never have trained attention on awareness itself. It is a theoretical distinction, not a measured one.

Why do long-time meditators and spiritual teachers still have so many emotional blind spots?

Several observers from different angles have reached a similar answer. Wilber argues that meditating on a disowned feeling refines awareness of it without the person re-owning it, so the pattern survives. John Welwood named the tendency to use practice to avoid unfinished personal business "spiritual bypassing" in 1984, and Jack Engler wrote the same year that some students and even teachers seem to be trying to skip the work of building a stable self — "you have to be somebody before you can be nobody." These are practitioners’ observations rather than measured rates, but they suggest treating advancement as no guarantee against old patterns, in others and in yourself.

What does showing up mean in the wake up, grow up, clean up, show up framework?

Showing up is the least worked-out of the four in Wilber’s writing. Publishers Weekly summarized it in The Religion of Tomorrow as attending to integrating; his 2024 book ties it to the Four Quadrants, the inner, shared, behavioural and systemic sides of life; and in a 2021 interview he described it as serving humanity in the world. In practice it means checking whether what you have realized or matured into is visible in your body and habits, your close relationships, your work and your community, rather than only in your inner experience. A useful test is to ask someone who sees you in each arena whether they notice any difference.

How do I figure out which kind of growth I have been neglecting?

Start with where your effort has gone rather than how developed you think you are. List what you have actually done in the last few years under four headings — contemplative practice, maturing in how you make sense of things, working with patterns you would rather not own, and how it shows in your body, relationships, work and community — and give each a rough share. The smallest share is a candidate. Because the neglected strand is the hardest to see from inside, check it against people who see you in different settings, then commit to one small, specific step in it for a month rather than a broad resolution.

¿Cómo elegir entre ellas?

If you are not sure where you stand, start with the four-way audit, and check it against people who see you in other settings. If your practice is deep but home life has not changed, look at the gap between cushion and kitchen. If someone you admired has disappointed you, use that to look at shadow in advanced people, beginning with yourself. If letting go of the self appeals partly because building one feels hard, check the order — somebody before nobody. If you are mature and capable but have never sat with awareness itself, add the waking-up strand. Once you know the neglected strand, take one concrete step in it, and test whatever you have grown into in the four arenas where it has to show up.

Lo que estos enfoques no resuelven

Waking up, growing up, cleaning up and showing up is a heuristic synthesis, not an empirically validated model; no study has measured the four strands together or tested how independent they are. The firmest data point, Brown and Engler’s 1980 study, used very small groups, no control groups and Rorschach tests, and its authors themselves suggested the strands may be related rather than independent. Much of the framing comes from Wilber’s own books and from teachers and reviewers close to the integral movement, and the phrasing itself has a contested history: Dustin DiPerna wrote in 2014 that he introduced it into the integral vocabulary. The ingredients are also older than the labels — the state–stage distinction, psychotherapy’s work with disowned material, and Engler’s and Welwood’s 1984 warnings about meditators skipping personal development — so the framework’s contribution is the naming and the insistence on balance, not new findings. None of the practices here has been tested as an intervention.

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Preguntas frecuentes

What do waking up, growing up, cleaning up and showing up mean?

In Ken Wilber’s later writing, waking up means contemplative awakening (states of awareness, as trained in meditation), growing up means moving through stages of psychological development, cleaning up means working with the disowned feelings and impulses he calls shadow, and showing up means bringing all of it into your body, relationships, work and community. His central claim is that these can develop separately, so a person can be deeply awake and still immature, or mature and still run by old wounds. It is a heuristic synthesis rather than a tested model, though a small 1980 study found that meditators their teachers judged enlightened still showed ordinary psychological conflicts.

¿Cómo funciona «Audit where your growth has actually gone»?

The framework’s central claim is that the four strands do not pull each other along, so effort tends to pool in whichever one comes naturally or is rewarded around you — meditation for one person, therapy or ideas or career for another. An audit makes the pooling visible. Because each strand has its own blind spot, the neglected one is usually the one you have the least vocabulary for, which is why naming all four side by side helps.

¿Cómo funciona «Notice the gap between the cushion and the kitchen»?

Wilber argues that meditative states are available at almost any stage of development and are interpreted through whatever stage a person is at, so depth of contemplative experience says little by itself about maturity in relationships. He also argues that sitting with a disowned feeling as "anger arising" can refine awareness of it without the person ever owning it as their anger. Putting your best moments of practice side by side with your hardest moments with people shows which of those two gaps you are actually in.

¿Cómo funciona «Expect shadow in "advanced" people, starting with yourself»?

If waking up does not clean up, then people far along a contemplative path can still carry unexamined patterns, and their standing can make those patterns harder for them and others to see. Expecting this protects against two opposite errors after a disappointment: deciding the whole path was a fraud, or explaining the behaviour away as higher wisdom. The more useful move is to ask what the disappointment shows you about your own blind spots.

¿Cómo funciona «Be somebody before you try to be nobody»?

Engler argued that a stable, continuous sense of self and the insight that the self is not solid are both necessary, and in that order: "you have to be somebody before you can be nobody." Teachings about letting go of the self can appeal most to the person who has not yet found out what they want or who they are, because dissolving can feel easier than building. Checking the order keeps waking up from being used to skip growing up.

¿Cómo funciona «Add waking up when you have only grown up»?

The independence claim cuts both ways. Wilber describes intelligent, successful, mature people who have never touched contemplative awakening, and argues that the states meditation trains are variations on waking, dreaming and deep sleep, which everyone already passes through each day. If so, waking up does not wait for a later stage of development; it can be practised from wherever you are, and maturity in other strands does not supply it.

¿Cómo funciona «Pick the neglected strand and take one concrete step»?

People drift back to the strand they are already good at because it is rewarding and familiar. Integral Life Practice’s answer is structural: practice is organized into separate modules — body, mind, spirit and shadow — so one is not quietly substituted for another. A single, specific, time-bound step in the neglected strand is small enough to survive the pull back toward the comfortable one.

¿Cómo funciona «Test your growth where it has to show up»?

Showing up, in Wilber’s later framing, is about integration — growth expressed across the four quadrants of inner experience, shared relationships, the body and behaviour, and the systems you live in. Growth that lives only in inner experience or in ideas can feel complete from the inside. Deliberately checking each outer arena gives it something to be tested against.

¿Cómo funciona «Borrow other people’s eyes on your four strands»?

Each strand has its own blind spot, and judgments about how developed or awake someone is are highly evaluative — the kind of judgment where personality research suggests friends can be more accurate than the person themselves. Wilber writes that the shadow material of advanced meditators is something that "absolutely everybody can see" except them. Asking several people who know you in different settings corrects for the angle any single view has.

Can someone be spiritually awakened and still be psychologically immature?

Wilber argues they can, and that this is the main reason to keep waking up and growing up apart. In Integral Spirituality he proposes that meditative and peak states are available at almost any stage of development and are interpreted through the stage a person is at, so a profound state experience says little about maturity. The clearest data point is older and small: Brown and Engler’s 1980 Rorschach study of practitioners their teachers judged enlightened found them less defensive about their conflicts but not free of them, and the authors suggested psychological maturity and enlightenment may be complementary but not entirely unrelated lines of growth. A practical response is to compare what you touch in practice with how you actually treat people, and to ask those who live with you.

What is the difference between waking up and growing up in Ken Wilber’s work?

Waking up refers to contemplative awakening: training attention through states of awareness, as meditative traditions describe. Growing up refers to moving through stages of psychological development, the subject of a century of Western developmental research. Wilber’s argument, set out in Integral Spirituality (2006) and named in this form in Integral Meditation (2016) and The Religion of Tomorrow (2017), is that the two are different axes: someone can be far along one and not the other. That cuts both ways — a meditator can remain immature, and a mature, capable person may never have trained attention on awareness itself. It is a theoretical distinction, not a measured one.

Why do long-time meditators and spiritual teachers still have so many emotional blind spots?

Several observers from different angles have reached a similar answer. Wilber argues that meditating on a disowned feeling refines awareness of it without the person re-owning it, so the pattern survives. John Welwood named the tendency to use practice to avoid unfinished personal business "spiritual bypassing" in 1984, and Jack Engler wrote the same year that some students and even teachers seem to be trying to skip the work of building a stable self — "you have to be somebody before you can be nobody." These are practitioners’ observations rather than measured rates, but they suggest treating advancement as no guarantee against old patterns, in others and in yourself.

What does showing up mean in the wake up, grow up, clean up, show up framework?

Showing up is the least worked-out of the four in Wilber’s writing. Publishers Weekly summarized it in The Religion of Tomorrow as attending to integrating; his 2024 book ties it to the Four Quadrants, the inner, shared, behavioural and systemic sides of life; and in a 2021 interview he described it as serving humanity in the world. In practice it means checking whether what you have realized or matured into is visible in your body and habits, your close relationships, your work and your community, rather than only in your inner experience. A useful test is to ask someone who sees you in each arena whether they notice any difference.

How do I figure out which kind of growth I have been neglecting?

Start with where your effort has gone rather than how developed you think you are. List what you have actually done in the last few years under four headings — contemplative practice, maturing in how you make sense of things, working with patterns you would rather not own, and how it shows in your body, relationships, work and community — and give each a rough share. The smallest share is a candidate. Because the neglected strand is the hardest to see from inside, check it against people who see you in different settings, then commit to one small, specific step in it for a month rather than a broad resolution.

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