the outer of inner transformation
a quick thought about figuring out whether you're making real change for yourself.
you just did a meditation. maybe you just got back from a yoga session. you feel elated and good and happy. you believe had some kind of emotional breakthrough during this session.
but in two hours the cafe mistakenly put dairy in your latte and you return back to a sour mood that you thought was magicked away by your calming sessions.
it’s a wonder that with all the millions of ways to do new age-y transformations, people are still struggling with the basic disappointments of a normal life.
a quick thought from me: be wary of the rapid catharsis of some techniques. if the technique is designed to make you emotional or cry or triggered within forty-five minutes, it likely doesn’t have any higher aspirations than the emotional release.
this release is good. it’s very good for the short-term. but like a band-aid, it’s only a decoration in the grand scheme of wound healing or great inner transformation.
we’re not even talking about a single layer off the old onion metaphor. “release” is just the start, but we end right at the beginning, every time.
here’s a three step checklist for determining whether you’re making any real change for yourself with techniques that you’re employing day to day:
do you still do the feeling, behavior, or thought that you wanted to move away from? y/n?
are you feeling attached to the feeling, behavior, or thought that you wanted to move away from? y/n?
are others informing you that you haven’t changed the feeling, behavior or thought that you wanted to change? y/n?
if yes to all three, you’ve learned nothing from your practices; this is more likely that the practice wasn’t set up to fix what you wanted, rather than pointing fingers at yourself.
when a technique for change works for you, it works. you’ll start checking “n” to those three questions in no time.
if you had to prioritize these questions, prioritize #1 and #3, because it’ll take longest to change #2 as one’s self-concept is hard to work on without a guide.
but you can work on #1 and #3 because they are externally focused: it just requires you to physically change the thing you wanted to change.
for example, if you want to find more time to do the things you want, you can pull up a calendar and use your eyes and fingers to find the time to do the things you want and try to cut out as many things you don’t want.
if you don’t do this, what exactly are you doing to “find more time”? that’s an easy verb to do. at least confirm that there isn’t more time by searching for it!
another example: you want to lose weight so you know you have to eat less, but you manage to not eat less, do you really want to lose weight?
we see that there’s a gap between our aspiration and our physical behavior, and there are likely inner excuses being made to keep this gap in place.
once you find this gap, you should discover its reasons for interfering with your goals. you’re going to be surprised by how it thinks it’s helping you.
in summary: if the outer reflects the inner, then immediate changes to the outer reflects immediate changes to the inner.
if you’re new to inner work, here’s an easier to way to see if a technique is working well for you or not, without leaning on the emotional catharsis.
find a measurable behavior that you want to change (procrastinate less=less minutes on distractions)
perform the personal development technique
measure the behavior (how many minutes am i procrastinating now)?
if there is a change in behavior, the technique does something!
if there is no change, test the technique again and measure (as many times as you like), or move on to something else.
for the best techniques that i’ve discovered, there is a virtue of patience because it can take several sessions before finding noticeable change. so i’m not advocating for one-and-done testing.
but also don’t get so attached to the thing that it’s taking up your time and mental capacity without doing anything useful for you.
best—dom
p.s.—inner work is a constant experiment until you die. be adventurous, open-minded, and excited for any new technique that you run into. but don’t get too caught up in it either, because your mindwashing is always for someone else’s benefit, even if they died centuries ago.
p.p.s—i’ll explain more about discovering the positive intent of any feeling, behavior or thought in another post.