PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION: the need, the context.

Why would you consider PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION?

Do you want or need to change your life, or some significant aspects of it?

Do you want to change the way you are?

Are you ready to gradually or even radically change the way you are, you think, you behave, you feel, you relate to others, your view of life and of your future?

If you feel fully satisfied with your job, your partner/relationship, your current environment, your future perspectives, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER: you are profoundly happy, so there is strictly no need to change anything whatsoever. You can stay the way you are.

However if you feel you are missing out something in life, if you are not feeling fully fulfilled or truly happy, if you feel disconnected from your passion, lack drive or motivation, feel you are not using your full potential, keep running without ever reaching a state of true satisfaction, THEN WE DEFINITELY NEED TO TALK.

These factors indeed are strong indicators that you are not living the life you might or should be living. You are up to something different. You deserve more. You need to change the track you have been taking so far.

It is time to stop your old habits, to change your thinking, to change the feeling and the behavioral patterns that have been shaping your life so far.

START TRANSFORMING YOURSELF NOW.

START TRANSFORMING YOUR LIFE NOW. Open up to new possibilities.

I guide you in your PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION. Methods and tools include transformational coaching, therapeutical work for releasing obsolete/unhealthy patterns and for integrating your shadows, hypnosis, holistic energy work for vitality enhancement and for resilience enhancement, spiritual guidance and consciousness development.

All concepts and methods used in our work together can, if you wish, be placed into a conceptual framework in order to enhance your conscious understanding of healing, growth and PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION in a broader perspective.

CONTACT ME! We can start your PERSONAL TRANFORMATION right away.

In the following text you can learn more about PERSONAL TRANFORMATION and what it takes.

PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION: a primer.

  • Why transform your life?
    • The life you live: how it develops and how you get used to it.
    • Unexpected events in life: warning signals? Wake up calls?
    • How to know whether it is really the time to TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE?
  • How to transform your life?
    • From where to where?
    • Benefits
    • Requirements
    • Main obstacles
    • Tools and ingredients for PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

Initial warning.

The following text is a considerably simplified version of the way things could potentially be. Reality is way more complex than how I will briefly present things, and all different religious systems and spiritual movements have specific variants that take into account cultural and historical perspectives, and often are of a highly metaphorical or symbolic nature. In this text a way of looking at life and at (your) self is proposed by the author, as an option inviting you to adopt, if you want, just for a moment, a change in the way how you look at things. I invite you to open your mind, and to see to what extent what you read resonates with some of your personal experiences, insights, intuitions or understandings. The objective is to provide you with a simple and highly simplified framework explaining why PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION can or might be an option for some people, depending on a certain number of criteria that will be described. Maybe this process will appeal to you as well and maybe answer questions that you have.

The author has no pretention that what follows is ‘the truth’ (whatever that could be) – it is only a simplified summary of some of his views.

A. Why transform your life?

A1. The life you live: how it develops and how you get used to it.

Just imagine that out of the blue, from a perfect innocent and divine state, as you can recognize in most babies, you are ‘born’ (in order to avoid confusion: I mean physically born from parents on this planet in this world).

Some religions or spiritual approaches would state that maybe beyond your actual physical life in this material world, there is a part of you which is (relatively) permanent, some call this the divine spark or the soul, which in its evolution constantly seeks experience to learn from, and thus, for instance, ‘incarnates’ in this material world under certain conditions. You are born male or female, with specific qualities and with an individual potential that you might further develop in life, with a certain personality type and a given temperament.

I will not get into the discussion whether some of these elements are either genetically determined or will be shaped along with your evolution in life, or even a combination of both - how this exactly happens is beyond the scope of this text. The purpose here is solely to understand that in your life, here, you develop some kind of an individuality and a “specialization”, and that over time you can more and more differentiate yourself as a unique expression of the being that you are. Or you can even develop further develop into a unique expression of the universe, the divine nature, consciousness being fully one with it, but that is even more advanced matter (if this triggered your curiosity, do contact me! You can find more about this theme looking at “non duality” and related subjects). I will keep it simple for the moment, however these further steps are really worthwhile or even essential, depending on what you want to achieve, and how ambitious you are about your PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION...

After being born, you are being formally and informally educated by your parents and by significant people in your life, by teachers and educators, through the culture in which you grow up, both ethnically, geographically and (sub) culturally. As a child you choose either to adapt fully, to adapt partially or to resist adapting as expected, and instead, choosing to develop “your way”.

Life ongoingly offers us with experience, be it in the professional, social or personal part of our existence, which continue to shape how we are and how we develop, how we express our thinking, our emotions, our behavior, how we develop beliefs, assumptions, expectations (these are part of what is usually called our unique ‘map of the world’ – a core mental construct defining our identity). Inevitably we encounter so-called ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ experiences (I will not discuss here why I put these words between brackets – just take it this way for now).

We construct and solidify more and more strongly what can be called our ‘ego’ or ‘personality’ – let us define this as ‘who we think we are’ based on how we think, feel and act in life; and you will agree that indeed, there are often specific patterns that we seem to be repeating on these 3 levels, on a conscious or unconscious level. By the way, through the mere habit and repetition of these patterns, we actually feel invited or even compelled to continue them, engraining them more and more profoundly (as music is being engraved on a record, allowing it to be replayed at will). Gradually these patterns have become so much part of “us” that they define and confirm our “sense of being who we are”, and by keeping repeating them they give us a sense of identity to hold on.

We have the natural tendency to keep doing what has been perceived as nice and pleasurable, and to keep avoiding what has been perceived as not pleasant or painful. We think we are ‘free’ as we ‘do as we want’ and ‘do as we like’, but this is not really true. Basically we keep going for the same kind of experiences that previously we experienced as ‘positive’ or pleasant, and we keep avoiding those kind of experiences that we experienced as ‘negative’ or painful. So in fact what we call ‘freedom’ is just an illusion. It is not more than our “wanting” (read: “habit”) to continue our past habits in the future...

Here is where PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION comes in. Basically it is about REAL FREEDOM, meaning not continuing our past, but living new and fresh in every moment, free from limiting and restrictive aspects of our past. Some spiritual traditions or religions call this AWAKENING, as if all of a sudden we BECOME CONSCIOUS that all our life we have just been acting as a robot or machine, just continuing habitual patterns, limiting ourselves to a very small portion of what is really possible, restricting ourselves to a very tiny bit of our true essential nature, living a very poor version of what true life could and should really be.

It truly is as if we have been sleeping all along, and all of a sudden, realize what is really happening. At that moment we have a choice. As human beings we do have a FREE WILL: either we continue the way we always have been, or we decide to change. It is very simple, and this decision is always just up to us. We only need to decide.

When in this situation you decide NOT to continue the old patterns and to experience REAL FREEDOM instead, to EXPLORE LIFE MORE FULLY AND TO BECOME MORE OF WHO YOU REALLY ARE (or could be)– then you start the journey of your PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION.

This TRANSFORMATION is true profound METAMORPHOSIS.You start peeling off layer after layer that you have been constructing over time, ending up freeing the Butterfly you are (and always have been) from its cocoon.

A2. Unexpected events in life: warning signals? Wake up calls?

How do we gradually, of for some of us even more suddenly, decide for PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION? Well, the Universe (or whatever we choose to call the Intelligence or ‘Field’ around us) starts giving us some help when the time is ”right”.

Coincidences start to occur. Seemingly without reason, things start happening out of the blue, unexpectedly. Very gradually, mostly one at a time. Suddenly you meet a certain person, or something totally unexpected happens, or someone you know tells you something unusual, or you come across a book that intrigues you, you might even develop a physical symptom, or for some strange reason you start reading a text like this.

If you want to understand more about coincidences from a more scientifical point of view, you need to look into fields such as quantum physics and quantum mechanics, or you look to more simplified versions of these domains in more accessible books published on this subject. Be careful however and use your critical mind, it is NOT that simple as some people claim. ‘Positive thinking’, ‘Laws of Attraction’ and similar concepts are fantastic and great ingredients for PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION, but in my modest view NOT SUFFICIENT NOR COMPLETE. There is more to it to make it really work for you in your life in a systematic and lasting manner, but they truly are great starting points.

What is actually going on? Technically speaking, you are getting ‘signals’ or ‘wake up calls’ to provide you with the opportunity to reconsider the way you are living your life. Often we are not aware of the lack of true freedom we experience in our life, as we are so busy running around doing all we need to do the best we can, feeling responsible, guilty, having too high a workload professionally and personally to even sit back a moment and to reflect on what is going on. Life is just so complex and challenging that we rarely have a moment for ourselves, let alone take time to fundamentally reconsider if we are doing it the right way. Yes, this might happen during a vacation, or at the end of the year when we draft and proclaim our New Year resolutions, or if we have been out of ‘service’ because of a physical symptom, when our habitual patterns or day to day routine have been temporarily interrupted. But we quickly forget. Soon life is back with all its challenges and we find ourselves overwhelmed with plenty of things to focus on. We forget these moments of ‘deep insight’. Either our work, our boss, our partner or our environment put quite a lot of pressure on us, or we do put that pressure ourselves.

Basically many people live their life by the norm of ‘duties’, ‘responsibilities’, ‘priorities’, ‘work programmes’, ‘to do lists’, ‘obligations’ and other types of ‘constraints’. Just make the list of yours and you will understand!

Basically, these are just STORIES we tell others and ourselves FOR CONVINCING OURSELVES NOT TO CHANGE and to keep the status quo. Think about it. Is that FREEDOM?

Coincidences are moments and situations where the Universe (or ‘the Field’, or ‘your soul’, or some divine component – all these concepts or terms are very similar in their nature and in their functioning but are dependent on and colored by cultural, ethical, historical and/or individual background, preferences or constraints) decides to HELP YOU UNDERSTAND, to help you see ‘the true nature of things’ or maybe just ‘a different way of looking at (your) life’. Often it is a small or a bigger signal to stop “living a life” and to “START LIVING YOUR LIFE”. Why? That is another story, a very interesting one, but again this is not the place to expand on this subject here. If you want to know more about this, get in touch and make an appointment, I will happily introduce you to the subject!

So whenever a coincidence happens in your life, or a relatively unusual, unexpected or even strange event occurs, stop whatever you do and give it some thought and consideration. Maybe it IS a WAKE UP CALL to tell you that what you are doing or the way you are living is not really optimal for you, and that there probably is room for a (major) improvement, maybe even urgently, BUT YOU REFUSE TO SEE IT, or you are just too busy with other –strictly operational-‘priorities’ as usual. Most people are startled for a couple of minutes, but soon “go back to normal”, forgetting about the coincidence, often disqualifying it with a poor excuse.

However, do not be surprised that after some time, signals come back. If you keep ignoring them, they will! They will start to appear with a higher frequency, with a higher intensity, or they will become more convincing. Maybe in addition you start to have strange dreams, or you feel a strange sense of excitement, longing or impatience which you cannot explain, or you start getting more uncomfortable in life without any reason. Often, you have all you want or need in life (or kind of..), and still you feel there is something profoundly missing. Some people even get confronted with mild to severe health problems. You probably know people who experienced burnout. Several of these individuals, not all, unfortunately, are proud they did CHANGE THEIR LIFE after they recovered from their burnout. ISN’T IT A PITY THAT OFTEN WE NEED TO GO THROUGH SEVERE PAIN AND SUFFERING BEFORE WE DECIDE TO CHANGE OUR LIFE FOR THE BETTER? It seems to be a pretty ‘normal’ and frequent phenomenon, as usually we just don’t give any of the early warning signals a chance at all. We simply ignore them, and keep going as we always have. Of course we should not be surprised then that after some time the signals become stronger and stronger...

I will reassure you. You only get strong signals if ‘somewhere out there’ ‘they’ consider you are ‘READY’ FOR PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION. If not, they will not bother to interfere with your life, and you would not be reading this text!

But I urge you to follow my honest and modest advice: DO NOT WAIT until something negative or painful happens. Instead, BE PROACTIVE, learn from life, look at the signals the universe is providing you, ask yourself the right questions, stop hiding your head in the sand, stop pretending, be honest with yourself and take this matter SERIOUSLY.

TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE proactively, avoiding the discomfort you will experience when purely in a reactive mode. Just decide to TRANSFORM your life and yourself by your own initiative. You will see, the process of PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION will be much smoother if you proceed in this manner.

QUESTION: Do you need to TRANSFORM your life, even if you are getting all these signals?

The answer is NO. You are ALWAYS FREE TO CHOOSE. As I told you, we human beings have our FREE WILL, and we can always freely choose what we do with OUR life. We finally are fully responsible of the quality of the life we choose to live. It is totally up to us. It is totally up to you! No excuses accepted.

The 2 options are very simple. The first option is to go on as you always have, maybe making some minor improvements, fine-tuning or adaptations to your life. And that is fine, as long as your life IS satisfying on many levels. That means: you are happy and fulfilled, you are passionate about your work, your relationship, your current environment, your choices, and your life - WHY CHANGE INDEED? If on the other hand, you are less convinced about the QUALITY OF YOUR LIFE currently, being truly honest to yourself, looking in the mirror without pretending or without keeping up appearances, well then you can FREELY CHOOSE FOR PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION.

It is just a matter of deciding.

A3. How to know whether it is the (right) time to TRANSFORM my life?

Let me ask you just a couple of questions.

What was your dream as a child? What are your passions? To what extent do you express your true potential in your job, your relationship, your leisure time, your life?

Is there a good place in your life for the things you love doing, for significant others you care about, for yourself?

What would happen if, just a moment, you would pretend that everything was possible and that there would be no constraints - just as a thought experiment?

Just take a moment. Give these questions some thinking.

I am curious, what are your answers?

I do not further complicate matters by adding questions such as whether you are really feeling happy, feeling fulfilled, are using your talents, and feeling full of energy and excited about your work / your relationship / your life.

Only if you are really interested, willing and curious, do consider these questions now. You see what I mean? I think now you understand what I mean with PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION!

Question: the difference between PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION and PERSONAL CHANGE/ PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT:

It’s just a matter of terminology. I use the term PERSONAL CHANGE/DEVELOPMENT in situations where you develop additional personal, interpersonal, social and professional skills in order to deal better with situations and challenges in your life, or when on a more superficial level, you change things in your life.

On the other hand, I reserve the term PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION for situations where you really TRANSFORM YOURSELF PRETTY FUNDAMENTALLY AS A PERSON (meaning on an identity level, affecting who you think you are), AND/OR TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE in a more significant rather than cosmetic manner.

B- How to transform your life?

B1. PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION: From where to where?

Actually the answer is very simple.

You change FROM a life that is almost fully conditioned by your previous experiences, your education, your culture, the personality type and the character that you developed, all of which have resulted in a set of beliefs and preferences which lead to patterns that you have developed and reinforced over time and which you tend to keep repeating, resulting in kind of similar situations that seem to keep occurring again and again in your life, in different contexts and with different variables. The sense of ‘freedom’ as discussed above, seems real but finally is more an illusion which we tend to take seriously and prefer not to question.

The core character in this life around which all events seem to occur is what you call “me” and who basically has a purely historic nature, and in my modest opinion, represents a very limited version of the full potential that you basically have.

You change TO what is called your ‘pure self’ or ‘authentic self’, your ‘essence’. That is what is BEYOND the limited freedom determined by the current habitual patterns of your life as I have described earlier on. Actually, as part of your PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION you did let go of many of these patterns, either one by one, gradually, or more radically - your choice.

And what do you get instead? YOU EXPERIENCE TOTAL FREEDOM, actually feeling reborn, fresh and new. You discover life with awe and wonder. YOU EXPERIENCE YOUR PURE SELF in its totality and its infinity.

A lot of things that you thought were not possible or seemed not the right options for you, all of a sudden become possible. A whole new world opens up. This is truly beyond description. If you want to find out more, or even experience this, come and see me...

B2. Benefits

You become more aware of your true potential, you discover a very rich and multidimensional reality beyond how you have been considering reality so far, you understand what your life purpose is. You become more and more the full and rich being that you truly are, unlimited, with a level of possibilities and perfection that are truly divine.

As a consequence you start experiencing others and life in a different way. You understand the purpose of difficulties and events in your life. You start seeing everything in life as a learning opportunity. You stop resisting to life and experiment the grace of just flowing graciously along with life as it unfolds.

As you are profoundly changing, life around you starts changing as well. You discover a quality of life beyond any expectation.

You actually start living YOUR life, and not ‘a’ life.

You experience genuine freedom.

You fully live in the now, detached from the past, detached from the future.

You become fully awake, aware and alive.

You start living with a strong eagerness to live, enjoying every moment, experiencing a high level of energy and enthusiasm.

You develop and maintain a constant state of positivity, happiness and of unconditional love.

You are grateful to live and for the opportunities offered to you by the Universe.

B3. Requirements

You need to have an open mind and to have performed personal development work, resulting in a good level of self-awareness.

You are looking for answers to some fundamental questions about life and yourself. You are committed to this journey and are determined to make it a clear priority in your life.

You have decided the moment has come to BECOME TRULY ALIVE, to use your potential more completely, to fully live life. You no longer are willing to compromise. You have the courage to step into a zone which is unfamiliar and unknown, but some part of you just knows this is the right thing to do. You developed confidence and faith in life.

B4. Main obstacles

  • Resistance: a tendency to go ‘back to normal’ – mostly an indication that your mind and ‘ego’ want to stay in control of your life and to continue as they have been doing so far, running your life.
  • Fear of the unknown. Not trusting self or life.
  • Lack of commitment. Not making PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION a key priority in your life.
  • Lacking persistence/hope/confidence: giving up to easily. Allowing yourself to be distracted by things that are way less important.
  • Being tempted by material conditions and achievements rather than by inner growth and PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION.
  • Difficulties with letting go. Wanting to stay in control of life, of things, failing to understand that more you want to control, less space you leave for genuine transformation and growth.

B5. Tools and ingredients of PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

  • Traditional meditation, relaxation, mindfulness as well as deep meditative states
  • Coaching
  • Observation and reflective feedback
  • Pattern identification and deconstruction (on emotional, mental and behavioral levels for releasing blockages or unresolved matters on these levels)
  • Shadow work/ integration of polarities (including male/female)
  • Healing past wounds and hurts
  • Ericksonian hypnosis
  • Solution based therapy and some other therapy approaches
  • Constellation and parts work
  • Energetic healing/ REIKI
  • Consciousness expansion, exploring other dimensions of reality and achieving higher levels of awareness
  • Developing and expanding body awareness
  • Enhancing awareness of yourself and of what is happening in your life
  • Spiritual development
  • Reconnection with your true self/ soul
  • Finding and following your mission/ purpose in life
  • Shamanism
  • Experiencing unconditional love/ profound happiness/ bliss

Personal Development and Growth - Personal Transformation