Five Difficult Ways to Transform Your Life for the Better
And why you don’t want to read this article
No really! I’m not kidding.
Do you truly want to read another piece about “Five Easy Ways to Transform Your Life?” Wouldn’t it be just another form of clickbait? Change never comes easy. It’s always met with resistance first, then avoidance, rationalization, justification, resignation, and the worst of all, apathy.
Change is hard, scary, difficult. But it’s necessary if we’re serious about transformation. So why pretend it’s easy? Why shill it off on the public like anyone can do it for just three easy payments of $9.99.
Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s be honest. Transformation can be painful, it’s almost always a long continuous slog through the ick of what we don’t want to look at, talk about, face up to.
But it doesn’t mean we’re wrong for avoiding it. It’s just that we got this way through years of conditioning that all our happiness and joy in life comes from improving our external circumstances.
I’ve written numerous times about how the pain and discomfort of trauma is necessary to motivate us toward a life of healing and growth. I’ve provided the example of the lobster shedding its exoskeleton because it’s outgrown it, and the pressure it feels is the lobster’s motivation for shedding and undergoing a period of extreme vulnerability while it grows a new and larger shell. The point is, that the lobster’s discomfort is its motivation for growth, and that our pain is our motivation for growth.
But I’m beginning to see it differently. Yes, pain is an excellent motivator. But our pain only motivates us so far. It leads us to therapists, encounter groups, shamans and ayahuasca ceremonies, and self-help books and gurus. But once we reach a point where we can cope with life, where we feel comfortable in our skin, the healing process tends to move to the back burner.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to the DEEPER side of things to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.