Dec 13, 202418 min read

Development Stages of Personal Experience

Updated: Dec 16, 2024

When considering my healing and awakening journey, I recognise that there has not been a clean and clear shift between being traumatized and living in an unconscious way to then being fully healed, awakened and realised. It’s a process and a complex process as well.

I imagine the process of healing, awakening and growth to be like a game of snakes and ladders. There are experiences that are like the ladders; healing modalities (breathwork, plant medicines, energy work), insights and realisations (through self-reflections and the wisdom of others) and new connections and explorations that open our mind to a new way of seeing ourselves or the world. Then there are the snakes; the ego traps, triggers and blind-spots that take us into our old patterns and reactions that are yet to be recognised or dissolved. Sometimes the snakes can seemingly take us right back to the beginning and so our progress may not feel very linear.

As someone who has lived in the shadows in a very unconscious and traumatised way, I have really put in the leg work to arrive at the place where I am. Choosing to follow my own path of self-discovery and trusting in my personal relationship with the divine, I have been able to evolve to a level of self-awareness that feels embodied and integrated and stable enough that I feel peaceful everyday. At this point in my life, I have chosen to live a reclusive life, somewhat similar to that of a monk of a mystic. I dedicate most of my time to explorative awareness practices and creativity (the building blocks of reality). As a result of a 14 month private retreat in Egypt, I have been able to move to a stage of experience of being, where my observations seem to connect in a way that offers me deeper and more complex understandings of the process of healing, awakening and growth. I feel confident to articulate my observations and as a creator, I am building frameworks so that others can feel a bit more informed when walking a similar path.

The stages that I suggest we can observe are not clean cut moments that you would experience, they are defined by the description we can give to the quality of our personal experience of life. The quality of one day can vary and may fluctuate during the experience of the day depending on the snake or ladder that may come into your reality. What is important to recognise is that we can be the observer of the experience and become familiar with all the small factors that are adding together to create the fullness of our experience.

We can observe our inner experience and the way we relate to others and the world. Identifying our experience as a stage which can be described, it can help us to become the witness of our experience. We may be able to reflect on aspects that we had not considered before and feel more empowered to embrace change. With an understanding of self-regulation practices and the process of inner restructuring of thinking-patterns, beliefs and perceptions, we can engage with specific development tasks to support a shift from one stage of experience to another.

These are the developmental stages of our experience that I feel can be defined as such;

The Contracted Self: Shut down, closed off, isolated and internally suffering

The Survival Self: Limited view of self and life, living to work, constantly on the go, no time for rest or repair.

The Conforming Self: Fear-based view of life, no permission, unable to question systems or authority.

The Conditioned Self: Living a full life within the limits of social expectations and previously established lifestyle patterns, unable to perceive in an alternative way.

The Undefined Self: Creating a new life to fit in with ideologies or cultural aspirations.

The True Self: Developed awareness of individual needs and desires, feeling empowered in autonomous decision-making.

The Creative Self: Able to disrupt personal and collective patterns by making choices that align with inspiration and higher self values.

The Expanding Self: Has surrendered to the flow of life emerging from within with full trust in one’s ability to navigate challenges and new opportunities.

The Actualised Self: Achieved alignment with a life that feels fulfilling and balanced, whilst offering unique gifts to the world.

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At one end of the scale we have someone living in the experience of the contracted self who feels powerless in their suffering, living from a state of awareness that’s no longer open to let new information in or be processed. At the other end of the experiential scale the actualised self has understood who they really are and has found the confidence and courage to show-up fully in the world and create the lifestyle that best suits them. Both experiences of reality are as real as they can be and there is a spectrum of experiences in between.

There are plenty of theories and philosophies to describe and explain why someone may live within a certain experience of life. Both art and literature explain how life is seen from within the various stages of experience. But I am yet to find a framework that can practically explain how we are able to move from one stage of experience to the next. I am aware that traditional therapeutic processes offer ways for us to bring new awareness to aspects of our experience, and spiritual paths can offer practices and tools that help us to leap-frog to a more evolved state. But if we are not careful, we can become caught in a loop not really progressing or we can overshoot the mark and by-pass some really important stages of our development. This can result in a sense of stuckness at best and worst feeling confused, lost or conflicted.

Unintegrated states of being, which I know first hand can cause a lot of anguish and be quite traumatic, often arise because there is no set pathway for someone to follow or due to the lack of available resources. We are in the midst of a meta-crisis and the way out has a price tag that means it’s not accessible to all.So I am attempting to create a framework that can be used to map out a practical process for our continual development, presented through the lens of what we experience.

I use the words ‘map’ and ‘framework’ as I can only suggest what can be seen, not fully explain the terrain of what actually is. I hope this will resonate with some of you, shine a light on what is unknown, and show others that there is a pathway to be found and explored so that hope can be given to those who feel stuck, and believe that there is now where to go.

I have not fully experienced all of the stages that are presented, and I assume that there can be other stages beyond these 9, but I have enough insight to feel that what I have put together is supported by the work of others in authority. To support my idea, I will reference other sources of information when I can. In the end, regardless of whether you feel or think this idea is accurate, or valid for you, I trust you will, at the very least, see the apparent evidence that your experience of life is not fixed and when the right steps are taken, we can evolve and begin to experience ourselves and the world in a new way.

I would like to begin by offering a lay-mans understanding of how our experience is formed. I am not a scientist so you may feel you know information that challenges what I say. My disclaimer is; the majority of us are not qualified to have a scientific understanding of life, it’s not practically possible. So for those of us who are curious, who learn from youtube or other platforms, we are doing our best to piece together an understanding of life so that we can successfully navigate its challenges.

It is my opinion that many scientists are not yet having inter-disciplinary discourse so I have often found that one school of study will have gaps and blind spots that require another line of inquiry. So through this framework I am opening a conversation in the intersection of all the various ways of thinking and seeing that I feel can help us observe, unpack and master our personal experience of life.

What is the internal experience?

For those of you who are externally focused, self-observation and self-reflection may be unknown practices. You may have grown up with healthy boundaries and internalise a set of values that have held you in good stead and therefore allowing you to ‘get on with life’ without hitting any major crisis point. If at some point in life, we are afflicted with the suffering of the mind, emotional pain that we can not shift, or we recognise that we desire to change some aspect of our lifestyle or behaviour patterns, then the path of healing and self-discovery guides us inwards and down into the depths of our being. What we find there can feel scary, the unknown truth that we can no longer escape. Many people will weigh up the odds for and against truth seeking, and if there is a way to cope with a situation other than facing the descent, they may choose the easier way out.

Doing this style of inner work takes courage and inner strength, a brave heart and mental fortitude. I have seen many people start the journey and simply quit after a few personal wins, believing that a few realisations and learning some new lingo, is all it takes to really connect with your inner truth. This is why the True Self, within this framework, is a stage that is midway rather than the desired goal. It takes work to connect with your true self (inner truth) and there is further development work beyond that to support growth into who you are meant to become.

When I use the term ‘inner work’ I am referring to the task of Cleaning-Up, a term used by philosopher Ken Wilbur to describe the process of emotional self-reflection or Shadow Work. I would unpack this and say inner work involves self-observation, reflective questioning, emotional processing, somatic releasing, belief resetting and mindset shifting. It's the bundle that I place under the umbrella term ‘Self-Discovery’. This restructuring of your inner settings, supports new interactions with the world. For example, someone who is reactive and generally frustrated about their life, may need to process repressed anger, look at their relationship with power and authority, connect with their body and desires and understand what it is that they want to change. Building awareness of our feelings and thoughts, create insight on how they are connected and how they emerge from what we believe. Inner work is what we can do to create change from within and when we change the internal, our experience of the external can will automatically shift.

What defines our internal experience?

From what I have been able to understand, our early life experiences create imprints within our minds and bodies. These imprints are energetic and held within our memories, beliefs and the physiology of our bodies. Imagine a plastic water bottle that has been crushed in some way, it now shows the imprint of the pressure that it was exposed to and appears contracted and distorted in some way. At worst, our early life experience can leave us dramatically affected in some way.

These imprints define how we see the world and ourselves within it. They are the foundation from which our perceptions and behaviours emerge and although we may be able to recognise that we are not the ones responsible for our imprints, it is hard for us to separate from all them. The core beliefs that we formed, the ideas about who we are, the emotions that we internalised, the behaviours we pick-up on and hold, the patterns of thinking and language that we learn, all connect and create this version of ourselves but someone we are actually someone else waiting to emerge.

We believe that we are this imprinted construct but this is not the case. In some situations, what some individuals take in as children, supports their true nature to emerge uninterrupted, but more often we become disconnected from who we really are and this evolution into a different version of ourselves happens unconsciously. Maybe it was in order to survive in challenging circumstances or to fit-in and meet expectations. The imprints and what we have internalised affect how our personality is formed, how our brian is wired and the level of awareness that evolves within us.

The imprint, brain-wiring and the evolving awareness, form a version of who we are, a sense of self. Throughout life, we may be given reflections of this and be able to modify and refine what we are aware of but this is not necessarily an option. Modification and refinement can not take place when we are in survival mode or do not have the insight or ability to make the adjustments. So we are who we are until we naturally arrive at a growth point and reason to evolve or we are forced into it because an aspect of our life is no longer working out how we would have wanted.

Why is learning and development so important?

By the time we decide that we may want to change, we have been reinforcing our inner constructs through our reactions to life. We have probably stopped learning other ways of approaching situations. The task of re-learning is also needed in addition to inner work. Re-learning can be more effective when we have a clear idea of what we need to learn and our reason for learning. For example: We can choose to learn self-acceptance so that we can eventually become more accepting of others and improve the quality of our relationships. Learning self-acceptance may require re-learning how you see sexuality, or gender roles or boundaries. Self-acceptance may require us to re-learn how we speak to ourselves and explore language that feels more compassionate and less critical. Re-learning supports growth in a new direction as we can only do better when we know better.

There is also the process of development, this defines our experience progressively. Whenever you witness by-passing or notice separation in yourself, for example; the separation from your inner child or someone who believes in the oneness of humanity but does not understand the complexity of experiences that racism creates, there has been a by-passing of some aspect of development. The development of the creative spirit would integrate the inner child aspect and developing compassion for the diversity of the human experience would integrate an embodied awareness of the impact of racism and how it can be dismantled rather than by-passed through a transcendent perspective. Holistic development includes growth in many areas; emotional, psychological, moral, creative, rational, relational and many other areas of the human condition that will improve the overall experience of the Self and being in the world.

It is through my dedication to practices involving inner work, re-learning and holistic development that I have been able to shift my stage of experience, from contracted and surviving stage to the true self and creative stage. Progress has been mindful and deliberate and not without its challenges, mistakes and set-backs. And it's from the insights that I’ve gained through my own success that I am informing the creation of this framework.

So let’s dive into an overview of this framework.

Stages of Experiential Development

1. Contracted Self

Description: The Contracted Self represents a state of severe internal suffering and disconnection. Individuals in this stage feel shut down, isolated, and overwhelmed by emotional pain. This state often arises from unresolved trauma, chronic stress, or attachment wounds, leading to an overactive survival response. The world appears threatening, and the self is defined by a profound sense of vulnerability and mistrust.

Key Concepts: Fight-flight-freeze responses, trauma imprinting, emotional dysregulation.
Experience of Self: The individual experiences themselves as small, unsafe, and unable to trust others or the environment.
Experience of the World: The world is seen as hostile, overwhelming, and devoid of connection.
Beliefs:
- Beliefs about Self: "I am unworthy and incapable of connection."
- Beliefs about Self in the World: "I must stay hidden to avoid pain."
- Beliefs about the World: "The world is dangerous and overwhelming."
- Beliefs about Others: "Others cannot be trusted."
Language Identifier: "I am not safe."