Personal transformation is a term that includes an array of practices that may heighten and change your life. Personal transformation can be physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological. The Integral Movement classifies personal transformation as any expression of the inborn desire to evolve and grow.
Psychological transformation refers to the discarding of beliefs and practices that one has evolved or outgrown. This could vary from a change in your religious or philosophical convictions to facing dependencies or problem habits that you are seeking to break.
Transformation of the physical might call for shedding pounds, plastic surgery, new clothes or a workout plan, or something less radical such as new cosmetics or hair style. A simple gesture such as purchasing new shoes or an updated shirt and tie can have a far deeper impact on the manner in which we consider the self.
Transforming the emotional body is about shifting a strong negative feeling into a more positive feeling. The transformation might lie in freedom from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, using medication to treat clinical depression or anxiety, clinical counseling or other kinds of therapeutic modalities that transform negative emotional baggage into something more useful or tolerable.
Transforming the spiritual body is the most moving of personal transformations as this major change embraces endless opportunities of change at a core level. In the spiritual stage, a person has the potential to discard the identified personality and shift to a unique and different being. In contrast to psychological, physical, or emotional transformation this kind of change may happen very fast and be enduring. The Sudden School of Zen defines transformation of the spirit as the complete and sudden attainment of enlightenment. Sudden nirvana is considered within range of spiritual personal transformation though lots of spiritual schools proclaim a “sudden school” transformation to be uncommon.
We don’t have control of the events outside of us. We may think we have control over them, but we really don’t. What we do have control over is the frame of reference with which I view the events of life. And as I open my frame of reference into vastness, into possibility, and into God’s love, I can begin to see God manifesting in naturein everything that’s happening, as a child, as my child playing.
We’re way out of conceptualization at this point. I mean, we’re not talking about this intellectually, because we’re not in an ivory tower. We’re in life. And we’re experiencing this happening, because we’re not bound. What makes freedom? This is a very, very important thing for us to face: What really makes freedom? It’s not lacking things; that doesn’t make you free. It’s not necessarily having things, either. What makes you free is that you are directing yourself. You’re not controlling the circumstance outside of you, you’re utilizing it. If you’re free, everything happening is a vehicle of enlightenment. So, let’s say I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m filled with anxiety. I realize that I’ve been tossing and turning, so I think, “Hmm, this is a drag. Okay, what can I do?” You know what? I can remember what helps my being to flow. I can remember the feeling of flowing in my life. I lay my head back down remembering that, and it changes the whole experience.
We talked about what happens in that situation in our last conversation. Because of my orientation, over time I end up creating eventsstringing together circumstances that actually become my reason for feeling anxiety. I’m actually a Co-Creator in my own response patterns, which are fixed, in this case, in anxiety.
Let’s say I have a super-structure of being upset, worried, afraid, and anxious. In that situation, I’m actually going to let anxiety select what I focus on over time in my life, so that I can find something to focus on and say, “That’s why I’m anxious! I knew I was anxious because of something, for some reason.”
Well, in my super-structure, there’s a relationship between that anxiety and the inimical universe. Obviously, if you live in an inimical universe, you’re going to be very anxious because it’s pretty frightful.
You’re a little boy who’s afraid. I mean, you have a frightened little boy inside of you. And you have developed, as I did, a tremendous intellect to be able to work with, to insulate, and to protect that little boy. That intellect thinks it is controlling circumstances of your life. You’re maneuvering, and you’re a very swift computer, and so you can rationalize all kinds of things. Yet, in the middle of the night, you wake up anxious.
Yogi Sean is the student of Swami Ramananda and the author of Dancing in the Fire of Transformation, The Everyday Sanyasin, and Experiments in Awareness, a workbook for yogis.