Spiritual Growth and Development –Learning the Dance of Opposites

 

Oberon, Titania with Fairies Dancing – William Blake

 

This spiritual growth and development post invites you to become aware that you are in essence a living paradox.  You are the dance in form of two poles of energy that are created to come together in a marriage of sacred unity within you.  Within this experience of sacred unity there is the living experience of so much more than simply the need to do your life.  This, so much more, moves as Love in action.  It is a movement of flow.  It is not simply life moving from the drive of the separate sense of self called the ego but the flow of the dance of Love in form.  It is  the dance of the masculine and feminine that then results in the inner marriage and the feeling of unification within ones self.    This invitation to unity beyond opposites is foundational information for spiritual growth and development.  Without a direct knowing of this sacred unity within oneself then spiritual life coaching as a way of making your living cannot really be authentic.  One might obtain a certification that one has trained as a Spiritual Life Coach but the authorization to invite others into the revelation of the spiritual life is a grace that is given.

 

In contrast to spiritual growth and development personal development is very often centred in the head and driven from the will.  There is an intellectual focus on what we might achieve.  It is, as the very word persona (meaning mask) implies, the development of a self image and how that self image can be used in the world and often how that self image can be used in the marketplace.  This tends especially to be the focus in the first half of life between the ages of 18 and 45 to 50 years.  We can get stuck in this stage of personal growth and development and become what is referred to as a Stage One Chaotic/Antisocial individual.   The author Stephen Hawley Martin writing in Stages of Spiritual Growth and Where they Lead writes of such an individual

 

I was once acquainted with someone I now recognize as a Stage One individual who headed a successful company.  Under his direction the firm became one of the fastest growing in its field.  The man was a brilliant speaker and strategist.  He had a photographic memory.  But he was without principles, scruples or anything close to what we might call a conscience.  Even though he was married he took pride as a master of seduction of members of the opposite sex.  Figuratively speaking, he left the landscape strewn with the bodies of his lovers and adversaries and to my knowledge never felt and inkling of remorse.  This man was extremely successful for a time and made millions before the age of forty.  But in the end his closest colleagues turned on and ousted him, perhaps because they feared they too would someday become victims of his egocentric nature.

 

Such individuals are often held up as models of success by the media because of their ability to create wealth.

 

In our focus to attain what is viewed as a successful life many of us lead driven lives.  We might go on time management courses to learn to manage our time in more efficient ways and find that the time we save we then fill with more things to do rather than use such time to allow our very being to express in unique and creative ways.  We learn techniques to help us with procrastination very often because we are half-hearted about what we are engaged in trying to do and we force ourselves to ignore our heart until there comes a point when we no longer know what our heart wants even though we are desperate to know.   There are those of us who, even when we work out in an exercise program, do so in order to attain some future result.  In this way, like so many ways, personal development can become a way of avoiding life and living life for a future, that when it comes, is focused on the future, that when it comes is focused on the future.  In this way the focus is always on a sense of self that is never really fully present.  In the higher stages of personal and spiritual development the individual whose focus is on attainment will be challenged to move to the opposing side of the energy spectrum.  The continued focus on goals and achievements as the driver of your life’s energy will begin to work against you.

 

One of the worlds greatest spiritual teachers was the Chinese sage Lao Tzu.  Here is some spiritual life coaching wisdom for the A1 personality type who is forever on the go.

 

Be aware of your masculine nature but by keeping the feminine way.

You shall be to the world like a canyon

Where the Virtue eternal abides and go back to become a child.

 

These spiritual words of wisdom that deepen you spiritual development have lasted centuries.  Lao Tzu advises what any good spiritual life coach would advise.  This is

 

Be aware of your masculine nature by keeping the feminine way.

 

Lao Tzu isn’t simply talking about being a man, and certainly not about a man who is driven by the masculine energy of go getting.  The energy of the masculine is needed.  It is the energy that creates and produces form.  It is the energy that allows things to be made manifest in this world of time and space.  The problem arises when the persona takes this energy and identifies with it and drives life forward with will power.  This masculine drive becomes one sided and imbalanced.  On a deeper level it becomes divided.  We see this division in the way we treat our home which is Mother Earth.  We see this imbalance in and what is termed the battle of the sexes.  This battle is an external manifestation of an inner dynamic.

 

Here are some indications that you are following the feminine way.

 

• you are not in a hurry.
• you are contented.
• you do not resist change.
• you are willing to be patient.

 

 

The feminine way is a state that you enter, and with trust and practice, it can becomes a station.  It becomes another one of several phases of spiritual development which you can then enter at will but in a feminine way.  This is the way in which you transit the stages of spiritual development with least resistance and with least pain and suffering.  A state of spiritual awareness comes and goes whereas a station is a spiritual state that you can enter at will and choose to remain in.  You learn to enter that station and it becomes a stage of spiritual development that is available to you.    Spiritual Life Coaching guides you into the ability to enter such states and stations.  It is a focus on the feminine way which is served by the dynamic of the masculine.  It is a focus of trust in the boundless that creates boundaries through which can be expressed the paradox of infinity within the finite.  The expression of this infinite becomes finite through the dynamic of the masculine.

 

 

 

Youth and Time – John William Godward

 

A Spiritual Life coach invites balance and the flow of the masculine serving the feminine moving from the inner to the outer.  Our secular culture is heavily focused on the drive to be seen as doing and becoming successful.  This drive to success can become a form of addiction and a form of chaos.   We see this presently happening within the world financial markets that were driven for a long period by fear and greed of a few at the price of the many.  These are the very people who are held up as models of success.    This addiction, like any form of addiction, spirals out of control both individually and collectively.  This spiralling out of control is a kind of energetic rebalancing.  It causes suffering in many peoples lives.  It causes a sense of confusion, loss and absence of meaning and purpose especially in the second half of life.

 

The sooner that you are able to learn how to balance the masculine and feminine within you the less you will be thrown off centre.  The sooner that you learn to move with the flow of these energies on a daily basis the more healthy your life will become.  You will not be a one sided doer with the result that you become dour and your life becomes more and more absent of meaning and real purpose other than activity for activities sake.  The inner life expresses in the outer.  Is your life driven or is it content and expressive?  The personality becomes radiant, not because you are an achiever  within a given cultural norm, but because the flow of your inner life expresses freely and creatively within the form that you are and are here to be.  You engage with creative activity and not simply in productivity which is activity as a means to and end.  This productivity tends to be future based and tends in many ways simply to result in either pleasure or satisfaction but not in spiritual or personal growth.

OTHER GREAT CONTENT Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.

spiritual growth and development
SPIRAL DYNAMICS - Another map of personal and spiritual development for your consideration
SPIRITUAL ARTICLES FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS - Spiritual Development articles related to student life
THE NEXT STAGES IN HUMAN EVOLUTION - We are now entering the twenty-first century and the third millennium. A perceptible feeling hangs in the air that the world is rapidly approaching one of history’s decisive seismic shifts. Changes are looming ahead o