The Wonder of the Heart
What does it take for spiritual practice to be truly sustainable, nourishing your soul while meeting the realities of daily life? In this heartfelt dialogue, Diamond Approach founder A. H. Almaas and Thomas Hübl, founder of the Academy of Inner Science, explore the conditions that allow integrated spirituality to flourish. They reflect on the importance of time, space, and inner presence in cultivating a path that is both transformative and grounded. Recorded at Science and Nonduality in January 2022, this conversation invites you to reimagine your relationship with practice, healing, and awakening.
Cultivating Integrated Spirituality
With grace and grounded wisdom, Almaas and Hübl speak to the need for spiritual practice rooted in the rhythms of daily life, nourishing, embodied, and sustainable. True spiritual development, they emphasize, cannot be rushed or compartmentalized. It unfolds in time, through maturation, consistent presence, and ongoing inquiry.
At the heart of their conversation lies a shared understanding: the importance of the heart in awakening. Love, as Almaas reminds us, is not merely an emotion but the radiant expression of our true nature. It appears as kindness, appreciation, and generosity — capacities that reflect the living presence of Being. Hübl notes that trauma can disrupt the connection between the mind, body, and heart, creating an inner division that makes it difficult to be fully present. Spiritual practice, then, becomes a way of onboarding the past into the now, allowing us to re-enter our wholeness.
As the dialogue unfolds, both teachers point to the heart as a source of profound intelligence. It’s the heart, not just the intellect, that recognizes truth. It serves as a compass, informing perception, guiding insight, and even helping scientists know when their thinking is aligned with deeper reality. The awakened heart also brings forth the capacity to respond appropriately to others, offering empathy and presence rather than reactivity. In this way, spiritual development is not a peak experience but a gradual evolution — a maturation of our humanity through love, connection, and embodied realization.
They also touch on the universal and personal expressions of love. While the universal heart pervades the cosmos, personal love appears uniquely in each human being as warmth, goodness, or delight in others. This capacity for love deepens our relationships, not only with people but with nature, reality, and our own inner depths. As Hübl observes, the highest intimacy is not just emotional closeness, but the fusion of hearts, a felt unity where both joy and sorrow are shared.
Both speakers agree that this level of presence is not always easy to maintain, especially in a world where fragmentation and trauma are so widespread. This is why spiritual community is so vital. An environment of care and mutual support helps the heart flourish. It holds space for the healing of old wounds and supports the integration of subtle insights into everyday life. Through this, we begin to reclaim the innate wonder of the heart, a wonder that sees the sacred in all things and listens for what life is whispering just beneath the surface.
This conversation is an invitation to take the spiritual path not as an escape from life, but as a deep embrace of it, guided by the intelligence of the heart and grounded in the mystery of love.