The Self-Transforming Mind
Robert Kegan, a professor at Harvard University, has been illuminating and researching three different stages of adult development. I have found his template to be quite helpful, as long as we remember that the map is not the territory, that life is profoundly mysterious and unpredictable. We do not go through these stages in a linear way-we swoop and cycle through them like a swallow, spending some time in a more mature stage, and then suddenly dropping back into a much younger one.
In the earlier stages of development, when I am less mature, less grounded and connected with myself, I tend to give myself away. Your opinions, your perceptions, your judgments, become more important than mine. I can take in your feelings and your energy and make them mine, without even knowing that I am doing this. This is how we are in adolescence: acutely aware of everyone around us, and very dependent on their acceptance and approval. We are designed to grow through and beyond this stage, but many of us don’t. Or we retain fragments of ourselves that still experience life with the volatility and fragility of a teenager. We never really discover how to be fully and freely ourselves.
The highest stage in Kegan’s template is the self-transforming mind. In this stage I allow myself to be changed by you, in a way that is healing and liberating. But I can’t get to this stage by hopping over the one in the middle, which is the self-authoring mind. Before I allow myself to be deeply changed by you, I need to discover how to stay true to myself. I have to learn how to stay fully present and grounded in my own body, my natural limits, my inner experience, my true desires, and my own perceptions. As I learn to honour and trust myself more and more, I keep evolving and expanding. I learn that I can be myself, I can express myself, I can stay true to my own inner sense of integrity and clarity. I can be kind to myself, honour my own interests and longings, follow the flow of my own wisdom. I can live without the approval of the people around me, if I have to.
As I become more and more self-authoring, I start to feel the edges of this stage, the limits of what is possible here. If I allow the next stage to unfold, then the structure of my identity becomes much more fluid, less dense, more spacious and full of energy. This is the self-transforming mind. When I enter this way of being, something beautiful starts to happen. I am so open and undefended that I can allow you to deeply impact me. I don’t have to protect myself from the impact that you have on my being. I have actually entered a different relationship with life.
This is not the same as the way you impact me when I am not in my own centre. Before I learn to be fully myself, I am constantly being impacted by others, in ways that throw me off my centre and pull me away from my integrity and my own depths. When I live in the self-transforming mind, the impact you have on me happens with my full consent, out of love. I am no longer experiencing myself as someone solid and separate. I am aware of my uniqueness, but it does not make me separate. I experience myself as a flow, a river of experience and perception that is constantly changing. So when I meet you in this openness, your impact on me can change the way that I am. You become an essential part of my evolution. I am not afraid of how you might impact me-I welcome it.
In the flow of the self-transforming mind, I cannot know what is going to happen next. Life could impact me through you, through a song, through an insight, a dream, a meeting with a stranger. I leave the realm of what is safe, secure and predictable. I become deeply vulnerable to life, to possibilities that do not exist when I live inside a more fixed structure and identity.
It might take me a long time to evolve into the fluidity and luminous nature of the self-transforming mind. Does it really matter, how long it takes?
Old men and women ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
-adapted from T.S. Eliot, East Coker
with love,
Shayla
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Hi Shayla,
I was just thinking about you, and am so glad you’re still here in Nelson.
I don’t know why, but your post made me think of the profound impact our families have on us. Maybe I was thinking about this before I read your post, I don’t know. Sometimes the things that come out of my relatives’ mouths demonstrate how profoundly we’ve all influenced each other, in ways we don’t even realize.
Or sometimes in our communities, we all come up with the same desires and ideas at the same time, maybe expressed in different ways.
I love how organically we’re all connected. These reminders that appear sometimes feel like an affirmation that beautiful connection.
Thanks for posting, Shayla. I hope you’re well.