Category: Spiritual Practices

The Highs and Lows of Life.

While psychology and esoteric systems can sometimes diverge depending on your perspective, there are two areas in which both sides often seem to encounter similar developmental territory: descent and ascension.

Many older traditions, particularly those concerned with depth, shadow, initiation, and transformation, contain journeys into darkness, underworlds, death and rebirth, ordeals, confrontations with monsters, periods of isolation, and symbolic dismemberment followed by reconstruction.

Psychology has its own languages for confronting painful, avoided, unconscious, contradictory, or previously unintegrated material. We descend. Into history. Into emotion. Into patterns. Into fear. Into the unconscious. Into whatever darkness lies beneath the person we presently experience ourselves to be.

The explanations aren’t identical.  But the developmental principle is recognizable: Sometimes you cannot understand what is happening on the surface without exploring what lies underneath it.

A reaction may have a history. A belief may have been formed under circumstances you’ve forgotten. A strength may have grown from something painful. A behavior that causes problems today may once have solved a problem extremely well. So, we descend.

This is not necessarily movement backward in the developmental sense. It is movement toward depth. You follow the present downward into what helped create it. And there are things worth finding there. But finding them isn’t enough. You must carry them back.

The objective isn’t to construct a permanent home at the bottom of the spiral. The objective is to return to where you began with something you didn’t possess when you left. Understanding. Awareness. Acceptance. A different interpretation. A lesson. A choice. A recovered part of yourself. Whatever was found at depth must encounter the present person before it can become part of present life.

The Other Side of Experience

A great deal of spiritual language also points upward. Higher consciousness. Higher Self. Ascension. Transcendence. Enlightenment. Liberation.

The imagery is understandable. Height gives us perspective. Rising above something allows us to see relationships that may be invisible while standing inside them. Many spiritual traditions therefore associate development with ascent—with reaching beyond the limitations of our ordinary perspective toward something greater.

As we move upward conceptually, perspective expands. From close enough, an event can occupy your entire field of vision. Move farther away and it becomes one event among many. Move farther still and relationships between events become visible. Patterns appear. What seemed random may acquire context. What seemed overwhelmingly important may become smaller. What seemed insignificant may reveal itself as part of something much larger. This is one reason spiritual and contemplative traditions have always been attracted to the symbolism of ascent. Higher perspective can change understanding.

But there is a danger here too. Perspective can become distance.

If the objective becomes permanently escaping the ordinary human condition—escaping the body, emotion, difficulty, responsibility, relationship, limitation, or material life—then the very perspective that was supposed to expand life can become a means of withdrawing from it. I don’t regard transcendence as useless. I question transcendence that never returns. If you climb high enough to see something that couldn’t be seen from the ground, then bring what you saw back to the ground. That is where it becomes practical.

A spiritual realization should eventually encounter behavior. A philosophical understanding should eventually encounter decisions. Greater consciousness should eventually encounter ordinary relationships. Expanded perspective should eventually encounter responsibility. Whatever happens in meditation eventually encounters the person who gets up from meditation. Whatever happens during ritual eventually encounters the person who leaves the ritual space. Whatever is learned in solitude eventually encounters another human being. Whatever is discovered beyond the ordinary perspective eventually has to be expressed through an ordinary life if it is going to become part of that life.

The Present Is the Point of Contact

It could be easy to misunderstand this and think the present is simply a neutral midpoint between darkness below and light above. For me, this is where spirituality and personal development become inseparable. Below you is depth. Above you is perspective. You can travel downward to understand what lies beneath your present condition. You can travel upward to see your present condition from increasingly larger perspectives.

But the life you are actually living is occurring here. In the present.

That makes the present something more than the starting point of the journey. It is the place where what you discover elsewhere becomes capable of affecting your life. You can descend into the past and discover why a particular pattern exists. Useful. But eventually you must return to the present and ask:

What am I going to do differently now that I understand it?

You can ascend into an extraordinary spiritual perspective and experience yourself, humanity, consciousness, or existence in a completely different way. Useful. But eventually you must return and ask:

How does someone who has seen that live differently tomorrow morning?

Without that return, insight can remain insight. Integration requires embodiment. That makes the present the grounds of integration.

It is where the different directions meet. It is where information becomes choice. It is where perspective becomes action. It is where understanding becomes behavior. It is where the past encounters the possibility of a different future. It is where the spiritual encounters the physical. It is where whatever you believe about consciousness, soul, meaning, or existence must encounter the fact that right now you are also a human being living a human life.

You descend. You return. You ascend. You return. And each return potentially changes the person standing there. You can encounter similar territory repeatedly while experiencing it from a different depth or height. You may return to an old question years later and discover that it is no longer asking quite the same thing, because you are no longer the same person asking the question. Extraordinary experiences can be valuable. So can profound psychological insights. So can symbolic experiences, difficult confrontations with yourself, periods of contemplation, and moments when your perspective seems to expand beyond anything you previously understood. Because I believe greater depth and greater perspective can help us become increasingly capable of engaging with life and being human deliberately.

What is Personal Development?

When people hear the words personal development, they often think of goal setting, motivation, productivity, career advancement, positive thinking, or becoming more successful. All those things can be part of personal development. But I believe the subject is considerably larger than any of them. At its simplest, personal development is exactly what the name suggests: The development of the person.

A career can develop. A relationship can develop. A business can develop. Skills can develop. But personal development asks a different question: How are you developing?

That distinction matters because every goal you pursue, every relationship you enter, every problem you encounter, and every decision you make has one thing in common. You are there. And wherever you go next, you will be there too.

Development Begins Within

I find it useful to begin by separating personal development into four broad internal areas:

Mental. Physical. Emotional. Spiritual.

These aren’t isolated compartments. They continually interact with and influence one another. Your knowledge and understanding affect the choices you make. Your physical condition affects what you’re capable of doing and experiencing. Your emotions influence perception, relationships, motivation, and behavior. Your beliefs, values, philosophy, and sense of meaning affect what you consider important enough to pursue in the first place. Development in one area can therefore affect several others.

The purpose isn’t to achieve some imaginary state of perfection in all four. It is to become increasingly aware of them and increasingly capable of deliberately participating in their development. 

That brings us to an important distinction worth understanding: Control vs Influence.

Control Within, Influence Without

We don’t live entirely within ourselves. We also participate in an external world containing finances, careers, families, relationships, communities, institutions, cultures, economies, and other people. Those systems have their own rules and structures. You cannot simply decide what the economy will do. You don’t personally control the hierarchy of an organization. You cannot make family members behave according to your wishes. You cannot dictate the decisions of everyone in your social environment.

Those things can exercise varying degrees of control over the conditions in which you live. But you can potentially influence them. And one of the most important ways of increasing that influence is by becoming better at governing yourself. That creates a useful distinction:

Within yourself, others can influence you, but developing control ultimately belongs to you.

Outside yourself, others and larger systems exercise control, but you retain the ability to influence them.

Personal development is partly about learning the difference. A tremendous amount of effort can be wasted attempting to control things that don’t belong to us while neglecting the things that do. The more effectively you can direct your own knowledge, behavior, emotional responses, discipline, values, choices, and actions, the greater your capacity may become to influence what happens around you.

You don’t gain control over the world. You become more capable of navigating it.

Knowing Is Not the Same as Developing

There is another distinction I consider important: Information is not development.

You can read a hundred books about discipline and remain undisciplined. You can understand communication and still communicate poorly. You can know exactly what habit you need to change and continue doing it every day. You can understand a pattern intellectually without having developed the ability to behave differently when that pattern appears again.

Knowledge matters. But knowledge must also encounter action. Action produces experience. Experience gives us something to observe. Observation allows us to recognize patterns, consequences, assumptions, strengths, weaknesses, contradictions, and possibilities that may not have been visible beforehand. Then what we learn can be incorporated into what we do next. That creates an ongoing developmental process rather than a collection of information.

You learn. You act. You experience. You observe. You adjust. Then you do it again.

There Is No Single Road

Personal development appears in far more places than just the modern self-help industry. It can be found in psychology and philosophy. It can appear through physical training, education, contemplative practice, relationships, professional development, spirituality, creative work, hardship, leadership, mentorship, and ordinary life experience. Different disciplines use different languages because they are often examining different parts of the same extraordinarily complicated subject: the human being.

I don’t believe everyone needs to follow the same path. People have different histories, personalities, abilities, circumstances, goals, beliefs, strengths, weaknesses, and ways of understanding the world. A useful framework should help someone explore those differences—not erase them. A map can provide orientation. It should not demand that everyone walking through the territory leave identical footprints.

The Objective Is Self-Direction

This is ultimately where personal development leads, in my view. Not toward becoming perfect. Not toward eliminating every difficulty. And certainly not toward becoming permanently dependent upon someone else to tell you what to think, what to choose, or where to go next.

The objective is to increase your capacity: to observe yourself, understand yourself, develop yourself, and direct yourself.

Teachers can teach. Coaches can coach. Books can provide information. Systems can provide structure. Other people can challenge you, encourage you, inspire you, question you, and occasionally show you something you couldn’t see from where you were standing.

But eventually the work returns to the same place. You.

Your choices. Your actions. Your responsibility. Your life. Personal development isn’t merely about getting more from life. It is about developing the person who is living it. And that process can continue for as long as you do.

Goals Are More Than Destinations

This is also why I look at goals somewhat differently. Obviously, if you set a goal, accomplishing it matters. But the result isn’t necessarily the only thing of value.

Ask yourself: Who would I have to become to accomplish this?

Perhaps the goal requires greater discipline. Maybe it requires learning something you don’t presently understand. Maybe it exposes an insecurity you’ve avoided confronting. Perhaps it requires patience, communication, physical development, emotional control, courage, better boundaries, or the willingness to abandon something that no longer serves you. Sometimes pursuing a goal even teaches you that the goal wasn’t really yours. That is useful information too. The destination provides direction; the journey provides experience. The true value of a goal lies not only in reaching it, but in the person you become on your way to achieving it.