Individuation, Transpersonal Self-Work, & The Great Work
are NOT Self-Help, Self-Improvement, or Self-Actualization Programs
Everyone is wounded/traumatized to varying degrees. It comes with growing up in a world of ignorance where we are disconnected from Spirit and Nature, and pathology has become normalized. In this world, the false personality is worshipped at the expense of losing our Essence.
Anytime we look outside of ourselves for happiness and fulfillment, it points to a wound/hole within us where we have lost an aspect of our Essence and connection to the Divine.
Most people try to fill these holes unconsciously by looking externally for what they feel is missing and even dissociate from their suffering and emotional body via avoidance, distraction, addictions, mindless media consumption, and live cut off from the wisdom of their bodies in a head-centric existence.
In fact, most people suffer without even knowing that they are suffering because their mind/body connection has split, resulting in dissociation. This boy/mind split and disconnection from essence will increase in the age of A.I./Transhumanism and create more entry points for occult forces to come in.
One of the most challenging things for people is to face the suffering held within the body, which is armored under many unconscious defense mechanisms. Real shadow work is confronting your fears and wounds (most of them are unconscious) and addressing stored trauma in the body — which is far from a walk in the park.
You can read books and quotes about it and may understand it intellectually, but the work itself is painful, scary, messy, and requires immense courage, but not the courage of being outwardly “tough.” As Joseph Campbell said: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
It’s the courage not to resist discomfort, not to escape into the head or back into your comfort zone, but to be vulnerable and feel it all in the body – for the healing only happens through the body, beyond any intellectual analysis or “story-telling,” beyond any blame or victim mentality, even beyond any premature intellective “forgiveness.”
That’s where the rubber hits the road when it comes to transpersonal self-work, and the internal alchemical fire for transmutation gets ignited through the friction of discomfort and “conscious suffering,” as Gurdjieff and many other teachers talked about, without resisting it, escaping it, nor projecting it outwardly by blaming others or your situation.
This process of Individuation is not a generic self-improvement or self-help program that aims to strengthen the false personality and build a better “mask” to help you reach external goals and fulfill desires which mainly stem from the socially conditioned wounded ego-personality but will never result in lasting happiness, fulfillment or love. It’s not about making your “happiness” depend on external factors.
As Bud Harris wrote in ‘Becoming Whole’:
“It is much more than firming up, losing weight, having more positive thoughts, or solving problems and getting on with your life. Individuation is not self-actualization. The mythologist Joseph Campbell noted that self-actualization is for people with nothing better to do—people who don’t know their personal myth or deeper purpose in life.
The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for security, prestige[power], self-development, and even personal relationships, are not the primary values a person inspired by their deeper Self, or the thread of their individuation, lives for.”
This more profound inner process requires incredible self-ownership and responsibility for everything you feel. The only way out is through, and there IS light at the end of the tunnel as you realize on a deep embodied level (not just intellectually) that any fear you have had was just an illusion and didn’t reflect your true self (essence), or that you have taken on stuff that is not yours to carry; that you always did the best you could at any time of your life based on where you were at. That unconditional acceptance of what “is” opens the space for healing on much deeper levels.
For example, you may have intellectually realized what your “issues” are, but as long as it’s not embodied and released somatically through your body and felt deeply within you, all you create is a mask, armor, and buffers to avoid facing yourself, while believing you have already worked through your “stuff.” As Gurdjieff said, “You have to pay with yourself.” No one else can “pay” or do the work for you.
This discomfort is medicine and can be used as profound teaching if we don’t resist it. Not only that but feeling the discomfort in the body is the only place where true healing happens.
This process also requires faith and trust and, most of all – letting go. It’s a big lesson in gratitude and humbleness – to be utterly unconditionally grateful for every moment, to see the beauty in simple things, to see how nature teaches us every moment how to “be” if we can tune into the frequencies and energies which are hidden from us long as we live from the head, or are armored up.
The moment we resist the presence, which is all there is, and get into our heads (the tyrant within), we lose the connection to our essence and the Divine, the source that loves us unconditionally and nurtures, guides, and assists us in our individual healing process and this earthly experience during this Time of Transition.
Doing this work is the most important thing/practice in this day and age. We can complain about the world’s “issues” on social media until eternity (which sometimes starts to sound like a “never-ending flushing toilet”), but nothing changes if we don’t go where actual change happens and where it can get really uncomfortable: within and into the body, while also surrendering to what is happening on a bigger picture level in light of the evolution of consciousness beyond our personal processes and 3D Matrix distractions, political and otherwise.
It’s easy to get caught up in our own “shit” (when self/shadow-work becomes a narcissistic self-indulgent/self-pity process) or the world’s miseries if we forget what it is all about and what we are here to do as embodied sovereign individuals and frequency anchors, which is really about “Being.”
That process has profound effects on the outside world (which is not really “outside” or separated from “you”) with regards to reality creation based on your internal healing process as you are clearing your vessel for the Divine force to anchor itself, reconnecting you to who you truly are and your divine purpose.
Know that you are loved and assisted at all times and that no one can take away who and what you indeed are. However, to know this experience yourself in your own being requires sincerity and integrity in your own process to reconnect with your essence; this means not expecting anyone else to do the work for you, to be “saved,” nor expecting the world outside of you to change “for you.”
As long as we are not sincere with ourselves and our own process to honestly “know thyself” beyond the personality mask, we are disconnected from essence, which is the only true source of fulfillment, love, and wisdom that will result in “right action”. This source is an infinite untapped resource that is within us, waiting to be uncovered and remembered through our own sincere Work.
If you want to learn more about the process of Individuation, listen to our recent podcast, BECOMING WHO YOU ARE MEANT TO BE.
Godspeed.
Bernhard Guenther
