Personal Growth Is Not for the Faint of Heart

I often reflect on hardness versus softness as two opposing forces in life. While many people see the world in terms of good and bad, I tend to see things through the lens of soft and hard. My long journey of healing and personal growth has shown me that the only way to truly live is through softness and flexibility, not stiffness and rebellion. That’s the exact opposite of what I used to believe, even just ten years ago. I was always in opposition to something, convinced that resistance and strong will were the only ways to get anywhere. Oh, how wrong I was.

Soft? Don’t Be Ridiculous!

The change didn’t happen overnight. It’s true that first you need to recognize your patterns and traumas, but this knowledge alone has no power to heal or change you: you cannot change through sheer will. That was never possible for me, and I don’t know anyone who has achieved inner peace by fighting life’s circumstances or by living in repression or suppression of their emotions.

Rebel and perfectionist—what a beautiful identity I had crafted for myself over the years. As funny as it sounds, I used to avoid flowery textures on my clothes because I thought they made me appear more feminine and delicate. “She’s so delicate,” I’d often hear. I didn’t want to hear it! But what really made me seem that way wasn’t my clothing; it was my shyness and my lack of courage to express myself.

So, at all costs, I wanted to become the opposite. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to show people that I was different from how they perceived me. I associated softness and fragility with pain, because at that time, that’s what “softness” meant to me. I was mocked at school: if you appeared shy and goofy, you almost instantly become a target for bullies.

I built a wall around myself, thinking that my low self-esteem would grow if I expressed assertiveness. But if you’re not grounded, assertiveness is just an illusion; you say “no” with aggression, and the guilt follows. This is not real assertiveness.

I became tough and inflexible. The illusion of higher self-esteem shattered every time someone criticized me. I grew more and more angry, insecure, and stuck in a victim mentality. Toughness was a way to protect myself from further pain, but I didn’t realize it was also blocking me from living fully. Instead of freeing me, it imprisoned me.

The Myth of Perfection in Personal Growth

For a long time, I believed that personal growth was about becoming the “best” or “perfect” version of myself, someone who had finally fixed all their flaws and would never struggle again. Let’s face it - there is a popular misconception that personal growth is about fixing what’s broken. While it’s completely natural to want to improve certain aspects of our lives, the idea that we must become flawless is simply unrealistic.

The second tendency is what I recently have seen social media posts claiming, “You don’t need to fix yourself.” While this can sound comforting, it often lacks nuance and can be misleading, especially for those experiencing real pain. If we take such statements at face value, we might believe that we should do nothing in the face of suffering, or that our struggles don’t deserve attention. This can invalidate genuine experiences of anxiety, depression, or repeated unhealthy patterns. True personal growth is not about attending retreats or adopting surface-level rituals; it’s a deep, continuous, uncomfortable process of expanding our capacity to live, feel, and relate.

Growth Isn’t Just in Your Head

Personal growth is a truly complex process. It’s not a straight line, and it definitely doesn’t come with a clear set of instructions: one for everyone. We’re all shaped by our past, some of us carry the weight of serious trauma, others have the usual bumps and bruises, experiences which conditioned them. Either way, figuring out who we are and how we want to grow is a deeply personal process.

For a long time, I thought growth was just about thinking the right thoughts or “figuring myself out.” But it’s so much more than that. Yeah, understanding why we do what we do is important. It’s a relief when you finally realize, “Oh, that’s why I react this way,” or “That’s where this belief comes from.” For anyone who’s been through tough stuff: trauma, heartbreak, loss - these lightbulb moments can be huge. But honestly, everyone has some version of this. Still, just knowing isn’t enough.

Feeling It in Your Body

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: your body remembers things your mind forgets. You might not even realize you’re clenching your jaw or holding your breath until someone points it out. Old stress and emotions get stuck in weird places. If it stays there for a long time, it can transform into an illness. When I started paying attention to how my body felt - whether I was tense, tired, or jittery, I began to notice patterns.

Holistic practices that connect body and mind, like Somatic Experiencing, are true game-changers. But again, don’t think that just reading a book or attending a workshop will magically change your life. It requires time and effort. And if you’ve got trauma in your history like me, prepare for a lot of discomfort.

Beyond Mind and Body

I’ve noticed that a lot of criticism about things beyond the mind comes from our culture’s focus on logic, rationality, and hard evidence. Oh, I used to be there. We tend to trust what’s tangible and measurable, so anything intuitive, experiential, or spiritual can seem suspicious or delusional. But what many people might not realize is that, especially over the last 40 years, spirituality has actually been explored through the lens of science. Consciousness researchers like Deepak Chopra have been important to me in this way: he draws on ideas from quantum physics, neuroscience, and consciousness studies to show that spiritual experiences aren’t necessarily in conflict with science. Instead, they can actually inform and enrich each other.

Personally, spirituality is what helps everything in my life make sense. For me, mind and body just aren’t complete without a spiritual background. When I think about healing or changing, I know it’s not just about my thoughts or beliefs, it’s about the whole of who I am, and spirituality is at the heart of that.

On a practical level, I find that spirituality shows up in my daily life as a sense of deeper connection and awareness. It helps me stay present and respond (rather than automatically react) when things get tough. That conscious awareness has helped me break out of old thought patterns and start to experience real transformation and healing.

Meditation has been a huge part of this for me. Through meditation, I’ve been learning to watch my thoughts and emotions without getting attached to them. This practice of non-attachment has been key for me in letting go—allowing experiences to pass without clinging to them, and slowly dissolving the barriers that have kept me from feeling like my true self. Buddhist chanting of “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,” on the other hand, reaches a similar depth as meditation but touches a different layer: courage. Chanting gives me access to the inner strength needed to move forward and break free when I feel stuck. Both practices are inseparable to me.

Conclusion

I want to be honest: this journey hasn’t happened in a week. It’s taken years, sometimes moving forward, sometimes stumbling back. There have been times when I tried to rush the process or “think” my way into healing, but I’ve learned that real transformation is gradual and often unpredictable. In fact, I clearly remember a moment when I realized I was actually using spirituality to avoid dealing with my own pain: a classic case of spiritual bypassing.

The hardest part is that spirituality is almost impossible to explain—you have to experience it. For me, it’s about observing my emotions, letting go of expectations, and even letting go of the urge to “fix” sadness or discomfort.

No matter how deep you fall, you have to take that additional step, even when your worst nightmares come true: the decision to get up. And that is the most difficult thing. Once you do this, persistence and patience must follow, and that’s just the beginning.

Personal growth, to me, has been a journey from hardness towards softness. It’s not comfortable, and it’s certainly not linear. Looking back, I barely recognize the person I was. Embracing softness has changed not just how I see myself, but how I move through the world.

Personal growth is more like the way a tree grows: always reaching, always expanding, sometimes living through storms, sometimes shedding old branches. There is no point at which the tree is “done.” Likewise, we are always in the process of becoming—expanding our capacity to meet life, not erasing our imperfections. Fixing “defects”? Not really. It’s about expanding my ability to hold discomfort, to relate to myself and others better, and to integrate all parts of who I am. It’s about learning to move through the world with greater openness, even when it feels vulnerable or uncomfortable.