“Living in the Myth of Growth”
by Kelvin Chin
Author
Meditation Teacher
Have you ever seen someone who takes every “self-development” class on the internet or at their local yoga center, yet seems stagnant in their personal growth?
They may have fallen into a rut. They may actually be living in the “myth of growth.”
Fooling themselves they are progressing but in reality are repeating the same old patterns over and over again for years, maybe lifetimes.
One fundamental problem for many people is the self-limiting way they view “love.” For most people love means really liking something or somebody “an incredible amount.” They put love on the far end of the “liking scale.” At the other end is extreme dislike. My daughter has pointed out to me that most online surveys about consumer products are languaged that way.
So that’s how we get acculturated to thinking about love.
Really?
I see that as a very limited view of love — one that sets us up for failure in many ways. Here’s one my daughter Sam pointed out to me….
If you think of love as extreme liking, then how can you ever “love yourself”?
There’s so much talk today about “self-love.” However, if you don’t “like” everything about yourself, then how can you ever expect to get to the end of the spectrum where you like yourself so much that you can call it “loving yourself”?
I think everybody can and will find something about themselves they don’t like. So given that reality, we can just forget about “self-love.”
Unless we define love in a different way.
How about “accepting ourselves and others for who we and they are, not who we wish they were.” So this moves us away from thinking of ourselves and others in the future — in terms of our “ideal image” — and more towards the present.
Accepting our warts as well as our beautiful aspects — to me that’s self-love. And that does not mean we cannot change or improve ourselves. In fact, I think it frees us from feeling guilty about not being perfect or “good enough” to be liked so that we can move forward sooner and unencumbered. And therefore, more likely to be successful in improving ourselves.
The other important aspect to this concept of love is the tendency for most people to assess themselves as loving based on what they are “feeling” about themselves or others. If they feel warm and fuzzy, or even swept off their feet in an emotional high, then they say they’re “in love.”
But how long does that last? Not very long. Right?
The notion that we are somehow “growing” when we are “feeling good” is a myth. And that if we are not feeling good, we are not growing.
For many of us I think that simplistic way of looking at personal growth can be a distraction from looking at ourselves, especially at where we need to do work. Because sometimes that is uncomfortable. Not a “feel good” feeling.
We all tend to get comfortable with familiar patterns of thinking and behavior. And we often forget to “test” out those patterns in the external world we live in — how do our friends and colleagues react to our behavior? Do our relationships with them grow and flourish, or do they wither and die? Or are they somewhere in between — ok most of the time, but just ok?
So this second issue of getting hoodwinked into thinking we are growing because we feel emotional highs from time to time is another thing to keep an eye on. Do you feel incredibly loved and accepted sometimes, and other times not so much?
And here is the tough one: Have you developed enough self-confidence to “see” whether you have left train wrecks in your wake during or after you have left some of your relationships? That, my friend, is a huge red flag. It is a sign that something somewhere deep inside needs some attention, and some adjusting…that is, if we are truly committed to self-development — and not just committed to getting another certificate to hang on our office wall from the latest workshop we took.
Otherwise, we will repeat the same old patterns over and over — for years, if not for millennia. Stagnating. Stuck in an eddy along the shoreline of the river of life. We will continue to live in the myth of growth.
Kelvin H. Chin is a Meditation Teacher, Life After Life Expert, and Author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death,” “Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations On Living Life” and “After the Afterlife: Memories of My Past Lives.” He learned to meditate at age 19, and has been teaching Turning Within Meditation and coaching others in their self-growth for 50 years. He helps people understand their life challenges through their individual belief systems, and helps them find their own solutions. His past life memories reach back many centuries, and he accesses those memories in his teaching and his coaching in the same way all coaches draw on their own available experiences for perspective and effective analogies. He can be reached at www.TurningWithin.org.