Sunday Reading 24 June 2007

Personal development means different things to different people. For some people a metaphor for the process is best described by the growth of a plant. Personal growth is a natural development given the proper mental and emotional food and social surroundings, just as a plant develops and grows through receiving the proper nutrients and a healthy environment. For other people an engineering metaphor best describes the process, in which you use suitable techniques to create the self that you envisioned beforehand. In yet other cases an artistic metaphor is more appropriate. I’m sure you’ve heard of sculpting as removing excess material until the figure that was already in the material is revealed. In the artistic metaphor, you remove things that have accreted in your personality until the you who is already there is revealed.

The artistic view of personal growth is thousands of years old. Yoga, for example sees evolution as a process of removing barriers so that the pre-existing self is revealed. The majority of the practices involved in yoga are essentially ways to remove the barriers between your ego and your inner self. This is one of reasons I put such an emphasis on meditation. It is the most effective method I’ve found to become aware of and clear the mental and emotional barriers that keep us in an unconscious state.

An illustration of removing psychological barriers to enhance personal development is in Lyman Reed’s interesting comparison between the twelve step programs and the basis of the GTD program in Is it Ego or is it intuition?

One aspect of personal development is the process of increasing your freedom of action by ridding yourself of habitual ways of thinking and acting that inhibit the expression of who you are. These are often the result of trying to act in accord with the dictates of popular culture. In the West, one expression of this is the massive reliance on television as a way to pass the time between eating, sleeping, and working. In The Amazing Effects of a Weekend Without Television John Wesley discovers there can be life without tv.

Another aspect of gaining freedom is in clearing the clutter from your physical and emotional environment. In Clear your clutter - and your mind Lila Das Gupta takes a look at how clearing the physical clutter affects clearing mental clutter. In Are You Leaking? Christine Kane takes a more in depth look at how emotional clutter can affect you.

Thank you to everyone who has shared links with Shards in the past two weeks

• Joel at Fearless Dreams in Why We Need Blogs that Make Us Think and Feel
• Terry Starbucker at Ramblings From a Glass Half Full in High Vibes and Good Demeanors
• Lyman Reed at Creating a Better Life in Five Favorite Personal Development Reads (and Listens) This Week
• Aaron Potts at Today is that Day in How to Get High (Vibrations, that is!)
• Liz Strauss at Successful Blog(gers) in the SOB Business Cafe 06-22-07
• Stephen Coley at S.R. Coley: Developing My Mind and The Web in Today’s Must Download - 06/23/07

Technorati Tags: freedom, consciousness, clutter, twelve steps, gtd, models of personal development, yoga, meditation, Christine Kane, Fearless Dreams, Creating a Better Life, Today is that Day, Successful Blog, Pick the Brain, Developing My Mind and The Web

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