by John Glanvill
There are many words that capture the essence of personal growth, like, personal development, self-awareness or enlightenment. The problem with these explanations are they are just words, a combination of letters (symbols) that have to be interpreted in a certain way to give them a meaning and for each person it will mean something different.
If you ask people who want to emotionally grow what they want, the answer is nearly always "I want to feel more abc......." They describe the feelings and emotions they want to experience or to let go of and these feelings can't fully be expressed with words.
Words can't truly express the sound of a song; words can't describe colours or the beauty of a rainbow, words tend to express the event, but not the feelings and emotions experienced by our inner self.
Our education tends to play a trick on us; we are taught that if we learn about everything, if we amass lots of knowledge, then we will know the truth, we will know right from wrong. Of course, knowledge helps us in our life, but not necessarily with our happiness and wellbeing.
If we are interested in our feelings and moving to a new emotional datum where we feel good all the time, then our questions about knowledge need to change. Do feelings have truth? Do feelings need to have truth? Can a feeling be wrong? The reality is emotional happiness is not dependent on intellectual knowledge.
We tend to use words to describe the dream bubbles we each live in, my dream bubble is different to your dream bubble, I dream about this and you dream about that, who's right? Well, we both are. We are both right from our own perspectives so there is no absolute truth unless we switch to feelings, because we both may wish to feel happy and in that case it doesn't matter about knowledge or facts, we can just choose to feel happy, if we wish.
As living beings, when we experience nature in its finest glory, a view, a taste, a smell, when we experience the birth of a baby or an animal, we can often become lost for words, just emotionally overwhelmed.
When this happens, it doesn't matter if there is truth or not, it is not important who is right or wrong, in that moment our mind is quiet, we are just in awe and we connect with the fullness of our feelings and emotions, this is the state we are looking for and it has nothing to do with our conscious thinking processes.
So, the aim of the personal growth game is to quieten the mind and let go of chasing being right or wrong, it takes too much energy and there can be no winner, I think I'm right and you think you are right. We need to acknowledge that truth is not about facts and figures, it is about how we choose to manage our emotions and beliefs.
As you proceed down the self-awareness path things begin to unravel and the real truth begins to emerge. You can clearly see that people are trying to protect themselves from emotional pain, they hide behind personalities and masks that they think will keep them safe, they search for more knowledge to keep them one step ahead of others. They build up layer after layer of conscious reasoning on top of the very thing they wish to experience most - their emotions. Therefore, truth is about letting your guard down and experiencing your emotions with less fear. Pain is inevitable, however, fear is actually optional.
I use a lot of jokes and humorous stories in my therapy practice because it stops people focussing too much on conscious facts, laughing is just natural, you don't need to analyse anything. I especially like to help people get to the point where they can laugh at themselves rather than feel frustrated or feel guilty etc.
The personalities that I see each day through my therapy practice fall into 3 distinct groups; those who make the rules and feel good by achieving (and experience stress), those who follow the rules and feel good by helping others (they get anxious) and those who feel that rules don't apply to them and are looking for gratification (these get stressed if not enough is happening).
Do any of these types sound like you? Can you see that what is true for one group will be completely different for another group of people, so we can't definitively say what is right and wrong; all we can say is what is right for us although this can often be so very flawed too. Emotional growth means shifting to more flexibility and taking a less rigid stance, stepping into new points of view and exploring how you release your emotions, not how you cover them up.
Feelings, feelings, feelings, this is the path to self-help and personal growth, not the search for conscious answers. Start with love and start with yourself, accept yourself and learn to accept others it is much easier than trying to change them!
Stop judging yourself and stop judging others, what are you hoping to achieve by doing this except placing yourself in the paradigm of "I am less than them" or "I am more than them" this is just setting yourself up to experience emotions driven by external factors, rather than being in a position to just be able to choose your own emotion at any specific time, just because you want to.
As your self-esteem grows you'll need to take an inventory of all of your self-beliefs, we all have them, remnants from our schooling or the way we were brought up. Beliefs about what you can do and beliefs about what you can't do, self-beliefs about how lovable you are, how talented you are, how pretty you are. There comes a time when you need to actually see these beliefs as hurdles to further personal growth and choose to finally let them go.
When I explored my beliefs I was amazed about how many there were, I told a few of my friends about them because I was so amazed and they all laughed and said "we know that, didn't you?" in the main I didn't! Now I can see them I can let them go, I can let my guard down and move on with my life not having to play these silly games.
So the next step in the journey of personal growth is living with humility. As you let go of old behaviours and thought patterns, then drop the charade of self-importance a whole new world begins to open.
As you grow emotionally and spiritually humility will begin to arise because as you stop making judgements about yourself (or others) you'll see that it doesn't matter if you are right or wrong, you don't need to jostle to be heard or require external confirmation that, in fact, you are OK.
With more and more humility comes more and more calmness and acceptance, you can accept others despite their views or actions, you can accept yourself despite your flaws. They live in their dream and you live in your dream, it's not a race, the only real winners are those who have calmness, love and happiness inside.
Humility allows you to refrain from needing to advise or correct people, or point out their flaws, they are competent to live their own lives and experience the consequences of their decisions and actions. This also allows you to step back from worrying about them, let them live their lives, just be there for when they need you, love them, love yourself.
There are pages of self help and <a href='http://johnglanvill.com/'>Personal Development</a> information on this site. Download <a href='http://johnglanvill.com/hypnosis-downloads-mp3-free-personal-development-tools/'>Free Personal Development Tools</a> wheel of life, goal setting, values and beliefs, hypnosis downloads.
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