I’m in my eighth year of being a personal growth teacher, speaker and writer. Not only is this my job, it’s also what I read most, talk incessantly about with my husband and friends and it’s significantly informed the approach I take to raising our children. Personal growth is even what I do for fun, for heaven’s sake, sad as that may understandably seem to some. Along the way – thanks to my channelling, hours spent with clients and personal experience (read: mistakes!) – I’ve begun to distill what the essence of this journey is for me and to distinguish it from the huge industry of self-improvement available to us in bookshops, workshop venues and therapy rooms these days. Here are a few things I want to set straight. I hope they help you interrogate the jargon, own the journey and have more fun.
• Personal growth is a process of emergence, not improvement. It is not about miraculous manifestation or turning you into what you aren’t but letting go of the layers of defense you have inevitably put up between you and reality, including between you and yourself
• Your role in this journey and in this universe is creator – not puppet, not seeker, not student. You are giving meaning to life, not finding it
• The goal of personal – or spiritual – growth is wholeness, not goodness. We go on a journey of self-discovery in order to be more real, not to try and be perfect (whatever that is)
• As such, being on a spiritual journey should result in being more vulnerable, honest and able to face painful truths – not more superior, withdrawn and sure of our rightness. It should allow us to sit fully awake inside our lives and relationships rather than encourage us to float above them
• There are as many ways to experience and express our full selves as there are people. My preferred way to navigate is through joy and being in close contact with divinity, but there can be equal value in choosing religion, suffering or nature as your path. Do yourself and others a favour by not expecting them to grow in exactly the same way as you have
• Personal growth is not about making an impressive or successful life, much as that is how it often gets sold. There will always be parts of your life that contrast your preferences and no amount of affirmation or enlightenment is going to change that because contrast is the currency of creation. The masterpiece you are creating is you, not your life
• Transcendent experiences, yummy as they are, are not enough for true change. Without facing yourself and your past squarely, owning and feeling all of your experience and pain, no amount of meditation, peak spiritual experience or positive thinking for that matter is going to truly move you forward in an authentic way
• That said, personal growth is not a linear, structured process of ticking off certain boxes and then arriving at the finish line. Much as we westerners like to be goal-oriented about everything, including our spirituality, the evolution process has its own rhythm, its own grace and its own timing which must also be noticed and honoured
• The most graceful way to grow (whether at any moment that means it’s time to forgive or take new action or strengthen your intuition) is to clearly and regularly demonstrate permission for this – in whichever way you can with whatever is available to you – and then listen to life’s response
• There is a time and place for teachers (whether those are therapists, facilitators, friends or writers) and there is also a time and place for the conversation to purely be between you and yourself, or your divinity, with no third parties involved
• Judge workshops, therapies, books and teachers by the effect they actually have on you not by who or what they happen to be: is this empowering, energising, loving? Do I feel inspired, real, truthful, respected here?
• Most importantly, does the teacher / writer / facilitator consider me an equal and consider that I actually know my own way better than he or she does?
• Nothing specific is needed, required or obligatory on a personal growth path, and there is no urgency or rush. Think twice before trusting teachers who tell you so
• Likewise, there is nothing on earth that you are obliged to do in order to have lived a full, conscious, joyful, purposeful life. Your purpose lies in who you become, not the job you do, successes you attain or good deeds you undertake
• Every athlete knows there is as much value in resting muscles you wish to strengthen as there is in using them. Personal growth is the same. If you’re in a cycle of workshops, therapy or self-help literature or feeling what I call ‘improvement fatigue’, take a break. Focus on walking or poetry as a tool for joy, or painting your toenails for that matter. Nothing is spiritual and nothing is unspiritual unless you make it so (see second bullet!)
• Have fun with your spirituality! Play with it rather than labour at it. Be light about your faults, your issues, even your purpose. You cannot create light in the world by being heavy, no matter how noble or spiritual that may appear
• Does personal growth ever end? I don’t know. Many of us have experienced being at the point where there is no more drama, where we take absolute responsibility for how we feel and respond and where the undercurrent of everyday life really is joy. But is that the end of challenge, risk, stretch? Oh no! It may well be the beginning.
Tags: enlightenment, improvement fatigue, Joy, Personal growth, spiritual growth, transcendence
