The Universal Growth Process
The Universal Growth Process (UGP)
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~Victor E Frankl
The Universal Growth Process for Self-Mastery (UGP) was developed by Dr. David Daniels, with five powerful components — the 5 As as explored later below — to aid spiritual growth and development.
Put most simply it is a method of disabling the mechanism that causes us to go into un-centered reactivity. It’s a mindfulness technique that, when practiced regularly, has the power of disrupting your seemingly automatic neural pathways of:
stimulus (event) → energetic change (emotion) → reaction (pre-programmed pattern of behavior)
Often, even if we can find presence through meditation or other means such as nature walks, dancing, etc., we can’t hold onto it long before someone or something has us back into reactivity mode. In reactivity mode, the ego pulls us back into the dance of unconscious projections (stories we tell ourselves), and reactions (ego defense, damage, and repair strategies) which draws us out of presence and onto a path of seeming chaos that has the power to disrupt every facet of our lives.
The full manifestation of accomplished mindfulness is that you gain enough familiarity with the presence state that the ego falls deep asleep and stands much less of a chance to act through you. However, because of your lifetime of societal and familial domestication you have practiced the opposite of that; ego identification and ego dominance and thus have to spend time untraining these patterns through the power of neuroplasticity—the ability to form new neural pathways.
The bridge from your conditioned, reactive egoic mind to a new possibility of undefended, engaged conscious awareness is where the UGP wants to take you. The journey across this bridge is called shadow work.
Why Do Shadow Work?
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
~ Carl Jung
The answer to the question, “why do shadow work,” can be simply understood by answering the following question. Would you rather attempt to rearrange the entire world so that you can avoid being triggered or would you rather do the inner work of purifying your heart and its reactive energies? The latter can be very difficult and the former nearly impossible, but this is the extreme view that we engage when confronted with the negative power of our shadow self.
One of our most basic fundamental energies is our survival instinct (self-preservation). Evolutionarily, what was once the energy of hiding from a predator has evolved into the psychological tendency to hide and defend our ego structure. Because we have evolved into such societal beings, we now spend our time defending self concepts rather than our body’s safety. Our struggles are now with our own inner fears and insecurities and destructive behavior patterns instead of outside forces, such as predators. The fear we feel now is a deep personal fear that provokes within us a protective force. When faced with this fear and since it isn’t socially acceptable to run and hide like an animal in the woods, you withdraw inside, close down, and pull back within your protective shield when presented with a perceived attack on the ego-self.
This has the effect of shutting down the energy centers (chakras) that permit us to be our most present, energetic, and balanced selves. When we permit ourselves to allow the ego to defend itself, we only hide the problems, we only treat the symptoms instead of the cause. The problem with protecting this part of yourself is that the ego seeks to keep things way out of balance by letting even the slightest things cause it to overreact, creating tragic and catastrophic narratives in its wake.
The paradox of protecting ourselves with walls like these means while we become temporarily safe, we will never become free. You won’t grow. You may know more, but you can’t act in new ways and ‘be’ more. Instead, we tend to make rules about what is supposed to happen outside of ourselves so that we don’t have to be exposed to what is inside ourselves and expect others to uphold them. Living like this allows for very little spontaneous joy, enthusiasm, and excitement.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
~ Carl Jung
Is life a threat or is the universe a friendly place? Spiritual growth means accepting a reality that believes everything is here for you, to teach you through a benevolent love for your growth—even if that love feels like pain and suffering.
Real spiritual growth happens when there is only one of you inside. Not a part that’s scared and another part protecting that part that’s scared. All parts become unified when you become willing to see all parts. You are no longer divided against yourself. Everything you see inside just is. These things are not you (subject—the witness), they are what you see (the object). A reaction becomes an experience of energy that pours through you creating different thoughts, attitudes, and emotions, and then there is you—the consciousness that is aware of it. There is simply you watching the dance of the psyche. It can be likened to being able to watch a waterfall from a distance, witnessing its qualities, rather than being under that waterfall, pelted with its force without reprieve or perspective.
In order to get there, you must allow your entire psyche to surface. Every little separated piece of it must be permitted to pass through your gate of unconditional regard (conscious love). Right now, many fragmented parts of your psyche are held within you and if you want to be free to live in presence full-time, you must expose every piece to your awareness (your loving light) and release it. You have to be willing to say, no matter how much pain is involved in experiencing this piece, I am willing to pay that price for my liberation.
When you are no longer willing to identify with the part of you that is separating itself into a million pieces, you are ready for real growth. Begin by seeing the tendency to protect and defend yourself.
“Closer examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow – reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality.”
~ Carl Jung
There is a very deep tendency to protect what is exposed, especially your soft spots (insecurities), so it takes work, but eventually you can give yourself the gift of owning these pieces by loving them too and thus release any need to keep that protector in place. Instead of identifying with the ‘being’ that is constantly trying to protect itself, you now identify as the awareness that observes the being of defendedness.
The reward for not protecting your psyche is liberation—true freedom to navigate without the fear that someone or some situation is going to hurt or disturb you. You enjoy experiencing whatever happens next, unconditionally. You take the power the external world has had over your happiness and well-being and now resource it from within yourself, which allows you to live with much less fear and insecurity.
This spiritual growth process begins when you are able to experience your trigger energy starting to get strange when your ego is provoked, usually in the form of a contracted feeling in the energy centers of your body. Someone says something or you think something, and the energy starts to get a little strange inside, and that becomes your cue that it’s time to grow instead of defend yourself. You let yourself pause, engage with what is, and you let go through self-love. You love yourself enough to let go through your inner safety—you’ve got yourself.
Through this practice, you can engage with your compulsive reactivity in a conscious way that enables your spiritual growth, rather than letting it possess and overcome you by transporting you into your unconscious non-growth mode of being. You practice loving yourself enough to just stop whatever you’re doing and breathe into the experience, or doing whatever it takes to be with it, with yourself, in the present moment (centering practice).
You strengthen your ability to become the non-reactive witness of all that is through what is called “The 5 As Practice” that can be used anytime over this and the upcoming weeks.
With this practice, we engage the process of disarming reactivity and encouraging your spiritual growth through mindfulness, through the Universal Growth Process.
The 5 As Practice
The UGP is a practical and powerful model for personal development that interweaves five components or processes—awareness, acceptance, appreciation, action, and adherence.
Each A is found throughout the Awaken Presence Within program, with practices and teachings that focus on developing each element. While practicing just one or two of the As will create growth, all five are required for effective and lasting change. Moreover, they are always present to some extent, and they are simple to learn and recall, which further increases their value.
As you become more practiced and fluid with the 5As, you’ll start to experience how they weave together throughout in a non-linear relationship, rather than follow a strict order as described below for teaching purposes. When this process is engaged in the moment, it essentially only takes the time of a few seconds or so. Keep that in mind as you read about this very slowed down exploration that can eventually replace your existing few seconds of reaction behaviors.
When practiced over time, each element serves to break apart and release our habitual ego patterns of behavior. In committing to doing this practice regularly, with and without the audio, you bring your life into your mindfulness practice which will benefit all of your relationships as well as your relationship with yourself.
Awareness
Use the breathing and centering practice conducted in the contemplative audio anytime (with the track below until you have it committed to memory) to increase your receptivity and grounded presence. This is fundamental to self-observing your adaptive strategy, with its interwoven pattern of attention and energy; to working with your stress and anger (your reactivity); to grasping and releasing from no longer valid core beliefs; and to heightening your flexibility, adaptability, and understanding. Change, growth, and development depend on awareness. And working with this practice provides a basis for reflection “on the spot” when you are faced with challenges, distress, or reactivity.
Acceptance
Awareness without acceptance can create endless suffering. Acceptance does not mean agreeing, condoning, capitulating, resignation, forgetting or giving permission to what is happening in the moment. It simply means befriending your reactivity, your judgments of self and others, and the associated sensations and feelings.
When you become judgmental, whether of another or yourself, the object of judgment often becomes defensive and creates strong rationalizations for what they are doing or feeling. This space of defended rightness prevents you from changing and growing, keeping you trapped in old patterns and unsatisfying substitutes for direct perception of your true self.
But just as reactivity breeds judgment and more reactivity, acceptance breeds neutrality. When you tell yourself the truth of what you are feeling and experiencing in the moment, whatever it is, and open your heart to be with whatever awareness you’ve discovered, this kind and caring attitude of acceptance toward yourself and others creates a space for true change and deeper awareness of your true self.
Do whatever it takes to get here—create temporary space from a partner, or other party, or situation if need be. Through eventually becoming more familiar with the entire Enneagram, you can disarm your reactions even more thoroughly by being able to accept others’ actions toward you as manifestations of their type’s characteristics—not taking things they say or do personally.
Appreciation
Appreciation as a process for growth is most powerful when it operates on both the macro and micro levels, the large and the small, the practice and the moment. In the bigger picture appreciation means really noticing and putting attention on what you are grateful for in your life with an open heart, the positives both ordinary and unique. At the micro level, it’s an appreciation for “what” is revealing itself, in the moment, within another, and/or within yourself.
Appreciation puts us in a natural flow of giving and receiving which in and of itself is highly nurturing and produces coherence and harmony in our bodies and lives. When we are in this flow both the nurturer and the one being nurtured produce oxytocin, the feel good hormone associated with bonding and love.
Action
Action involves three interrelated steps. These incorporate ongoing Awareness and Acceptance of what is arising and present throughout the process.
Pause - Notice your reactions, upsets, and distress and then pause, by breathing and centering, to collect your energy back into yourself—into the gravitational center of your body into the belly—so as to contain it when it wants to discharge into old habitual reactions and behaviors. Briefly put: notice → pause → collect energy → contain. Note: the most difficult aspect of the 5 As practice can be allowing yourself to ‘pause’ rather than following the old momentum of your past habitual tendencies that just want to keep things moving. Make sure you put extra emphasis on allowing yourself the grace of the pause to dig deep.
Inquiry - Next practice thoughtful and gentle reflection and inquiry in order to discover, discern, and work with whatever reactivity—such as upset, anger, or distress—or theme, especially type structure, that arises in the moment. This is where the Enneagram understandings provide ultimate value. Adopt a stance of genuine curiosity to know the truth. Inquiry involves considering what your usual reactivity and automatic responses are about. These responses are keys to development and change because they mainly involve:
Our key identifications, our core beliefs, and the associated concerns and feelings deeply embedded in our type structure
Our personal stories and wounds
Conscious Conduct - Let your “inner coach” be your mentor by gently encouraging you into conscious conduct, which manifests in two interrelated forms:
Releasing into acceptance by staying with the experience or felt sense of → loosening → letting go → and reexperiencing the fundamental principle you lost sight of (to be experienced at a later time in the “Reflecting Practice” meditation). Remember that the higher qualities in the ultimate goal of your development don’t come and go—your being in touch with them comes and goes.
Taking action by staying with the experience or felt sense → of loosening → and moving into compassionate action respectful to self and other.
Adherence
Adherence simply means commitment to the process of the 5 As and to daily practice. We all have many opportunities each day to recommit and as we go on automatic and get reactive. Motivation for adherence carries with it expectation of benefit and ultimately a hope for greater happiness. Thus, intention is an irreducible ingredient. Adherence honors the principle that new learning is a combination of observation, experience, and practice, for we all have minds and bodies characterized by neuroplasticity. Through adherence you can internalize the Universal Growth Process of the 5 As and carry out regular assessment of your growth.
Remember to bring love into this experience as much as you can. It softens everything.
Use your Practicing The 5 As contemplative audio (below) to learn the centering practice meditation, which then can be invoked in the moment. You will also want to spend time with the full 27 minute audio in a quiet setting any time you want to confront your type’s brand of reactivity; befriending your anger, and undefending what is defended. Consider it a virtual 5 As practice space.
Before you begin, here are some guidelines to optimize your experience:
Let yourself be as centered and grounded in the present moment as you can.
Allow yourself to have an open, receptive, compassionate heart, aimed at yourself.
Allow yourself to have an open, receptive, and non-judging mind that is not busy forming responses and defenses.
Let yourself be curious and exploratory, as a child naturally is.
Anticipate personal gain or value regardless of the difficulty in the exercise or moment.
Be committed to making the necessary effort to change, since spiritual growth requires real change.
Audio Track Note: after the Breathing and Centering Practice, the contemplative will engage with a scenario of reactivity that you may experience in your life from time to time. We do so to engage with these unconscious narratives that get us to react, disabling their power over us, but also this process serves as a template for working with our other stories of reactivity. One major goal when working with this practice is to comprehend it well enough to simplify it, shorten it, and commit it to memory. Then practice the process in real life, more organically when faced with a moment that triggers your warring-self.
Try to practice more than once or twice as repeating this practice will train your system to be able to organically execute the 5 As the next time reactivity shows up in real life. And enjoy!
