5 Ideas to Help Us Return to Our Evolutionary Journey

If we have not been working on ourselves or our growth for some time, it can be a challenge to give renewed attention to our evolution. While there are logistical and energetic barriers to our self-work, the most decisive impediment tends to be our mindset. Our limiting beliefs, ideas, and self-talk often prematurely terminate internal dialogues around possibilities for ourselves, instead reinforcing a less productive or less satisfying status quo.

This does not mean that you have to attend to your evolution or evolutionary projects ceaselessly. However, we often want more for ourselves and would be happier if we had a more activated relationship with our evolution. If you feel you would enjoy greater evolutionary dynamism in your lifestyle, here are five ideas that can help us to unblock the psychological resistance and estrangement that we tend to accumulate toward our own journey of growth.

Our evolution is not just one thing.

Sometimes we assume that our evolution requires us to return to an old, predefined set of goals or objectives. Perhaps we previously practiced exercises or activities which were not very interesting or engaging for us. Or maybe they were engaging, but we stopped at some point, and now we are not motivated to return to that previous place where we ‘failed’.

But evolution is not defined in terms of a set of prescribed practices. Our evolution is in fact an exploration and extension of our state of being and our frontiers. Our evolution is an application of our selves. So, while walking our evolutionary path often involves some effort and discomfort, it should also activate our personal energies, creating a sense of spontaneity, authenticity, and possibility for ourselves.

While our courses at Mosaic tend to focus on key multidimensional topics, there are many themes or areas of growth for that may be immediately relevant for us. Many of us have found instrumental growth studying other topics, such as psychology, sociology, communication, and group dynamics.

If you do not feel compelled to continue with some pre-defined notion of evolution, then you may consider themes or practices which are more relevant to your present moment. Regardless of the outcome, you will have broadened your experience of what is more or less interesting or meaningful for you.

More than anything else, it seems that our evolution simply asks us to show up and get involved. We will inevitably recalibrate, adjust, and refine our approach over time.

Doing our evolutionary work may make it easier to breathe.

Being distanced or estranged from our organic evolutionary process can produce many different sensations. We may feel despondence, boredom, or even physical discomfort. I have personally felt as though I had weights holding me down when I was avoiding certain tasks that I knew I had to do. In this case, I found that putting time into a specific project alleviated an acute sense of personal discomfort. It was as though my life was a steam engine, and I could only release the pressure by focusing energy into the work that I had committed to.

Sometimes we postpone work that is relevant to our evolution because life feels too turbulent. But in some cases, counterintuitively, rolling up our sleeves and getting to work is precisely what will bring a sense of peace and euphoria back to our lives.

Our evolution is of benefit to others in addition to ourselves.

When we work on ourselves or work in alignment with our evolution, we generally become more aware of our behaviors and how they affect ourselves and others. While this helps us to avoid pitfalls and unnecessary suffering, it also helps us to be a more positive, conscientious presence in the lives of others. While we typically think of our growth and evolution as being purely related to our self-relationship, it has a substantive impact on the quality of our interpersonal relationships.

On a larger scale, we can even consider our relationship with the world overall. When we work with our evolution and develop a stronger and clearer energetic field, we become more capable of applying our strengths to our groups, our communities, and our cosmos.

Opportunities are amplified amid a greater volume of energy.

Sometimes we fail to start or continue projects because we are not sure of the right direction to go. However, by simply working towards something, we can produce a greater amount of personal energy, which will help us to think more clearly and strengthen our understanding of our evolutionary moment. We can always shift or adjust course over time; but the momentum of our activated personal energies is an essential fuel for moving ourselves forward.

Our evolutionary work can also be our evolutionary play.

Ultimately, our evolutionary work is work with ourselves. While we must flow our energies out beyond what is familiar or comfortable for us, we can also enjoy the sensation of this very flow of energy. Learning to enjoy our evolutionary work, and finding evolutionary work which is enjoyable to us, is a transformative and attainable goal for us in this life.

A mature picture of evolution is not resigning ourselves to a machine of drudgery or self-abnegation. It is, rather, an individual well adapted to their adaptive process - someone who has evolved their way of evolving. As we learn more about ourselves and bring our life course into a fuller and more mature stage, we will find our evolutionary work has all the creativity, personality, and spontaneity of what we might call play. At this point, it is both work and play at once - and while we must take steps which are not always comfortable or fun, we are motivated to take those steps because we want it and because we are captivated by our enjoyment of the journey.

Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash