TOPIC
The human group - session 96 - how to grow up
Have you grown up? Do we grow up? Does our society help us grow up?
What is growing up?
Is it to become wise, is it to adjust our identities, our services to the community? Is it to learn from our mistakes and develop ourselves?
If we are to be the future elders and wisdom keepers then we must learn what it is to grow.
In this moment in history there is the popular sentiment of ‘go with the flow’, ‘follow your intuition’, ‘live the life you want to live’.
Does this serve us in growing up? Does it have a particular part to play?
When do we control ourselves and when do we surrender to ourselves to grow up?
Let us jam away with this ancient wisdom from which we are where the paint meets the canvas.
How do we grow up?
REFLECTION
How are you growing? Where are you growing?
This week’s discussion’s were deep, personal and cosmic with a whispering edge of universal truth. At times it was confronting and triggering as we explored boundaries as growing thresholds in which to practice crossing. Never being a static learning in which it is neatly completed that we file away into our tool box but a constant exercise in which to practice into an eventual fully integrated habit.
We spoke of leaning into fear and shedding shells of identity and the continual proliferation of our specialness, until we eventually surrender to being a regular human being.
Acceptance and understanding becoming avenues of growth and the more obvious childhood growth into various freedoms within society and becoming an autonomous individual. To the internal expansive growth, discovering different aspects of ourselves, self-development and unlocking our various potentials.
‘Just beyond yourself there is a path that beckons, half a step to self forgetting, the rest restored by what you’ll meet. Just beyond yourself. - David Whyte.
There is intentional growth; activating the will to grow; stepping beyond ourselves, commitment, discipline, work, planning, visioning and executing.
Then there is growth that happens to us, when our natural aspects of being a human activate due to our linear growth; age and environment/context.
Eventually we then have everything in-between where we go through crisis, relationships, projects, failures and we choose how we wish to carry them. We choose whether to grow or no.
There is also a cyclical nature to our growth; our identities expanding, building, contracting and collapsing. The cycle of identities, emerging with relevance becoming whole and complete. Then coming to a natural death, irrelevance crumbling the foundations, us holding on until we let go and then we a reborn once again into the fool archetype.
There is a spiralling to our growth when combining the linear external with the cyclical internal. The linear is the quantitative physical measurement and the cyclical is the expansive emergence and contraction of our internal evolution.
This internal development more easily mapped with symbolic sciences such as the tarot. Travelling through the archetypes to a completion and then returning to the starting point once again, each cycle adding to all that came before. Arguably beyond this individual life as well, for death on the linear could simply be another beginning for the cyclical internal.
Spiritual/soul growth to which we have very little guidance at this present moment. Therefore growing up consists of collecting, having access to and developing skills for the material world. Spiritual evolution becomes a wandering accident sitting upon each individual’s choice.
This is where as a society we could use some structure and guidance. How to do the growing that lasts into the next life and contributes to the overall spiritual development?
We can bring these theories of growth out into the macro scale: the growth of society? Does society grow through identities? Is there a connection to our missing spiritual structures/internal growth guidance and our attachment to irrelevant and damaging identities? Making the case that our society which is heavily attached to a set of values that have become damaging to our environment and our mental and physical health. Where is the spiritual authority teaching us the power and value of letting go?
We dived into the intimate growth thresholds of boundaries. How and when do we stand up for ourselves? When do we fight back and when do we allow for other’s evolution without our intervention?
We crossed into differences between the way that different genders interact and step over boundaries and that there is a necessity to secret men’s business and secret women’s business as we have different ways and extents in which we receive the world. How do we grow up and create the space for others to grow as well? How do we stand up for the vulnerable in which empowers their own expression and autonomy?
David Deida the author of ‘the superior man’ speaks of men needing to activate masculine characteristics such as will, discipline and control in order to grow up, as men happen to nature. For women they must surrender to the feminine characteristics of acceptance, trust, forgiveness and flow as nature happens to women or women or more accurately the feminine is nature itself.
In this unbridled sentiment of consumerism and ‘live the life you want to live’, there is little discipline activated to resist our animalistic desire leading to the raping and pillaging of the feminine.
In order to grow up as men we need to protect the environment and our women from our wild unbridled man. This is perhaps how we become men of integrity.
With the space held with integrity, the feminine can surrender to nature serving and unearthing abundant and fertile wonders.
Deep work this week. Collective discussion is a constant surprise from which universal wisdom is jammed into a sense-making we can all digest.
Thank you all for participating and contributing your perspective.
Love
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