There is a subtle but profound difference between personal growth and personal transformation. We often confuse the two. Personal growth is an expansion of ones current self by way of refinement. Personal transformation is a new creation. A watermelon that ripens over time is experiencing personal growth; a watermelon seed that becomes a watermelon is potential that transforms itself into a watermelon, a new creation, even as the seeds of its creation are still embodied in the transformation.
One the things I have discovered on my own journey and in observing friends and others is that many of us grow but we don't reach for personal transformation. We simply develop more refined, more mature ways of dealing with our issues, but we don't eradicate them—we merely learn how to coexist with them better. While personal transformation means you have become such a wondrously beautiful new creation that those issues evaporate like mist on hot summer concrete—the conditions for them to live no longer exist.
It is a process. If we are courageous, we embrace the work of personal growth, and then, if we are brave work towards personal transformation. I want see what I look like as a wondrously beautiful new creation. For those of us who consider ourselves healers—a popular and increasingly vacuous term—we have a special responsibility to do the work within our "community of self" to push past the self satisfied comfort of personal growth, and do the heavy and hard work of transforming ourselves, so that we too become wondrously beautiful new creations, divine beings cloaked in immense transformative power. Personal transformation is a quiet revolution that gives birth to movements that transform the world. This is a lesson I think our ancestors hope we get from their living gifts to us.
In life, love and liberation,
In the above blog the author discusses a comparison of the dimensions of development and transformation as they apply to the human personality. As I read this insightful comparison the question I have concerns the space and support to achieve them. Personal development in my view has remained a goal of the professional class and the tools needed to achieve it have been constantly improved and broadly shared. In the author's discussion of transformation he presents it as more a liberating dimension of personality. Therefore while transformation might serve important needs of the individual, as such it appears to threaten established order. My question then is there, in the literature a discussion that take up these topics useful to the adaptation and use when treating African clients?
ReplyDeleteUntil we talk again take care of yourself and be well.
A Luta Continua