Tag: Personal Development

Where Psychology and Esoteric Practice Meet.

For much of human history, people have developed practices intended to change themselves. They have meditated, prayed, fasted, performed rituals, contemplated symbols, worked with breath and movement, undertaken initiations, refined the body, studied philosophy, entered periods of solitude, confronted fears, practiced disciplines, and attempted, in a variety of other ways, to understand parts of themselves that ordinary daily life did not necessarily reveal.

Today, we have another language available for examining human development: psychology.

Psychology has given us increasingly sophisticated ways of discussing cognition, emotion, behavior, attention, identity, personality, development, the unconscious, relationships, trauma, motivation, and many other dimensions of human experience.

But something I have discovered through my own development is that the psychological and the esoteric do not necessarily have to be competing ways of looking at the same person. In my own experience, psychology often provided language and conceptual structure for understanding processes that I had already begun exploring through esoteric practice. The practices came first. The psychological understanding frequently came later.

Spiritual Development Is Still Personal Development

This is ultimately why I use the term personal development so broadly. If a chosen practice changes your relationship with your thoughts, that concerns personal development. If it develops discipline over your behavior, that concerns personal development. If it changes your relationship with your emotions, that concerns personal development. If it causes you to examine identity, meaning, mortality, values, purpose, or your relationship with something greater than yourself, that concerns personal development too.

The spiritual dimension does not have to be removed from the person for the psychological aspect to be worth examining. And the psychological dimension does not automatically invalidate the spiritual aspect. They are different lenses. Sometimes they point toward different conclusions. Sometimes they reveal different levels of the same experience. Sometimes they genuinely disagree. The objective isn’t to force every field into a single vocabulary. It is to learn what each perspective allows us to see.

Different Languages, Overlapping Territory

I don’t believe psychology and esoteric traditions are interchangeable. Psychology is not simply modern terminology for magic. And reducing every spiritual or esoteric experience to a psychological mechanism can remove precisely the dimension that makes the experience meaningful to the practitioner. At the same time, an esoteric interpretation doesn’t eliminate the psychological processes occurring within the person practicing it.

 Both perspectives can sometimes be useful.

Consider meditation. Meditation existed as a spiritual and contemplative practice for thousands of years before modern psychology began systematically studying it. Today, psychological research can examine aspects of meditation in terms of attention, awareness, acceptance, stress responses, and emotional regulation. That psychological description doesn’t necessarily tell a Buddhist, yogi, occultist, mystic, or other practitioner everything that meditation means within their tradition. But neither does the spiritual interpretation prevent us from recognizing that practicing meditation develops psychological capacities.

Both statements can be true without requiring one to replace the other.

Practice Can Precede Explanation

This has been particularly important in understanding my own development. Many of the skills I later learned to describe using psychological terminology were not originally developed by sitting down and deciding to practice psychology.

They developed through practice. Meditation. Concentration. Somatic practices. Breathe work. Visualization. Symbolic work. Ritual. Self-observation. Emotional work. Auric-based energetic practices. Contemplation. Working deliberately with different states of consciousness and different perspectives upon my own experience.

Some of those practices were explicitly spiritual or esoteric in purpose. Yet practicing them repeatedly also required me to develop things that psychology can discuss perfectly well. Research on mindfulness provides a particularly clear example of this overlap: practices with contemplative roots are now studied in relation to attention, metacognitive awareness, emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, and rumination.  That doesn’t mean every esoteric practice produces those particular effects.

It demonstrates something more basic: A practice can belong to one tradition while developing capacities that can also be understood through another field.

Symbols Are More Than Decorations

Symbolism is another area where the boundaries become interesting. Human beings have used symbolic figures for an extraordinarily long time. Gods. Animals. Heroes. Monsters. Elements. Planets. Colors. Directions. Numbers. Myths. And various other things as well.

Whatever metaphysical status someone assigns to those things, symbols can also function as ways of organizing information about experience. A symbol can hold several associations simultaneously. An animal might represent qualities of behavior, instinct, emotion, strength, vulnerability, relationship, or environment. A mythological figure can represent an entire collection of characteristics and relationships in a form that is easier to contemplate than a list of abstract definitions. That is one reason symbolism became important within my own personal-development framework.

I wasn’t interested merely in collecting interesting symbols. I was interested in what happened when I worked with them. What qualities did I personally associate with them? Why? What did my interacting with them reveal? What changed over time?

At that point, symbolic practice becomes something that can be explored psychologically without requiring the practitioner to abandon its spiritual meaning.

Ritual as Deliberate Practice

The same is true of ritual. The word can sound mysterious, but ritual itself is hardly foreign to human behavior. Psychology recognizes ritual both in clinical contexts and, more broadly, as ceremonial behavior involving structured actions and words; anthropology has long examined religious, magical, calendrical, and initiatory rituals as well.

From a personal-development perspective, ritual can provide a deliberately constructed environment for attention. You determine what you are doing. You establish an intention. You create a sequence. You concentrate upon particular ideas, symbols, emotions, or actions. You repeat practices. You observe what happens.

For an esoteric practitioner, considerably more may be occurring. That’s where I think intellectual humility becomes useful. Psychology can tell us something about what the human being is doing. A spiritual or esoteric tradition may offer another explanation for what the practitioner is experiencing and believes is occurring.

You don’t necessarily have to destroy one explanation in order to investigate the other.

You Don’t Have to Settle the Universe First

There is a tendency when discussing spirituality, psychology, mysticism, consciousness, or esoteric practices to immediately arrive at the largest possible argument:

But what is ultimately real?

That’s an important question. It is also not always the first question that needs answering. You don’t have to settle every metaphysical question before asking whether a certain practice teaches you something useful about yourself. Are you more aware? More disciplined? More compassionate? More capable of recognizing your own patterns? More capable of directing your behavior? More capable of living according to what you claim to value? Has your relationship with yourself improved? Has your relationship with other people changed? Can you apply what you learned when life becomes difficult?

If the answer is yes, then something experienced elsewhere has begun to become integrated here. Because whatever language we use—psychological, philosophical, spiritual, symbolic, or esoteric—the information eventually returns to the person having the experience.

That person still has to live. Still has to choose. Still has to act. Still has to integrate what was learned. For me, psychology has become an extremely useful framework for understanding parts of that process. Esoteric practice has been one of the major ways through which I experienced and developed within it. I don’t need either one to erase the other. I prefer to understand what I can learn from both.

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.