Insights · Spiritual psychology
Spiritual psychology for leaders: when the soul enters your work
You have built a good career or a successful company, and yet something no longer fits. What used to fulfill you, leaves you empty. Many leaders and entrepreneurs go through a spiritual awakening, often without calling it that. Spiritual psychology helps you understand what is happening, and how to bring it into your work instead of running away from it.
By Dirk Jan Versluis, registered psychologist (NIP). Updated 15 November 2026.
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Leaders often have an unusually developed consciousness
Leaders are often people with an above-average developed consciousness. They are not CEO or managing director only because they worked hard, are smart and had a good career. Often they stood out somewhere as people with a leading consciousness.
It is precisely in this group that we meet a lot of spiritual awakening. By that we mean that people are on the path of the soul: they are going through a personal development that reaches beyond the personal.
What is spiritual psychology?
In his book De zeven pijlers van krachtige innerlijke ontwikkeling (The seven pillars of powerful inner development, in Dutch), Dirk Jan Versluis distinguishes three stages of personal development: prepersonal, personal and transpersonal. The distinction goes back to Ken Wilber’s integral psychology. Many related thinkers, often found in the broad spiritual movement, describe a similar progression of personal or soul development, in which people pass through different gates or thresholds. Several traditions call these initiations.
An initiation is an opening of consciousness to new dimensions and new proportions. A first opening is often described as the moment someone realizes that they are consciousness. A later one is coming to know unconditional love. After that, consciousness opens more and more to a planetary and even cosmic perspective.
Many spiritual approaches distinguish between a lower and a higher self. The lower self, often called the personality or the ego, includes the mental, emotional and physical body. The higher self, the soul or the spiritual human being, refers to a more powerful inner perspective, with a higher vibration: higher thinking, higher feeling. Some traditions go further still and speak of the divine self.
Different authors point to comparable realities, each in their own idiom. Words like ego or personality mean different things in different schools. Ken Wilber showed how many spiritually coloured models of development overlap, and differ mainly in the language they give to universal processes of consciousness.
How it differs from academic psychology
Once we are talking about these stages, we are fully in the territory of spiritual psychology. It can hardly be compared with academic psychology, which deals with mental processes, behavioral change or cognitive therapy, and is mainly focused on the mind. Spiritual psychology takes the transpersonal seriously: the development of the soul, and how it shows up in a person’s life.
Signs that a leader is on an inner path
In general, life takes on a different orientation. Often:
- the old, what came before, no longer satisfies
- there is a search of the soul, and a search for the soul
- energetic sensitivity increases, and people may temporarily recognize themselves in high sensitivity
- there is a mismatch with the environment: you feel deeply misunderstood
- people around you get triggered by you, in ways that are hard to explain
- you feel alone in your family; outwardly the contact is fine, inwardly it feels foreign
- relationships go through a crisis, or new soul connections enter your life
These are examples of what happens when the soul enters someone’s life. None of it means something is wrong with you. It is a phase that asks for understanding and integration.
What it looks like for a director or founder
Often there is a search for how to see your company, your organization or your career spiritually as well. In the beginning, a career is usually built on the ego or the personality. You are, say, a lawyer or an accountant, and things are going well. Then you notice a soul motive coming into your life, and suddenly what came before leaves you unfulfilled. It is not it anymore.
People may then think they need to do something completely different: open a retreat center, only meditate, turn their life upside down. That is never forbidden. But people often underestimate that they can, and perhaps must, take their newly found soul influences into the reality they already live in. Every profession can be shaped in a spiritual way.
Dirk Jan describes it from his own experience: “I am a psychologist. I could work perfectly well with psychological complaints, in psychiatry or in a practice of my own. But my own soul development means I have to follow my soul impulses, and stay true to what they tell me. I can no longer do everything. Skills-wise I could, but my heart and my soul call me in other directions.” We see this all the time in entrepreneurs who come onto the path of the soul.
So we would usually not make the all-too-easy choice of changing course completely. We would integrate the soul’s influence into the existing life, rather than abruptly stopping a business or a profession.
Where it goes wrong: you change, your company does not
The match with an organization can become a problem when you change and the organization as a whole knows few soul impulses yet. Or you are spiritually oriented yourself, and your two or three co-founders are much less so. That can create large differences in orientation. In practice, this is where things go wrong most often.
A field of tension arises: an inequality in consciousness, and in power. People get triggered by you, and collaboration becomes harder. Read more about co-founder conflict and about being lonely at the top.
What changes in your leadership
When a leader learns to integrate the higher self, several things change:
- Forcing becomes impossible. In Power vs. Force, David Hawkins described the difference between true power and pushing. Instead of forcing, you look at what wants to happen here, and what is trying to come into being, from the deep knowing that everything happens for a reason.
- Inner perception gets a place. Sensory sensitivity and inner perception grow stronger, including what some traditions call clairvoyant or clairsentient perception. It gets a place in strategy and decisions, alongside the figures.
- People are approached from the soul’s virtues. Light, love and strength: a loving contact, with an eye for the soul of each employee.
- Purpose becomes evolutionary. Everything you do with your company serves a larger aim: what is good for the soul of your clients and your people, and for the earth and the whole of creation.
Purpose from the soul, or purpose as a marketing term
Purpose-driven leadership has become a popular term. The difference with purpose that truly comes from the soul is subtle but important. Many spiritually pure concepts are given an emotional interpretation in the internet-driven spiritual market. Esoteric psychology calls this the astral or emotional level.
Put simply: things that belong to the higher self are approached in a way that comes from the lower self. Purpose then becomes a feeling or a slogan, instead of a direction you serve.
Why this matters now: what AI cannot replace
Spiritual psychology often carries the idea that we live in a time of strong energetic intensification, and are moving towards a reality that is far more oriented to the soul. Artificial intelligence may play a large role in this, because it inevitably brings us back to the question of what it means to be human.
All the lower functions, the lower self, can be replaced by AI. The higher self, by definition, cannot: it is rooted in a divine reality, in an original given. In that sense AI is a shadow intelligence. For leaders this is not an abstract question. As more of the functional work is automated, what remains distinctively human in leadership is exactly this: consciousness, presence, purpose and the soul.
Embodied, not escapist
Spiritual seekers send a strong search signal into the universe, and along the way they meet many schools, teachings, coaches and guides. There is something good in all of it: transcendent meditation, energetic healing, special rituals, plant-medicine ceremonies. Everything has its place.
But it is essential that spirituality is embodied. Not an escape from the body, but spiritual and soulful influences that can be fully experienced in the body. And the experiences that open our spiritual eye further need a place in our everyday conscious life. The soul’s path is a journey, and you want to be able to see which experiences you are having on it, and what they ask of you, in your life and in your work.
At Triunify
Businesslike, and grounded
Our work stays businesslike because we keep in touch with the company. The business provides all the concrete questions and entry points: the decision that has to be made, the co-founder you no longer understand, the strategy that no longer feels right.
And it stays grounded because we always work in an embodied way. That also means your body can hold a lot of powerful energy, and we train you in that. With the ECA Leadership Framework we also look at the company itself as a living whole.
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Frequently asked questions
What is spiritual psychology?
The psychology of development beyond the personal. Where academic psychology focuses mainly on the mind and behavior, spiritual psychology takes the soul seriously: the higher self, and how it shows up in someone’s life and work.
How is spiritual psychology different from transpersonal psychology?
They overlap strongly. Transpersonal psychology is the academic field that studies experiences beyond the personal. Spiritual psychology, as we use it, is broader and more practical: it also draws on contemplative and esoteric traditions, and focuses on the path of the soul in daily life.
Should I quit my job or company when I awaken spiritually?
Usually not. It is often wiser to bring your soul’s influence into the life and work you already have. Every profession can be shaped in a spiritual way.
Why do spiritually awakened leaders clash with their co-founders?
Because a difference in orientation creates an inequality in consciousness and power. People get triggered, and collaboration becomes harder. That difference needs to be seen and worked with.
How do you keep spirituality grounded in business?
By staying close to the concrete questions of the company, and by working in an embodied way. Spirituality that cannot be lived in the body and in your work is an escape, not integration.
Read also
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