Spiritual Intelligence: The Key to Transformation Beyond Mindset

There comes a point in every growth journey where insight stops feeling like it’s enough. You’ve done all the journaling, you’ve reframed your thoughts, processed your emotions and maybe you even had moments that felt like breakthroughs. So why do you feel as if there is something missing still? You still feel incomplete.

It’s at this point that spiritual intelligence work needs to begin that will take you even deeper. Spiritual intelligence (SQ) is not about shifting your mindset. SQ is about something older, deeper, more profound that just thought. It’s quieter and more powerful than more effort.

When Thought Has Taken You as Far as It Can

There is certainly value in understanding yourself through coaching, therapy or personal reflection and all of this helps to shine a light on how your inner world works. But self-awareness isn’t the same as transformation. Knowing your patterns is one thing, but living from a place beyond them and taking action on deep insights is something else entirely.

At some point the energy shifts and so does the question. You begin to ask, ‘Who am I and what can I really achieve and be in my life?’ It doesn’t arise from thought, it comes from a deep wellspring of stillness, from that part of you that was always there just quietly watching.

What Is Open Awareness?

Open awareness is the space that holds everything.

It’s the feeling you get when you stop trying to fix, name, explain, or improve, and simply allow what’s there to exist. You’re not zoning out or trying to rise above anything, it’s just about arriving fully in the present moment, and seeing it for exactly what it is.

That might sound easy, but because of our conditioning, it certainly isn’t. It takes effort and dedicated focus. But when we can get into that space, something shifts. You start to notice just how much energy you were putting into managing, tracking and organising your internal world with no meaningful results, and you start to soften into something much steadier and real. The you beyond all the thought.

Having an open awareness won’t give you the answers to your problems and then pining you inside a box defined by the thought, it will reconnect you to the part of you that already knows the solution in an expansive and open way.

That’s the territory of spiritual intelligence.

The Four Intelligences, and Why One Changes Everything

Inside The Abundant Self, we acknowledge four forms of intelligence that shape how we relate to the world and ourselves:

1. Intellectual Intelligence (IQ)

The ability to think clearly, reason logically, and make sense of complex ideas.

2. Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

The capacity to feel deeply, understand your emotional landscape, and relate with honesty.

3. Physical Intelligence (PQ)

The awareness that lives in the body, your breath, your movement, your ability to feel what’s true on a cellular level.

4. Spiritual Intelligence (SQ)

This is the quiet, grounded knowing that doesn’t come from thought. It’s the part of you that’s always been there, never been wrong, and never needed to prove anything. It doesn’t calculate or reason or analyse, it recognises the truth beyond conscious thought. It doesn’t argue, it simply sees reality.

While all four intelligences have a role to play, spiritual intelligence brings the others into alignment. It doesn’t override them. It harmonises them.

What Changes in a State of Open Awareness

When you stop trying to solve everything, you begin to feel and tap into what’s always been beneath the solving mind. Mind and awareness are not the same thing.

Stillness. Spaciousness.  There’s a kind of calmness that isn’t performative and doesn’t relate to the ‘doing’ mode of the conscious mind. It’s simply there in knowing stillness.

From that place, effort gives way to clarity. You begin to respond instead of reacting and you act from alignment instead of urgency and the need to get into action.

This is the intelligence that allows you to move through life without gripping it. Imagine holding your life in an open palm instead of a clenched fist. SQ is the open palm, always allowing the possibility that something new and better can come along as life and circumstances change. This isn’t passive though. It’s very participatory but not from the place of pressure or clinging or determination. It just arises from being present.

The Role of Spiritual Intelligence in The Abundant Self

We begin with nervous system regulation because your body must feel safe enough to access subtlety. And the first steps in this process are to explore your subconscious programming. It’s the beliefs held here that block and cloud your awareness.

Once the noise quietens down, then we can focus on allowing SQ to arise and move forward into conscious awareness. This isn’t a tool, it’s the real you surfacing and confronting the world and who you really are in a powerful and deeply engaged way. So, we’re not manufacturing anything here, we’re not bolting on another mindset tool, we’re simply remembering our own true nature, our potential and what we’ve been doing and believing that have been holding us back.

This Isn’t About Creating a New You. It’s About Coming Home to Who You Have Always Been.

There is a version of you that already knows how to be in the world without all that striving and agonising. That version of you, the real you, isn’t someone you need to ‘discover’ or reach out for. All that needs to happen is that you create the right conditions for that version of you to arise. When you have that ability, you can stop searching and just be yourself. The striving ends, there will be profound recognition and your orientation to life will fundamentally change.

The Invitation

If you feel like the mindset work is no longer enough, you’re probably right. It never has been. Mindset work only takes you so far. But it was never just about your mind. It was the deep conditioning underneath or beyond the mind that framed your erroneous mindset in the first place. And unless that aspect of you is addressed, the triggers for the old mindset stay in place, threatening your new worldview and ways of doing things for ever.

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You don’t have to master your thoughts. You just need to connect with the part of you that has always dictated your thoughts and then start to move beyond them.

All the best,

Steve