Personal development is self-defeating if you attend to one dimension of yourself at the expense of another dimension. At best you will experience lopsided growth. At worse, you will become dysfunctional and obsessive.
All areas of life (emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental) work synergistically with each other. When one area suffers, they all suffer. That is why when you experience fear (emotional realm), your heart rate increases (physical realm), with perhaps rapid and shallow breathing and nervous perspiration.
If my spiritual consciousness improves, so does my communication, and leadership. If I take time for relaxation, my time management improves and vice versa. If I take time to refocus at a spiritual retreat center, I have more energy and direction when I get back to my professional life. If my inner world is working, my outer world cannot be far behind.
Let me tell you a story about myself that sheds a little more light on this, an experience that was pivotal in shaping my personal development. When I was 20 years old, I was a professional saxophone player. I traveled around the United States in a nine-piece band. We performed in nightclubs in various cities, usually for a period of one to three weeks.
At the time, I had no spiritual life to speak of, no concept of eating smart and healthy, and I wasn’t thinking at all about personal development issues. I would play the gig each night in a smoke filled bar, eat out in a restaurant three times a day, and watch TV. No foundation at all. And then a few stressors hit me. My girlfriend left me, the band broke up, my father died and I got sick. Really sick. Three weeks in a hospital kind of sick.
Western medicine interceded. But the doctors took no account of any factor in my life, other than my physical condition. I was given huge amount of powerful anti-inflammatory drugs that had adverse side effects. The doctors treated the outward symptom, but ignored the underlying condition.
No one asked if I exercised. (No). No one asked if I was under stress. (Yes). No one asked if I was eating properly. (No). And no one asked if I had an inner life, or if I did yoga or meditated. (No to all of the above). What kind of doctors were these, anyway? Definitely not holistic doctors.
Fortunately and paradoxically for me, I suffered. It was almost unbearable. But that experience pushed me into a metamorphosis connecting me to the inner dimensions of my self. Inspired, I started exercising (physically and mentally), I started eating in a healthy manner (with supplements).
I learned everything I could about consciousness reading volumes of metaphysics, Eastern and Western, plus the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz. And add to this a little yoga and meditation and traveling to India ten times and guess what?
The chronic problem that doctors said would plague me forever had vanished. I even managed to reverse the damage from the prescription drugs.
This reinforced in me the understanding that we cannot compartmentalize our lives. We cannot progress physically if we are ignoring the emotional, mental, and spiritual realms of our life.
Spiritual, Physical, Mental, and Emotional Balance
As spiritual beings, we have to realize that we have physical bodies and minds for a reason. It is through our bodies that we can gain awareness of the inner worlds.
And it is through our bodies that we gain awareness of how the inner emotions affect the body, such as the rapid pulse or shallow breathing, or chills, or nervous perspiration. And we can also observe how consciousness and awareness can reverse all this.
We learn poise. We experience how meditation can slow the mind and the body.
David Bohm, the quantum physics theorists, wrote extensively on wholeness and oneness. He said that we, as a civilization, could not survive if we focused on one problem at the expense of other concerns.
An example would be to increase the Federal budget for fighting crime but cut the budget for education. Or increase the military budget at the expense of the environment. Everything is interconnected.
Bohm is the person who keyed the term, “implicate order,” which is as clear of an example of oneness as you will ever find. This was later expanded into the concept of a holographic universe.
When he met the philosopher and mystic, Krishnamurti, they found common ground when Bohm said that existence was a totality. Krishnamurti grabbed his arm, and said, “That’s it.”
A book that examines the mechanics of consciousness and this totality more than any other book I have ever come across is God Speaks
All souls (atmas) were, are and will be in the Over-Soul (Paramatma).
Souls (atmas) are all One.
All souls are infinite and eternal. They are formless.
All souls are One; there is no difference in souls or in their being and existence as souls.
Can you fathom what it means that all souls (and that means you, too) are infinite and eternal? And that they are formless? Remember those lines next time you are stressed out.
That to me is holistic. Contemplating those lines connects me to my source of being. No wonder Meher Baba said, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” After all, what’s to worry about? We’re infinite and eternal.
Personal development works best if the growth and development is from all dimensions simultaneously. Coincidentally, I was on a site a couple days ago about Buddhism and it said all eight parts of Buddha’s Eightfold path should be developed simultaneously.
Anyway, back to personal development for the rest of us. Here’s a question to contemplate: What good is it to learn public speaking if you haven’t learned poise, body language, concentration, a sense of humor, creativity, passion, and an inner sense of who you are?
See my article on holistic communication, if you have not already done so, for an example of an immortal speech that embodies this to the highest potential.
What good is self-esteem if you don’t know the self? It can lead to obsessions and distractions that could waste a lifetime doing what you don’t really want to be doing.
And what good is the ability to meditate if you don’t have motivation to live life to the fullest? We are dynamic beings made up of dynamic systems that are interconnected and synergistic.
We are connected to each other (see my post on consciousness) and that is as good as reason as any to want to communicate, to serve others and make a difference to the world.
What good is time management if we are not on the right course? What good is a jet if it takes you to the wrong destination? And what good is anything if there isn’t love?
If we pursue our personal development with a perspective of wholeness, then the end result will not lead us onto the wrong path. We will experience life with passion, with all cylinders clicking.
