On finding the holy grail of self help (and why you need to ditch your dogma)

Most people I’ve met who are doing some kind of self-help work will hit on something that for them, really resonates. Then they declare, “I tried so many other things—and THIS is what REALLY works!”

They think they’ve found the Holy Grail of self-help. They become evangelists for it. Sometimes, a shadow self emerges that starts to denigrate other forms of personal work, scoffing at it as being somehow behind-the-times or incomplete (many coaches have this attitude towards therapy).

And hey, I’ve done this, too. We all have. It’s sheer arrogance and Ego that has anyone think they’ve found The Thing that is the Best Thing that should be what Everyone Does…and Ego is always driven by an insecure need to reassert its specialness.

It’s only through time and wisdom that we come to learn that there is no Holy Grail of self-help. There is no Holy Grail of anything.

All paths lead to one, and each process was a stepping-stone to another. The years spent doing therapy, while you might not have had your official “breakthrough” at that time, probably gave you foundational ways of looking at yourself through a different lens, or receiving compassion differently than you ever did from your family of origin. And the time spent meditating with that group probably gave you tools for assessing your body or accessing your inner world. And the time spent doing somatic release probably helped you to, well, release some pent up stuff that was stuck—

and if you have your big A-ha while doing work that’s cognitive-behavioral, that doesn’t mean that cognitive-behavioral work is better.

Wherever you have the a-ha, it doesn’t mean that that work is “better.”

It means that all those roads fed together in the intricate dance of who you are as a human being, and nourished the different parts of you in different ways, and one day, all of it came together to be incredibly resonant for you.

As soon as you get caught up in having “found the answer” and evangelizing for it, you’ve officially become caught in dogma.

Dogma always enters your life pretending that you are its master, when really, it has just laid down the slickest little rule book for how you have to live your life.

No one flourishes under the influence of dogma. Dogma becomes stale, eventually, and the tracks that were set for growth end up leading nowhere.

Ditch your dogma. Whatever it is that you think is sacred, knock it off its pedestal a bit, and see it in the greater scheme of all things. There is no one coach, methodology, book, guru, teacher, workshop that is “The One.”

Everything is playing its part in the dance of your life.