Rediscovering Your Growth Drive

We are all born with a fundamental drive to grow. 

We all want to thrive. We all want to kick ass at life.

This is innate. This is human nature.

Some of us stay tuned in to this drive from the time we are young.

These are the people who always knew who they were and what their purpose was and who never lost sight of it for more than a few moments here or there.

Others lose touch with it, especially around adolescence and into adulthood, and might have difficulty rediscovering it.

This is common today especially as the world moves more out of tune with nature.

I was in this second group. I lost touch with who I was as a teen and moved further away for years.

It was ironic too because I studied all the personal journey stuff extensively in college and then at the graduate level.

It turned out that exploring the work of Jung and Campbell and Hesse and Lao Tzu and Carl Rogers was different from me taking the journey myself.

The masters are great, but the journey is not inside a book. 

The journey is inside of you.

The things that made a difference to me, the key elements to self rediscovery included,

1. Body movement - This was my gateway. It was a fundamental part of who I am that I’d lost touch with. It got me tuning into who I was when I was a kid, before I began losing touch.

2. Loving and letting myself be loved.

3. Fatherhood and experiencing the power of role modeling.

4. Quitting alcohol and drugs.

The funny thing is, at a certain level, I knew that these were the important things, yet I covered truth over in layers of fear and other assorted bullshit.

If you’ve lost touch with your fundamental growth drive, I am 100% certain that it is still inside you somewhere. 

Your four or five things may be very different from mine or they may overlap.

If you are tentatively aware of even one of the things you believe is essential to rediscovering yourself, that is the place to begin your journey.

Find that one real thing you suspect and start there! That is your gateway.

All the real you things are gateways to all the others.

And so if you begin with the one that is most accessible, you will quickly find yourself on a very different path.