Personal Development

A perspective on "the work"

"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." - Aristotle

This is a subject I know a fair bit about. It's been my path. The need to grow became an urgency in a life that never felt like it fitted and a body that didn't like living a lie.

I upgraded my eye movement therapy training this weekend and the question was asked...

"When are we done doing 'the work'?"

And it totally resonated. The work can become the stick you beat yourself with. How much can we share, purge, heal and develop to live our best life? Or can we just drop the baggage and actually make some decisions to live that life the best we can?

I have been talking a lot about limiting beliefs and and self-sabotage lately and for me personally this where my need for personal development came from.

I wanted to feel better without facing what was holding me back. Fear, low self-confidence, low self-worth. I had beliefs of being undeserving of financial security and even growth. Beliefs of being unloveable and feeling totally incapable in a relationship. I felt I wasn't good enough, which meant everyone else was better than me in every way and created this need to be someone else other than who I really was. That is not good for anyone. Believe me!

It all meant I was living in this chaos of wanting to be myself but feeling I had to be someone else. The work became everything I did to improve, change, alter my perception of myself and my experience of the World.

There is no need to go into the why of how I felt that way. The feelings of growth came from the right place, my truth or authenticity but I could never really see the how. I would come away from a class or circle or training and feel amazing, but then an experience would crop up and it would all shift back. I couldn't think, medicate, share or journal myself out of the way I felt. I had to deal with the root cause and then live.

Social media has exacerbated this need to "improve" and "do the work" Looking on Instagram at tiny, gorgeous women on a beach in Bali saying "live your best life" is all well and good but their journey is not yours and part of the message is missing. You absolutely can, but if the thoughts and beliefs that are present in your daily life are of being fat, ugly and undeserving of wealth and love then that is going to be tricky.

Our experiences of life and how we feel about them can make even visualising that best life difficult too. If you live a life surrounded by the same experiences and the people who share similar experiences then your vison of life will be the similar too. To be able to see things differently, we have to learn and grow and that comes through different experiences.

What those Instagrammers don't tell you either, is of the support and practices they had to help them every day and that some days they still felt like shit! Because life can be that way sometimes, its how you feel about it and respond to its challenges that change who you are.

That takes courage and kindness. It takes work and pleasure. It takes pain and healing. But most of all it takes support, love and patience in the process.

The self development and self help industry is booming in a world with the most information and no real answers. The real work is discerning what is right for you and I can tell you from my own experience, if you feel you aren't worthy of anything that can lead to whole load of information and experience that isn't really necessary.

How are you feeling about "the work?"

Do your shelves creak with the weight of self- help and development books?

Are they really helping?

How is your relationship to yourself?

Are you hanging on to old beliefs and patterns that are ready to be let go of?