True Personal Growth

From the time you are born to the time you die all you ever really “get” out of this life is your experience of it – which ultimately is how it feels and the meaning you give to it. Whatever you own, wherever you go, whatever you do, any relationships you have, are all life experiences – no more and no less. We can spend our entire lives in the constant effort of trying to manage that experience, never seeing the bigger picture, never even glimpsing the reality of our situation.

For some, when their life experience isn’t how they wish it to be, they look for a solution to this problem in some form of personal or spiritual growth. People normally don’t look for ways to change their lives when they are feeling good. Most want change when they don’t like how life feels and so they are trying to move away from feeling one way, towards feeling another way. They are attempting to move towards an experience of life, which is believed to be in some way better than the present one. This is present moment awareness.

The most frequently taken path is towards what is mislabeled as growth, but is really just wanting to feel better. People march into therapy, flock to the self-help section of bookstores and attend all manner of workshops and seminars looking for a way to change something about their self, someone else or some situation, so that life feels "right" again. And, in the grand scheme of things there is absolutely nothing wrong this. I’ve been there, and so has most everyone who’s made an effort towards changing his or her life at some time or another. Pretty much everyone hits a point where they just need to be soothed. There are times when feeling better is exactly what is needed. But this isn’t growth and at best can only delay whatever feelings it is that are being avoided.

There is another path, however, which is the push to see what is true and real about your self and your life. This usually comes after some kind of significant event that has really knocked a person off of their feet, so to speak. It serves as a wake up call to how their old ways of being in the world weren’t working and never could have. A recovering addict would call this “hitting rock bottom.” This is the point where a person starts to really question how they perceive themselves and their world and how they feel and behave as a result of it. It is the place when a person begins to question their own sense of reality and takes full responsibility for their life. It is the starting point of the path of true growth.

Beginning at a young age, around six or seven years old, I can remember having insights and understandings into the nature of life that scared and confused me. They just didn’t fit into the life story that everyone around me was living. As a teen and young adult I never felt like I fit in because it was so difficult to pretend to go along with the drama that my friends and family were so swept up by. I felt confused, out of place and desperately alone pretty much all of the time. These feelings pushed me right up against suicide when I was sixteen. I can still remember sitting there on my mothers’ bed with her boyfriends’ polished semi-automatic 9mm pistol pressed against my temple. To this very day I can recall the smell of the old burnt gunpowder coming off of it. I was sobbing because as desperately as I wanted how I was feeling to stop, my desire to live was stronger. My curiosity about what would happen next was too compelling. I was overwhelmed with the sudden understanding that there was a much bigger picture than the one my feelings were painting for me. Without even thinking the words, I knew in that moment that there was more to this life than the ebb and flow of emotion and the meaning it created. Hitting rock bottom, from where there was no place to escape, sent me on a journey of exploration and growth that has radically changed my experience of life forever. Enlightenment is freedom.

My normal experience of life is as a wonderful gift that I’m incredibly grateful for. My everyday state of mind is normally calm, centered and peaceful. But it isn’t always that way. It hasn’t been all sunshine and roses. I’ve had to struggle miserably at times to pull through feelings and states of mind that, had I not been intentionally facing them in order to grow, would have had me running away and screaming like a lunatic. True growth is all about pushing our own boundaries, and that is rarely, if ever, easy or comfortable. Like a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon, it is hard work to fly free. Freedom is enlightenment.

Ascending to the surface of what’s real
I’ve pushed again and again to the bleeding edge of my self. I feel the hardened perimeter of my conditioned mind and stand there trembling, for at this edge I am blinded. I do not know what lies beyond this line. I feel the magnetic pull of my habits; drawing me back to familiar ways of being, back to what I know. Pushing across this boundary is painful, as it invokes a sense of angst, a stressful fear that punishes my body and distorts my thoughts. My instincts scream for me to return to what is known, to hide in the familiar. But I cannot, as this is not my way. I will surrender to the pain and fear. I will surrender and find truth. I am ascending through the illusions to the surface of what is real.
This is True Personal Growth
-Shannon Scott Duncan

Lets take a closer look at the desire to just feel better and how it compares to truly growing. This kind of yearning is a more obvious version of what many of us do unknowingly all of the time. Living with an almost constant underlying sense of discontent or uneasiness - we seemingly have the continual need to either satiate it or to distract ourselves from it. Just think about how hard it is for most of us to just be still and quiet. We stay effectively numbed to our true feelings and are most often searching off in the future for when life will feel “right." Personal Growth and enlightenment and true personal growth.

The dilemma is that we tend to look externally for what can only be found within ourselves. We form attachments to things, people and ideas in the belief that this is what we’ve needed for life to feel better. We often make our choices based on deeply submerged feelings, these are defenses of a sort, that push and pull us towards what we are conditioned to desire. We’ll grasp on to material things. Who hasn’t fantasized about how much better they’d feel with more money or that new car, home, TV or stereo. How much more valuable will we be with those certain clothes, or shoes? Once acquired, how long does it take before something new is needed in order to feel good? Some will grasp on to love relationships to make them feel better. But what partner could live up to the unspoken responsibility for making another’s life feel worthwhile? How long till disappointment sets in and with it a renewed sense of dissatisfaction? Some grasp on to achievement, status or power. Some grasp on to rigid ideas and ideals about life. And still others grasp on to self-help, religious or spiritual growth concepts and ideas. They unknowingly hide behind them like a shield, denying the reality of their life as it is in this moment. This only serves to sooth feelings of inadequacy with no real growth having been achieved. The list of what we’ll grasp on to, and the ways in which we’ll do it, is only limited by mankind’s nearly limitless imagination.

Regardless of how it may feel at the time, nothing you can grasp can give any lasting sense of satisfaction in your life. In fact they turn toxic for us when we get our sense of identity and self worth from them. They are no longer things that we simply have, do, think about or are inspired by. Instead they have become the basis for how we value ourselves. This struggle is made infinitely more difficult because our modern culture sells this kind of grasping as the solution to our problems almost every minute of every day. The inescapable fact is that nothing outside of ourselves can complete or heal us.

Note: This isn’t to say that having possessions or money, desiring relationships or having beliefs is in any way wrong. There is no right or wrong here. We are either growing beyond our self imposed limitations and fears or we are living within them. Either way, our little blue planet will continue to spin around the sun...

Living in this way, we can spend the majority of our lives driven to maintain a certain emotional equilibrium. We all seem to have a specific range of emotions that we’ll allow ourselves to experience. Without conscious awareness of what is happening, any feelings we begin to experience from outside of that narrow range brings up such discomfort that we scramble to find any way to escape. Most will keep escalating their efforts, becoming more and more anxious, till something finally distracts them sufficiently. Others can fall into a numbed depressed state. But some will begin to finally look inside of themselves for their answers. The more questions they start asking, the better the results.

As we’ve been discussing: true, lasting growth is really only possible when you are at a point in your life where facing your fears becomes more important than avoiding those frightening and painful aspects of your self. Before that anyone will make any rationalization and take any action to not face those feelings – and this primarily occurs on an unconscious level. They’ll live in denial because the alternative instinctively feels like far more than they could possibly tolerate. This happens whether they can consciously admit to it or not. (As we’ll explore in later articles, avoiding those feelings is tied into your body’s own instinct for survival.) When it becomes more important for you to face those feelings than to run from them, you finally have the opportunity to truly, genuinely grow. You move from being a victim of your feelings and your life to being empowered to evolve. With the right mindset and the proper know-how you can steadily progress far beyond the emotional maturity that your habit based everyday life could otherwise ever bring.

Just know that growth doesn’t happen all at once. It generally comes in many small, sometimes seemingly insignificant changes over time. As they accumulate, they begin to add up to really big changes in your perceptions and thus in how you feel about yourself and your life. This is the process of evolving. Imagine a ship on the ocean traveling in a straight line. If you can see the big picture, then you have a pretty accurate idea of where it will end up a months time. However, with just a small change in its heading, just one degree of difference, after a month that ship will be far away from where it would have been before. With lots of little changes in your course over time, who knows where you will end up? For those who remain afraid to access those scary or painful depths within themselves and challenge the “reality” that those feelings imply, their heading is fixed and their destinies already written.
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The key to True Personal Growth is finding what is true for yourself. Anything I say here is nothing more than my perspective on the discusion. Nobody can be an authority on you, but you. Think for yourself!

True growth comes from working with what is real for you right now in this very moment. But a very common roadblock is getting lost in concepts from teachers and books that somehow make us feel good. When it feels like some kind of a connection has been made with the idea being presented, a person can begin to feel and act as if this were a truth that they are living. This is a spiritual bypass: Identifying with a concept or belief and hiding behind a thin veneer of denial about all of the ways that they themselves aren’t living up to it. It is just another story to be acted out, in avoidance of facing their fears. Very often these concepts and ideas are standards that nobody, not even the person selling or teaching it, can live up to.

Trying on new points of view is a great way to open your awareness of yourself, others and life itself. However, taking on those notions as some kind of a truth just because it makes you feel good is a dead end trap. You’ve only buried yourself in more ideas when what is needed is the clarity that comes from direct experience. It is critical to understand why it makes you feel good. Are you really connecting with something that is setting you free? Or are you hearing what you need to hear in order to hide from your deeper fears of what life might bring? Here is just another example of our incredible unconscious power to avoid those scary aspects of our self. These are the times to reaffirm your intent to grow. Even if what that talk-show psychologist, soft spoken guru or fire-and-brimstone evangelist is saying happens to be pointing directly at something true – having a belief about it isn’t the same thing as living in that truth. There are no authorities on your life except for you. When it comes to your life and your growth, there are no answers except for the ones that you find to be true for yourself. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: Anyone can directly experience truth. It is only fear and ignorance that stand in the way.

A spiritual bypass is essentially the act of grasping on to spiritual or personal growth concepts and ideas for a sense of identity and security. It is when someone latches onto those notions as if that is how they were truly living. In doing so, they bypass all of the real growth that needs to happen, forming a kind of denial that it exists, in order to “be” these new ideals. This can be very hard to admit to and break out of. One of the clearest indicators would be if you in any way feel self-righteous about those beliefs, or if you feel the need to defend them against another persons opinions or beliefs.

Growing up in a rural area of the Midwest, going to church every Sunday was a given. Every week I would see people from the community praying and singing and talking about the glory of their god and about how to be “good Christians.” It was always so confusing for me to later see many of these same people sitting around judging and gossiping about others. Among the men I knew, violent racial comments and jokes were common. Within many of the families, including my own, screaming at or hitting their children to teach them the difference between right and wrong was commonplace. When I was really young I was very confused by all of this. If the teaching was “judge not..” then why were they all sitting around passing judgment on one another? If gods will was “love one another” then how could they have so much hate for those of another race? At one point I believed this behavior to be pure hypocrisy, as if they knew how different they were behaving. But then later I realized that they really did believe themselves to be righteous and on the side of god. Here was the spiritual bypass. They denied their insecurities through their beliefs, and vented the uncomfortable energy from them by focusing it on other people. In the world today, there are examples of this sort of thing everywhere. We toggle back and forth between feeling virtuous and being victims but rarely ever equal among our fellow man.

Laura had a great example of a spiritual bypass from her past experience. She was always very jealous in her intimate relationships. At first, to her it seemed like her partners always secretly wanted to be with someone else. She believed they were to blame for how she felt and she needed only to catch them to prove it. Then after yet another relationship had ended badly, she began to look towards self-help to aid her in understanding her relationship struggles. She went to a weekend workshop on overcoming jealousy and was very inspired by what she had learned. She also got a firm idea in her mind about how she is supposed to be. The thought of being free of these jealous feelings made her feel great. But in her next relationship her suspicions were still hard at work. Whenever something would happen to bring up these feelings, she would clamp down on them and try to deny to herself that they were there. Often the energy of those feelings would find another way to come out. She would become irritable with her partner, picking fights over nothing. She would also secretly read through his emails, but told herself this was just to prove that she had nothing to fear. It was when he caught her doing this that she had to face the fact that she was still very much a jealous and suspicious person. This was hard for her to do, but it also gave her the true opportunity to grow.

By accepting her feelings she was able to find out what was driving them. Instead of being something to avoid or shame herself for feeling, Laura used them to access even deeper levels of herself. In working with those underlying feelings, over time Laura has genuinely evolved from being terrified in relationships to being much more relaxed and calm. She has naturally evolved to a more mature and open experience of life.

You can see other examples of this in many different forms. There are those who swallow their anger because their beliefs say they should not be angry. Hiding the external manifestations of those feelings does not make them not exist. There are those who try to hide the external signs of any sexual desire they might have because their beliefs say that they are wrong. Some end up secretly fulfilling those desires, often with a great deal of guilt attached, and then continue to live their everyday life as if nothing had happened. Or they live in denial that they even have the feelings. Either way, they live miserable lives because their spiritual bypass traps them. To own those true feelings is to have the opportunity to know themselves better, grow, and to live a more authentic life.

Many also tend to turn their spiritual bypass into egotism. Arrogance and self-righteousness are always covers for deeper insecurities. Often this shows itself in the assumption that they now have “it” all figured out, especially in relation to others. This can frequently be seen in many religious and spiritual leaders as well as in others who also are heavily invested in their beliefs being true. They will defend their ideals as if it were a part of them who was being questioned or attacked.

One example is a fellow we’ll call Dan, who seems to desire growth but really only wants to feel better. He reads lots of books and attends lots of workshops on the subject. But he only uses what he has learned in an intellectual capacity. Never actually seeing how these concepts he’s learning might fit into his own life, he only uses them to label and control those around him. In doing this he gets a sense of grandiosity and purpose that hides him from his own emotional turmoil and insecurities. As long as he is judging and analyzing the “problems” of the people close to him, he never has to look very closely at himself.

I’ve pulled myself out of spiritual bypasses and arrogance any number of times in the course of my own journey. It is always as empowering as it is humbling. Anyone striving to truly grow has to be aware that this is an easy trap to fall into. It is so alluring to get lost in lofty notions that bring about a false sense of security, righteousness or belonging. But once recognized for what it is, it is a great indicator of where to start digging in to get back on the track of true growth. Be careful, there are no shortcuts. There is only your experience in this moment and whether or not you can bring yourself to see it for what it is.