I’ve helped numerous people undergo personal transformations and make major changes in life including:
- Relationship changes (divorces and new relationships)
- Career shifts and dream jobs (usually making more money, but that’s never the goal)
- Exploring new places and improving living situations
- Resolving traumas and childhood wounds
- Improving health habits (better nutrition, breath work, etc.), and more
There is so much that is possible, and the way I point people towards their personal transformation marries together all kinds of tools and techniques.
But first, let’s discuss what exactly we’re transforming, and why so few people succeed.
The Reality of Transformation
People come into this world, and their personality, body, and interests are defined by two main things:
- Biology
- The environment
The environment can be broken down into two central elements:
- The social environment (the people and society and the forms of interaction taught which showed a person how to survive)
- The physical environment (the demands and opportunities of the physical environment that had to be overcome or could be taken advantage of to live)
In adapting to these environmental conditions based on the biological interest to survive, a person developed physically and created an ego to handle those unique circumstances.
However, what happens when a person travels to new circumstances where the rules are new or vastly different?
What happens to a person who learned incorrect ideas and beliefs that don’t apply to the social and/or physical environments that they inhabit?
How does someone break out of these old adaptions that are limiting them?
They choose to transform themselves.
The Biological Transformation
The reality of personal transformation is that it is a biological transformation.
I feel like science has pointed us to this reality for some time.
Neurons that fire together wire together.
This is a commonplace phrase.
You’re building and rebuilding your brain every day with how you think.
Neuroscience points us to fact when it offers data about what gratitude does for the human body. Think more grateful thoughts, and you’re changing your brain and nervous system.
The fact that personal transformation is a physiological change is a powerful point because it underscores why so many people fail at it, resorting to their accustomed behavior patterns.
Their biology is entrenched in those thought and emotional patterns. It doesn’t change quickly.
If you want to become a great business leader but you grew up isolated and focused on individual pursuits, your basic ego program will struggle to step into a communal activity in business and leading people.
Where is the struggle happening?
In your biology.
It’s trying to go down the same neurological and hormonal pathways that it has always chosen from ten, twenty, thirty, or even more years of practice.
Now today in your inner work or in a session with someone like me, you’re derailing that train of thought for the first time.
And it’s not a matter of just thinking differently.
That train of thought is towing a cargo of emotions and body sensations that give you a whole body experience.
Just consider someone who is afraid of public speaking or doing presentations.
Their body tenses up. Their breath shortens. Fear takes over because of a past bad experience, doing something different from their ego program, or doing something that is brand new.
The presentation goes poorly as the person stumbles over words, struggles with questions, and races to finish the presentation and leave the room.
Those internal limitations have real physical impacts and real social impacts on relationships, careers, and more.
But if you want to personally transform yourself, you learn that you don’t have to believe these physical impulses.
The Animal Within: Retraining the Primal Instinctual Body
No Magic; Lots of Powerful Work
I know you’ve landed on a blog with the terms “spiritual awakening process” as a title and my title is spiritual teacher.
But let’s forget the term “spiritual.”
It seems magical.
Let’s focus on personal transformation as no different than getting into shape.
You are at a certain level of physical ability.
You can do some things, but not others.
You step into the gym, and you lift the weights you can lift. You find out where you are at.
We start where you are, and then we gradually build you up from there so that you can be stronger for your whole life.
At the same time, you’ll learn how to let other biological patterns break down.
This is unique to personal transformation.
While you’re learning to be that leader who is confident, you’re also unlearning all the past lessons that made you anxious, doubtful, and suspicious.
That doesn’t mean they stop over night.
It means you co-exist with them without reacting to them while you engage with these new patterns.
How do you do that?
Coming back to awareness.
The Power of Awareness
The power of coming back to awareness is that this is where you have choice. This is where your freedom is, which is what I’ve talked about extensively on this blog.
In the space of awareness/the observer, you observe your internal dialogue.
That’s it.
It’s a purely neutral space.
You never lose awareness; your attention only becomes enmeshed or re-enmeshed in whatever patterns you’re used to reinforcing.
If you’re doubting your upcoming public speech, you come back to awareness by noticing the doubts.
That little bit of shift takes away some of the reinforcement, weakens the pattern. But the fear likely continues.
So you breathe to help re-regulate your body.
You do this thousands of times, and little by little, that old fear pattern disappears and the new pattern of confidence you’ve practiced is now available to you.
In short, you choose to give any limiting pattern more force by believing it, or you can come back to awareness to detach and de-energize it.
Then you can redirect your attention and internal will to create new patterns.
It’s that simple.
Simple doesn’t mean easy.
Getting Support in Your Personal Transformation
You don’t have to believe in God.
You don’t have to believe in energy.
You don’t have to believe in the Universe–whatever that means nowadays.
The process of personal transformation means learning to believe in a toolset and using it to the fullness of your ability.
That second part is important.
Half-assing a toolset does not give you any results. You get no credit for climbing half the mountain. You’re still not on the top of the mountain much less the other side.
With that said, learning to see that you are free to change and transform is enlivening and empowering.
The better you get at the tools I point you towards, the more limited you realize you are. Which is ironic, but that’s how it goes.
The more limited you realize you are, the more insatiable your longing to be free.
The Artform of Transformation Support
There are steps that I follow when I’m helping people transform their internal and external lives.
One basic step is that any external changes must be meaningful to transforming the internal world.
A lot of times people attempt to fix their outer world experience to soothe an upset internal world.
This doesn’t work. This is a kind of denial.
For example, many people succeed at changing external things–jobs, relationships, living situations, etc. However, the minute the external world becomes something that they don’t want, then they go right back into the old pain and discomfort that they’d sought to leave.
So when I’m helping someone with a divorce, career change, starting therapy on the right foot, becoming a parent, and many, many other very practical things, I’m listening closely. I’m listening to hear what the limiting ego beliefs are, what is most meaningful for them, and what path will be most sustainable for their personal transformation.
From there, some of the steps/questions are:
Where are you now in life? What’s your relationship status, career status, etc.?
Where do you want to be?
What resources do you have? (Time, money, social connections, education, etc.)
What resources do you need?
What’s the first small step that you need to take?
The Power of Incremental Transformation
The interesting thing about making big life changes is that they’re all little steps.
Most people know that.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” is a saying that attributed to a Chinese proverb.
But a lot of people struggle with pacing these incremental steps. They often fall into the trap of choosing the steps that their egos’ and bodies’ prefer.
I help people see these traps and do the next step that they need to do, despite ego protests.
And these ego protests aren’t just ideas.
No.
The ego and its limiting ideas are a full-bodied experience. It can feel like stepping into an electric fence.
The Other Side of the Electric Fence
In supporting people in their personal transformation, I help them get to the other side.
How Do You Want to Transform?
There are lots of ways to transform yourself.
How do you want to change?
Who do you want to be?
In surrendering the ego and limiting beliefs, who ever it is possible for you to be is possible.
I can point the way if you are ready to do the work.
If you want to learn more about support in your personal transformation, feel free to reach out.
For more about me, you can click these links:
About Jim Tolles
