No one showed me the map – what to expect when we step on to
our spiritual path.
Sometimes we’d rather be asleep again – sometimes we’d
rather not think so much about things, feel so deeply or be so sensitive
to life. At times, we wish we could turn
back the clock and avoid what we now see and experience. When we encounter others who are leading
seemingly ‘simple’ lives which don’t seem to feature the depth of understanding
and the ups and downs that come with being on a spiritual path, we have the
thought that maybe it would be nice to go back, to live our long gone oblivious lives.
I want to be able to inform myself and my clients of what
development takes, what it looks like and what we can expect. I want to be able to use this is a comfort, a
map, a reassuring guide to when things feel difficult – one of my teachers once
said that if we don’t address this
topic, that it’s like taking people through the Himalayas on a life long trek but
not showing them the map before they set off.
I am going to write about my understanding of
‘The Stages of the Work’ with the purpose of delving more
deeply into how we unfold in our learning and growth as human beings - with the
hope that this will also serve as a useful map for anyone who is growing or
developing and is interested to see what this natural process can look
like.
I am using the inspiration of
three sources to write this – one comes from Russ Hudson and Don Riso’s
‘Strata’ model from their book
The Widsom of The Enneagram, and the other comes
from James Flaherty’s
Ten Ways model of Development, and the other is my own
experience of myself and my journey.
The Stages of the Work:
We are Asleep.
A: Our Habitual Image
of Ourselves. This is the stage I
have spoken of above – the stage we sometimes feel envious of – it’s when we
are wondering around without an awareness of the effect we have – we have no
idea what impact our beliefs and thoughts have on us or anyone around us. We take most things for granted and we feel
as if the world is being ‘done’ to us.
We feel like victims of this world and we are not questioning anything
about our experience.
We are Questioning.
B: What We Are Really
Like. At this stage, when we embark
on learning something about what made us the way we are today, we begin to
experience what we are REALLY like – not what we imagine ourselves to be
like. Until now our awareness is too
dispersed to see clearly what we are really up to – what part we play in
creating our lives. This is where our
assumptions about who we are and what we are come into question, and we see for
instance, that we are not relaxed at all, that our bodies are tense and our
shoulders are tight. We start to notice
for example, that we have an underlying mood where we expect things to go
wrong, and we just thought we were being ‘sensible’. We see, eventually, that we are actually late
for events all the time, when we thought we weren’t a ‘late person’. The list will go on and on for all of us.
We are Learning.
C: Why we act how we
act, what our attitudes are really. At
this stage, it becomes clear what drives us to act, what underlies how we deal
with the challenges of our life. Good
therapy has us uncover this level of learning that brings clarity as to how
come our lives have turned out this way up to now. We shift away from blaming others and we
realise our part in the patterns that are shaped in our lives. We start to see the underlying motivations
that drive the patterns in our lives.
For example, my underlying motivation for doing all that I do in the
world could be to be liked, to avoid confrontation, to be different, to be
accepted, to be successful, to be superior, to be safe, to remain happy, to be
strong – and the list goes on. Once we
become clear on the underlying issues that have us think, act and feel the ways
we do, the lights get switched on to our underlying issues and how they drive everything
about our lives.
We are Diving Deep.
D: What we find
underneath our formed patterns. As
we enter this stage, when we have embarked upon studying in detail how we are
and what makes who we are, we experience ourselves as being ‘caught in the
act’. We can see ourselves acting out
our habitual patterns – until this point, we have only remembered what we did
in past situations – now we are seeing ourselves clearly and experience how we
are perpetuating our patterns even further.
As we are present, a small opening appears that gives us another option
to the engrained habitual behaviour we are so familiar with – it’s a small
opening of choice, and one which we normally don’t take. At this stage, we can experiment with doing
something that we don’t normally do, and seeing how it feels, what we think and
what happens in our bodies. For example,
a song that we’d normally switch the radio off for – can we listen and be
present to it rather than doing what we’d normally do and watch what our
experience is ? It’s starting to become
clear here that our personality or ego is a set of defences that keep us
exactly the way we are – it’s a coping strategy that has kept us alive for our
lifetimes and it’s defending any new experience from truly being lived. The graceful quality of this stage, is that
we are able to notice that there is something else happening other than what we
are immersed in during any moment – there may be an argument happening but my
awareness is wide enough that I know there is something other than this – that
this is not everything. I may feel small
and contracted, frustrated or sad, but I am held in something other than my immediate
experience – I am within a presence that is what it is regardless of what seems
to be happening in my body, my mind, my surroundings and my emotions. I am able to see more clearly all the
defences I employ and when I don’t buy into them as wholly as before, I
experience an unknown – an experience of being something other than my habitual
self. We have to be aware at this stage
that the personality or ego will be trying to keep us small in an even more
exaggerated way – so kindness and acceptance of our patterns is essential.
We are Opening.
E: The parts of our
humanity we are most scared of and have most judgements on. As we develop further, and we start to
let go of all the ways we have defended ourselves or kept ourselves small, we
begin to experience shame, rage, anger, fear and all of the raw energies we
have access to as human beings. We see
all the ways we have covered up these energies and we let them go to reveal
that we are rageful, we are terrified, we are angry, hurt or deficient. As we continue to be present and to live in
our awareness, we become aware of all that is being held down by defences, we
become aware that there are blockages and the more present we become, the more
we feel is being blocked – and we experience this being released. These experiences are physical and emotional
– they are not cognitive – you can’t think your way out of these energies. All that we can bring to these energies is
breathing, presence and awareness. We
know at this stage that it doesn’t help to act out the energies we are
experiencing – it doesn’t serve us to impact others with these experiences and
we are able to be with the rawness which is then beautifully part of life – it
becomes an aliveness that is filled with energy and vibrancy. At this stage we realise that what we don’t
deal with and become present to will be passed on to those who we love – it’s
an act of love to be with these energies and to learn not to act out on
them. With presence, love and awareness,
they can be transformed and contribute to our aliveness and life force.
We are in the Aftermath.
F: Nowhere to
stand. At this stage, we have
dropped our habitual behaviour to the extent that we have an experience of not
knowing how to be, where to stand, how to interact, who we are, what we are
here for. It’s like all our tools have been
taken away from us and we are simply a piece of life pulsating in a body. We feel empty, hollow, fraudulent as if our
usual strategies are deficient and do not get us what we want – ironically they
keep us away from it. At this stage, we
learn to relax, to truly relax into being and to let it all go – to let go of
all the ways we have learned to be in the world, to make way for another kind
of life experience in the moment, an exquisite presence that is immediate,
gentle, surrendered and accepting. At
this point, we surrender in the experience that we don’t have the answers, we
let go of all we have held on to and we breathe. From here on, everything is creation from a
platform of nothingness, everything is new and seen with new eyes.
The stages beyond this are beyond my development and have
been described as things such as The Void, Universal Being Itself, The Death of the Ego - which I cannot write about
at this stage of my growth.
I hope this has given us some kind of guide as to the
territory we get into when we begin and continue to follow our journeys.
Let us welcome the challenges that encourage
us on the path and let us embrace the grace that is always landing in our
hearts in each moment to hold us through it all.
