A simple model of psycho-spiritual growth

There are many like it, but this one is "mine"

Maps and models of the path are great, until they aren’t. I’ve benefited from a number of them, including the three stage path in Vajrayana, and Michael Taft’s “Hacking the Stack” model of phenomenological experience. But here I want to present a simple model that I’ve found¹ helpful in thinking about how two aspects of growth fit together: psychological growth at the level of your ordinary sense of self, and spiritual growth at the transpersonal level. Now of course this model will be an oversimplification; specifically, it definitely does not capture very much of the depth and nuance on the transpersonal side. Nonetheless, I think it does a nice job explaining how these two aspects of development fit together and ultimately reinforce one another. So without further ado, I present to you, “The Flywheel of Psycho-Spiritual Growth”:

The basic idea here is as follows — when we start out on our psycho-spiritual journey, we are suffering from traumas, undigested emotions, our own shadow, etc. The path is moving toward greater integration and wholeness, bringing all our parts together and harnessing them for our own flourishing and eventually for the benefit of everyone around us.

We might start out meditating², engaging in practices like concentration (e.g. breath meditation) or noting (bringing mindfulness to moment-to-moment experience and tracking what’s going on) or “do nothing” style (simple resting as the field of awareness and letting everything come and go). One thing that happens right away might be called “distraction” — the mind is really busy and you get derailed from your basic meditative algorithm through different kinds of mental content. Often it’s difficult to disengage from mental content, and the less integrated you are (i.e. the more undigested bits you have), the harder it is to disengage. In fact, one chief challenge of sitting is often how much of those unpleasant undigested bits there are floating around in awareness, and sitting just brings those up. This can feel kind of shitty³.

Now with time and practice, you start building up a tolerance to just sit with those uncomfortable bits. You might find that all of a sudden you have an increased capacity to feel things and it’s easier to rest in awareness. Then you can apply that capacity to various modalities of inner work.

In different sorts of inner work, the goal is to access those submerged feelings, traumas, aspects of self and fully feel them. It’s difficult to do this at first, because the pain and grief associated with becoming aware of these aspects of self is really difficult to bear. You might even notice how much of our personality structure and habits and energy are caught up in avoiding feeling those feelings. But the only way out is through. And as you meditate and develop the tolerance to sit with unpleasant stuff, you are more and more able to bring all this stuff into the light.

As you bring more of this stuff into awareness, they gradually become integrated, And lo and behold, once they are more integrated, they stop being so intrusive and unruly. They stop unconsciously steering your thoughts and behaviors. You feel better. As Carl Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." In other words, your mind will become more amenable to a sort of control… precisely the kind of control that makes various meditative practices easier and less unpleasant. My teacher, Dan Brown, would say that “to deconstruct the self, first you have to have a self.”

As you can see, it’s a flywheel — meditation makes therapy easier, which in turn makes meditation easier. And in fact, you can think of it as an ascending/descending spiral as much as a flywheel, because the fruits of meditation involve greater contact with the transpersonal realm.⁴. So in conclusion, do both! These are two great tastes that taste great together. Or maybe more accurately, they are all one taste.

1. I haven’t seen anyone present this model in quite this way, but I’m not sure it’s mine, hence the quotes around mine in the title of this post. In any case I didn’t choose these thoughts, they just appeared in awareness one day. Spooky!

2. I’m picking meditation as the starting point, but it does not have to be. The starting point could just as easily be conventional psychological work. That’s why it’s a cycle! Start from wherever you’d like.

3. Interestingly it often seems like sitting with negative emotions can be more difficult than sitting with physical pain. We often invest a lot more energy in avoiding feeling our feelings. Isn’t that strange? Like when you look closely at the unpleasantness of anxiety, for instance, it’s just some tightness in the chest, clenching of the stomach, some associated thoughts. Compare that to stubbing your toe really badly. It seems like the latter is more intense in valence, and yet most people would much rather stub their toes. Is it that the former takes up more space in the mind? I’m not sure what explains this. To be fair, it’s hard to compare these different types of pains to one another. Maybe if we find the right dimension of comparison all types of discomfort are well-ordered on a spectrum.

4. Shinzen Young characterizes this spiral as moving inward and not upward, toward the source. Immanence and transcendence are not opposed — in fact they are the same. Where you end up is a greater intimacy with the mundane and finding the sacredness within it. Nirvana/awakening isn’t some place you fly off to - it’s always right here (another phrase Dan would often repeat).