In my 1:1 work this week, I had a couple of people present with similar experiences regarding clearing, healing and generally living aligned in every moment. The experience we were discussing goes roughly like this;
1. You decide you’d like to explore the world of personal development and stumble across something which works
There are billions of ways in which this might occur; a friend mentions a therapist or a coach or perhaps you find yourself turning up at a meditation, yoga class or personal development course. What shows up is not so important. The fact that it shows up says you’re ready. You’re ready to start exploring what lies beneath the surface of your day to day existence.
Once you’re ready, you can assume that whatever shows up is the exact thing you need at that moment to help clear out old patterns, ideas or beliefs that are holding you back or causing upset, frustration, disappointment or disease in your life.
2. You start to feel better
Turning up and applying the teaching to your life inevitably means that you start to drop old ideas about who you are and what you can achieve. You let go of old hurts. You gain in wisdom and self awareness. You realise that life doesn’t have to be hard and you become used to a new way of living which is easy and effortless.
3. Old issues arise with a vengeance
After some time in this new place of ease and relative bliss, your new found experience of equanimity is challenged. You see old patterns and old ideas arise in ways that seem much more potent than before. They seem this way because unlike before, you are now more aware of your thoughts and emotions. And so, the ugly and mean spirited thoughts, the judgments, the criticisms, as well as the hidden shame, guilt and neediness, all start showing their faces.
At this stage it’s common to think you’re going backwards. It’s common to assume that the work has only temporarily benefitted you and that you’ve slipped back into an old way of living. A way of living which you had already decided was either painful, unpleasant or unsatisfactory in some way.
4. You have a choice
This is a critical stage in personal and spiritual development and we each make different choices as to how we address it.
Some give up. They become like the man in The Matrix, who was freed from its slavery, only to decide he prefers ignorance to truth and freedom and so does a deal with Agent Smith to be put back into the system. He knows it’s not real and that in the matrix he will be a slave to the machines, but he doesn’t care.
This is the choice some make, either temporarily or permanently. They slip into old patterns and ways of being – over-eating, over-drinking, over-working – to ensure that further introspection won’t bring them face to face with buried issues.
Some try other techniques. This can be a means of hiding out or it can be a further step towards truth and freedom.
Different tools and techniques are more or less effective in addressing different issues and occasionally the time arises when we need a different set of tools to dig more deeply. This can be a very healthy and freeing step. Alternatively, we can use the ‘shopping around for other tools and techniques approach’ as a means of hovering at the surface, of digging around the same issues at a superficial level rather than allowing ourselves to dig more deeply and face that which is most terrifying and, when addressed, most freeing.
Others stick with what they’ve learned and keep applying the techniques and lessons over and over again, recognising that personal and spiritual development is just like any other form of learning.
Setting out to become a great dancer for example, requires years of training. We start because it brings us some joy. Over time we master certain techniques and feel that we’re making great progress. Then one day we turn up to class and we can’t remember the basics. We feel that we’ve forgotten how to dance. Our mistakes are more obvious to us and our lack of technique is embarrassing. Of course we are a much more sophisticated dancer now than when we began, but our greater knowledge of dancing presents us with an insight we didn’t have previously – just how much further we must travel to truly achieve our dream.
In this regard, working towards becoming a great dancer (or writer, teacher, artist, entrepreneur, or sportsperson for that matter) presents us with the same choices as in personal development – to decide what matters most to us and to persist irrespective of the challenges that arise.
5. You allow yourself to go deeper
In my experience, continuing to apply the personal development tools, techniques or lessons you’ve learned will eventually take you deep within yourself. I am yet to meet a person for whom this is not true and I am yet to meet a person who wasn’t transformed by the experience of turning within. I am also yet to meet a person who wasn’t eternally grateful that they chose to do so, tough though it may have been at times.
6. The cycle repeats
Finally, the cycle repeats itself and each time it does, we have more skills and more awareness with which to apply to the situation.
With each new cycle we’re able to face things we would never have been able to face previously as we slowly but surely become the living embodiment of ease, wisdom and grace.
On the way, we face years of old, unhealthy conditioning.
It is wise to assume that these things won’t be cleared in a day. And yet with time, patience and persistence, freedom is not only possible but is assured for each and every one of us.
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Photo credit: Todd Baker
A wonderfully useful summary. Thank you. I’m passing it on to some friends.
So pleased that it’s useful! I wrote it because I know I would have benefitted from being told this in the first few years of my own internal investigations. It might have saved me a great deal of angst!
so true. we have a choice. always a choice to suffer or be positive about the experience that belie us
thanks!
noch