9 Stages of Transformation
What do you do when the flow of inspiration, communication, and connection between your soul-inspired self and you gets disrupted? How do you meet the challenges of a time of transformation that shakes you to your core? When you start questioning your purpose and calling? When you move from a clear vision to a lost vision? When taking any action doesn’t feel like the right action?
When you travel along a transformational path, you may encounter such times and challenges.
When you play with energy, you activate the contents within your metacreative field. Depending on what got activated, you may undergo a mild to medium to large cycle of transformation. My friends and I like to refer to this as a growth period. Understanding where you are in your cycle of growth supports you in several ways. Each stage presents its own set of opportunities. Each stage points to specific practices and strategies you can employ to nurture yourself, move forward, reengage the flow of inspiration, and reestablish your sense of self.
The 9 Stages of Transformation model shown below represents a natural progression moving from left to right – working from one comfort zone to a new comfort zone. However, the spiral in the model indicates that you may move back and forth throughout. Movement through each stage is dynamic and specific to where you are in your personal development. There is no right path or way to progress. This model simply provides some recognizable stages that you may encounter during your travels.
Catalytic Moments spark a transition out of a Comfort Zone. Such moments arise when you challenge yourself, take a risk, and step outside of your comfort zone. Whenever you choose to forge new patterns and pathways as an expression of your creative-spiritual self, you actively trigger the release of elements within your inner world. At other times, your soul-inspired self determines that it’s time for you to shift your perspective, to stop living out of one frame of reference and explore a new frame.
Often what follows a catalytic moment is a time of Disintegration or disorientation. You don’t feel like yourself. Your clarity and confidence diminish. You feel like you are falling apart, your life is falling apart, and nothing is working. All too often, you question yourself, your abilities, and your vision. As you make major shifts within your inner world, a disintegration and dis-identification occurs as you make separation from elements within your inner world. You literally are dis-identifying with some aspect of yourself, your beliefs, your perspectives, or more. With the dis-identification comes a feeling of disintegration, As you move through a time of disintegration, you create space for some new expression to appear.
During times of disintegration it is especially important to be kind to yourself, gentle with yourself, be patience, and be a witness to your experience – without over-identifying with the experience. The more you can allow the disintegration and inner shifts to happen, the more you support yourself through the transformational process.
As you move through a time of disintegration, you naturally react to what you are experiencing and take actions based on your learned patterns of response. Your Actions and Reactions may help or hinder your progress. Depending on your specific patterns, you may fall back on familiar habits or you may strike out and try something new.
Not Knowing corresponds to that still point you come to where you give up and realize you don’t know what your next step is. You feel clueless, all you have are questions and no answers. At some point, you stop struggling, and you relax. As you do so, you create space for the flow of inspiration to begin anew. You accept where you are and you start to recognize that a new canvas is forming upon which new answers will be written.
A time of not knowing always presages a time of knowing.
When you find yourself exploring new pathways, new possibilities, new avenues, approaches, and perspectives, you’ve landed in a time of Potentiality. You’ve landed in a time to realize the promise of potential. These are especially potent times, where you can expand your vision, deepen your understanding of your calling, and connect more actively with your soul-inspired self.
After dwelling in potentiality, you start to make New Connections. You choose from the many possibilities that you have explored to forge a new way forward. You may connect to new avenues from the set of possibilities that have now opened up to you because you undertook the challenge of transformation.
A new sense of self starts to form, one that has shed some limiting pattern or embraced a more expansive pattern. You sense of self and identify reformulates from a new base. You’ve entered a time of Reintegration, a time of renewal and coming to know your new self. Acknowledging that you are in a different place, and engaging practices that support becoming centered in this new place are appropriate at this time.
CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve run the gauntlet of the transformational stages that disrupted your inner world, your inner harmony, and have arrived at a New Comfort Zone. In this new place you often feel liberated, expansive, and empowered. Your sense of yourself, your creativity, and your spiritual dimensions typically take a step up.
