Personal Growth: Where to begin and what are the Barriers to Personal Growth?

Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 2:20 pm

At the heart of true personal growth is self knowledge. Having insights into the complexities of our mind is the prerequisite of a fruitful examination into our being of this world with all its intricate relationships we manage, called life experiences. And it all is embedded in a so called map or filter within your mind.

Each day is unfolding based on thousands of little decisions we make and each decision we create in our mind continuously keeps shaping the world we live in and our experience thereof.

Yet our mind operates 99% in realms that are not easily accessible to our power of reasoning because that 99% of our decision making process, that 99% of our mind map is filtered away from our conscious mind. That is why psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists become inreasingly more popular in our world. Yet, through insights into the mechanisms of how our thoughts are created in the first place, you can do a lot of that work by yourself.

One of the greatest thinkers in the fifth century was the critical philosopher Socrates. Genuine knowledge and careful reasoning guided this man in his pursuit of truth. His life passion was the inquiry into the core of our human beingness, into the faculties of thought and experience itself, and was guided by the belief or deeper knowing, that “the unexamined life is not worth living”.

We can examine life from all sorts of angles but to examine any experience we are relying on the faculties of thought. Any meaning we give to any of our experiences is created by our thoughts. And even though thought guides our decisions, our actions and impacts on each and single moment in our life, its impulses and triggers are mostly beyond our awareness, that is why we can sometimes believe we acted thoughtless.

Thought, thus, is not a very reliable source for our self inquiry. Yet, at the same time an examination of life itself and life’s experiences without an examination of thought is plainly not possible. It seems to be a complete paradox. Often, the result of such a one sided inquiry like thought alone is a feeling of stuckness, seemingly moving in circles. The result is confusion and can lead, ultimately, to frustration. Because we did not come into this life to have a thought but to have an experience.

Why thought alone is leading us into frustration, is that our mind has created its own map as to what constitutes our world and how we manage our life and our experiences in it and thought is the caretaker of this map. This map, however, has been mostly created a long time ago from a child’s perspective and holds the power of filtering out information and experiences. With 99% being stored away from our conscious awareness it guides us through our adult years not realising that the world has changed, that we have changed, that our resources have changed.

So if thought alone cannot guide us on our path to personal growth, what else is there? The most powerful way to examine our life and to move beyond the conscious awareness of our thoughts lies in the felt sense of an experience or the absence of it. Our whole map is woven into our experience and our perception of the life we live. All our past is captured in the present moment experience, in the way we hold our body and in the words we chose to express any experience.

If our world is limited by our own map that is beyond our awareness, how do we know how what we are looking for feels like? How can we grasp a world that we have not experienced and yet keep yearning for? How do we trust our dreams if the very same dreams are created by the faculties of our so limited mind or how can we explain the absence of dreams alltogether? We get a sense of something is missing, something is not right, but how do we find out what that is? Because if we would have known it in the first place we would recognise it. Or did we know it and have just forgotten? And if this would be the case, why does the map not allow us to access it? Why is it filtered out of our awareness? And what purpose does it have?

All those questions of self discovery and self inquiry are running deeper than most of us can comprehend. The path to self knowledge becomes easily an obsession and more often than not people struggle through their lives in search for answers and experiences and completely missing what life has to offer to them because their filter or map does not allow them to take it in.

The less answers we can find, the more bitter we get. The more bitter and frustrated we get, the more we get into our minds. The more we get into our minds the more we disconnect to our everyday experience and to our body. Until it hits us again seemingly completely out of left field. Life seems to be happening to us while we are trying to figure out how to get control over it. And usually we perceive only the experience that we perceive as bad because if everything would be joyful then we would not be in that place in the first place.

The first step out of that vicious cycle is self knowledge through self inquiry. And it begins with an understanding of how this map got created in the first place and what its very function is in our life. With that knowledge comes an acceptance of ourselves which in itself is a very healing and powerful insight.

To grow personally means to be able to use this knowledge and apply it as a foundation or basis into the self inquiry process. And this is truly what personal growth is all about – moving towards choice – updating that old, long forgotten and dusty map that has served us so well in so many ways but is not needed any longer. When we start working on our filter or map we start working with our thoughts and experiences because one without the other does not exist.

I chose to work with the world of words. Even though, researchers have concluded that only 5% is attributed to words in our communication channels, for me they have a magic of its own. The choice of our own words and how we use them tell a rich story of our map and its filter within. That is why I work through email mentoring in my personal growth program.

May you find your own way to bring your world together and open it up to all its vast possibilities and opportunities of all the choices that you just cannot imagine, YET. What ever your steps will be, though, allow me to suggest you begin by starting to learn about the very basics of the map that filters the perception of your world and the barriers to personal growth.

And please, do not forget, that whatever you will find within your filter, be gentle with the insights, everything in your mind you have created for a specific purpose that you might not remember but one thing is sure: anything in your filter or map is there to protect you and to keep you safe in one way or the other. Thus, do not judge. Let that critic straight out of the way and be thankful for the insights your very own world is presenting to you.

Have a safe journey and if I can be of any assistance in that very personal journey of yours, please do contact me.

Halka Beseda

I invite you to watch the following video of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s talk: Can humans change? “Thought”, he said, “is born of experience and knowledge which are inseperable from time and the past.”

“Man cannot come to truth through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.”