Breathing Underwater
What is it to relax into the seeming paradox of our need to participate and the insufficiency of our participation.
The Mystery of Growth: Effort and Surrender in Adult Development
Recently I was speaking with a colleague with deep experience in adult development. The conversation was rich, varied, and filled with morsels I'm still chewing on. "How it happens is a mystery." This one in particular sticks with me. He was talking about our understanding of what supports adult development, what enables stage [[1]] shifts and calling out the mystery of it. It connects with something by Thomas Keating (a great mystic of our time), "In the beginning we have to make a lot of effort for spiritual growth just to find out that human effort does not work [[2]]."
In an age of information about increasing happiness, reducing suffering, optimizing our humanness, the ethos of both of these sentences lingers with me. What is it to hold the tension or may be better said, relax into the seeming paradox of our need to participate and the insufficiency of our participation.
The Paradox of Transformation