There is an interesting difference between learning more about ourselves and coming to understand ourselves more deeply. We can accumulate information about our personality, our history, our relationships and the experiences that have shaped us, and all of that can be valuable, but OneSelf Discovery invites us into a larger conversation about who we understand ourselves to be, where the boundaries of that self really lie, and how a changing understanding of ourselves might also change the way we relate to one another and to the living Earth.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The phrase OneSelf Discovery<\/strong> gives us room for a conversation that doesn’t fit comfortably within any single discipline. Psychology is clearly part of it, as are personal development and emotional wellbeing, but sooner or later we also encounter philosophy, spirituality, consciousness, ecology, creativity, relationships and the enduring human search for meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I find that breadth important because there are many different ways of coming to know ourselves, and they don’t necessarily lead us to precisely the same place. A psychologist may invite us to notice patterns in the way we think, feel and behave, while meditation may encourage us to observe thoughts and feelings without immediately becoming absorbed in them. A conversation with somebody we trust may reveal something about ourselves that years of solitary reflection did not, just as becoming a parent, losing someone we love, changing careers, travelling, creating something, falling in love or simply growing older can alter our understanding of who we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet there is another possibility that particularly interests me, because perhaps self-discovery eventually asks us to question something we normally take for granted: what exactly do we mean by the self we are trying to discover?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of us carry around some kind of story about ourselves. We have an idea of the sort of person we are, the things we are good at, the things we struggle with, what matters to us and where we belong in relation to other people. Some of that story has been consciously constructed, while much of it has developed gradually through family, culture, education, relationships and the accumulated experiences of a lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those stories can be enormously helpful because they give continuity to our lives. The person I am today is connected in some meaningful way with the child I once was, even though almost everything about my circumstances, knowledge and understanding may have changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, the stories we tell about ourselves can sometimes become surprisingly restrictive. Someone who learned early in life to think of themselves as shy may continue organising their life around that description long after circumstances have changed. Another person may carry a conviction that they are not creative because of something said to them at school, while somebody else may have spent decades pursuing a version of success that made sense when they were twenty but feels increasingly empty at fifty or sixty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Self-discovery can therefore involve becoming curious about the stories through which we understand ourselves and asking whether they still fit the person we are becoming. This doesn’t require rejecting our history or continually reinventing ourselves, but it does allow our understanding of who we are to remain alive rather than becoming fixed around conclusions reached years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is, however, a still deeper question. Perhaps it isn’t only the story<\/em> of ourselves that can become too limited. Perhaps our ordinary idea of where the self begins and ends can become too limited as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the introductory video I recorded for the OneSelf Discovery YouTube channel<\/strong>, I began with an idea from Zen Buddhism which, at first encounter, can sound rather strange: that the hills themselves might be understood as the body of the Buddha. What interests me about this is not whether we interpret it literally, poetically or spiritually, but the different way of seeing that becomes possible when we stop assuming that human beings somehow stand apart from the rest of existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are interconnected with the Earth in ways that are so ordinary that we can easily overlook their significance. The air entering our lungs comes from an atmosphere shared with forests, oceans, animals and every other breathing human being. The water within our bodies has travelled through a planetary water cycle that existed for billions of years before we were born and will continue after we are gone. The food from which our bodies continually rebuild themselves comes from soil, sunlight, water, plants, animals and the innumerable living processes upon which agriculture depends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we look at ourselves in this way, the boundary between the individual and the world becomes rather less absolute than it first appeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the video I described this movement as one from a narrowly bounded sense of self towards an eco-self<\/strong>, or perhaps a Gaian sense of self<\/strong>, in which our identity begins to include something of the living Earth of which we are a part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That doesn’t mean that our individuality somehow disappears. I remain myself and you remain yourself, with different histories, personalities, responsibilities and experiences. What changes is the larger context within which that individuality is understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The self becomes relational rather than isolated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Psychology has long reminded us how deeply relational human beings are. We don’t construct our identities entirely by ourselves because, from our earliest years, we learn something about who we are through the responses of other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A child discovers themselves partly through being seen, spoken to, encouraged, comforted, corrected and loved. Later, friendships and intimate relationships reveal different aspects of us, as do workplaces, communities and the innumerable encounters through which we experience ourselves in relation to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes another person sees something in us that we have difficulty seeing ourselves. At other times we discover that a role we have occupied for years no longer expresses who we have become. There are relationships in which we find ourselves repeatedly behaving in ways we don’t particularly like, and others in which qualities we barely knew we possessed seem to emerge quite naturally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why I have never found the idea of self-discovery as a purely inward journey entirely convincing. Introspection certainly matters, but much of what we discover about ourselves emerges through relationship, and perhaps the interesting possibility is that the circle of relationship can continue widening beyond our immediate relationships with other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We belong to communities and cultures, but we also belong to ecosystems. Our lives are embedded within the biosphere, and eventually the question of who we are leads naturally into the question of what we belong to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My own background naturally leads me towards psychology as one way of exploring these questions. Psychological understanding can help us recognise recurring patterns, understand the influence of earlier experiences, become more aware of the assumptions through which we interpret situations and sometimes discover why particular emotions or relationships have been so difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Therapy can become part of that process, although I don’t think self-discovery belongs only in the consulting room or necessarily requires psychological difficulty. People have always sought greater self-understanding through conversation, literature, art, philosophy, contemplative practice, spiritual traditions, travel, solitude, community and engagement with nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Psychology contributes something valuable to that larger conversation because it gives us ways of thinking about development, personality, cognition, emotion, relationships and behaviour. At the same time, a psychological description of a human being can never encompass the whole person. We can describe someone’s personality characteristics, attachment patterns, cognitive style or developmental history and still have said relatively little about what gives their life meaning, what they love, what moves them, what they hope for or how they understand their place in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As soon as we begin asking those questions, we find ourselves moving into a much wider territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is where the relationship between personal and spiritual development becomes particularly interesting, because the great contemplative and philosophical traditions have been exploring questions of selfhood for thousands of years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Buddhism, for example, presents us with the apparently paradoxical idea that the deeper we inquire into the self, the less easily we can locate the permanent, independent entity we originally assumed ourselves to be. Other traditions approach the question differently, but again and again we encounter the tension between our experience of ourselves as individuals and an intuition or experience of belonging to something much larger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the introductory OneSelf Discovery video, I spoke about learning to live with this kind of paradox because we can experience ourselves both as individual human beings and as participants in a larger unity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some people, exploring this territory is inseparable from religious faith, while for others it has little or nothing to do with organised religion. It may involve meditation, an interest in consciousness, a sense of connection with nature, philosophical inquiry or simply experiences of wonder in which the usual distinction between ourselves and the world seems, for a moment, less important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would like OneSelf Discovery to make room for these different approaches without assuming that everyone needs to arrive at the same answer. It should also make room for healthy scepticism because openness to spiritual and philosophical ideas does not require us to abandon critical thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most interesting conversations occur when curiosity and discernment accompany one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is another theme running through the introductory video that I think belongs centrally within OneSelf Discovery, and that is our relationship with suffering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Human life inevitably includes loss, disappointment, uncertainty, ageing and experiences we would never willingly choose. Psychology has developed increasingly sophisticated ways of helping people respond to psychological distress, while traditions such as Buddhism have spent centuries exploring our tendency to add to unavoidable suffering through attachment, resistance and the ways we become entangled with our thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the video, I drew a connection between this older contemplative understanding and contemporary psychological approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The point isn’t that we somehow learn to abolish suffering, because much of what is painful about being human cannot simply be removed. What can change is our relationship with suffering and our capacity to continue living meaningfully in its presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, this is where self-discovery becomes much more than an abstract philosophical exercise. Understanding ourselves can help us become less imprisoned by some of the assumptions, fears and attachments through which unnecessary suffering is created, while also helping us discover what makes a life rich, meaningful and worth participating in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That brings us naturally to the idea of human flourishing, although I would want to extend the meaning of flourishing beyond the individual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the ideas I particularly want OneSelf Discovery to explore is what happens when our understanding of ourselves begins to include our relationship with the Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are entering a period in which the environmental crises confronting humanity increasingly require us to reconsider not merely what we do<\/em> to nature but how we understand our relationship with it. If the Earth is principally regarded as something external to us\u2014a collection of resources from which human beings extract what they require\u2014then sustainability can easily become a matter of managing those resources somewhat more efficiently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Something different becomes possible when we understand ourselves as participants within the living systems we are trying to protect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the introductory video I used the language of an emerging eco-civilisation<\/strong>, by which I mean forms of civilisation in which ecological understanding is woven into economics, education, psychology, culture and our wider consciousness rather than being treated as a separate environmental concern. Such a civilisation may require a corresponding shift in our understanding of ourselves, from the isolated individual towards an eco-self or Gaian self that experiences the flourishing of the living Earth as inseparable from our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This doesn’t require everyone to adopt a particular spiritual philosophy. It simply asks us to consider how differently we might behave if the forests, rivers, oceans, animals and other forms of life around us were experienced not merely as external resources but as part of the larger community of life to which we ourselves belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a point at which this understanding has to find expression in the way we live, and this may be one of the most important aspects of OneSelf Discovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spirituality can sometimes be imagined as a journey away from the difficulties of ordinary life towards some private state of peace or enlightenment. Yet if greater awareness of interconnectedness is genuine, I find it difficult to see how it could leave us less concerned about the suffering of other people or the degradation of the living world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movement I described in the introductory video was from waking up towards showing up<\/strong>. Greater awareness brings with it an invitation to participate, whether that means helping another person, contributing to our community, restoring an ecosystem, creating something beautiful, teaching, caring, speaking up or simply becoming more attentive to the effects our everyday choices have upon other lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is also where OneSelf Discovery begins to connect naturally with the wider concerns of Whole Life Times<\/em>. Personal wellbeing connects with Holistic Health, our relationship with the natural world connects with Sustainable Living, questions of responsibility and participation connect with Leadership for Sustainability, while creativity leads naturally towards The Arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey inward and the journey outward need not be separate journeys at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t imagine there is one prescribed route through any of this. In the introductory video I spoke about there being many different roads, and that seems important because people come to these questions through very different experiences and traditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One person may come through psychology, another through meditation or philosophy, another through science, ecological work, art, a religious tradition or a profound experience in nature. Sometimes the most interesting discoveries occur when people travelling along apparently different roads begin talking to one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is one of the purposes I see for OneSelfDiscovery.TV<\/strong> and the OneSelf Discovery YouTube channel<\/strong>. Through conversations, interviews and presentations, I hope we can meet people who have explored some of these questions deeply, learn from their experience and allow different perspectives to encounter one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Explore OneSelfDiscovery.TV<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe self we think we know<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Where do I end and the world begin?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
We discover ourselves in relationship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Psychology opens one door<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Learning to live with paradox<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Suffering, acceptance and living well<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
From the individual self towards an ecological self<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Waking up and showing up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Many roads, a continuing conversation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n