Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Which method or technique is best for personal growth?

I've consciously dedicated the past eight years of my life to personal growth (personal development, spiritual growth, spiritual path -- whatever you want to call it...) and lots of people have been asking me which methods or techniques I have found to be the best. There is no easy answer to this question because everyone has to find what works best for them. (Believe me, there is tremendous value in the active search itself...). So instead, I'd like to highlight two characteristics that I believe such a method or technique should have:

A: it should increase the client's self-knowledge or self-awareness (Socrates: Know thyself...) with information that the client can use to take constructive action to improve whatever it is he/she wants to improve (happiness, health, flexibility...). The reason for this is simple: as soon as I know why something is happening to me, I can do something about it (conversely, I cannot do anything about something I do not know about...).

B: it should strengthen the individual's ability and willingness to make active choices about his/her behavior (one of the main reasons I like holotropic breathwork is because it does exactly this -- if I want to go deeper in the state of altered consciousness, I make the choice to breathe more intensively, and if it's too much for me at the moment, I slow down. Conversely, I am not a big fan of anything like hypnosis or past-lives therapies because they offer no such choice. Another example is the difference between PBSP vs. Family Constellations: PBSP is completely client-driven, whereas family constellations depend a lot on the input of other people that are present)

As I have written before, the best method or technique I found for my personal development is a combination of holotropic breathwork and PBSP (I've written about both of these in previous posts). I also threw in a little Rolfing for the physical body and over the course of about 3-5 years this personal growth cocktail has improved my life immensely. What are or will be the ingredients of your personal growth mix?

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