Heal, Grow & Awaken (HGA)
A simple framework for understanding your developmental journey
The Insighter project integrates various developmental theories, frameworks, and practices to provide a breeding ground for holistic human development. While there is much overlap in the way humans develop invariably each of us has a unique developmental journey that propels us towards some theories/practices and away from others. At some point, we may develop our own theories and frameworks that reflect our unique disposition and life experience.
In my developmental journey, I intuitively sensed that there were three domains I was trying to develop in which I‘ve come to call Heal, Grow & Awaken. These three domains have become the foundation of my developmental framework (HGA).
Each domain is a way of working with the psyche that includes a distinct value focus and helps us meet specific human needs. Working excessively in one domain while neglecting the others can lead to developmental imbalances. While no one domain is more important than the others I’ve found that creating a solid base in the Heal level allows us to evolve in the most wholesome way.
Like all aspects of life, the three domains of Heal, Grow, and Awaken have significant overlap and can never truly be separated. However, creating this segmentation has helped me develop clarity and focus around my developmental process and I hope it can help you do the same.
Heal
The Heal domain is about processing trauma, integrating shadows, repairing attachment, and facing our mortality. It is concerned with becoming an authentic, individuated, and whole human being. While this work can be an uncomfortable and destabilizing process in the long-term it leads to a deeper level of connection and well-being within ourselves and our relationships.
Predominantly working with: emotions, feelings, sensations, images, dreams, and archetypes.
Needs Met: Safety, Connection, self-esteem, and love.
Manifests as: Wholeness & Goodness
Imbalance: Reifying emotions, endlessly circling and healing, excessive use of psychedelics, taking emotions as objective reality, losing one’s individuality in the collective.
Immanent focus: Values of nature & community
Practices: Psychotherapy, Parts work, Circling (relatefulness), Imaginal practice, Somatic work, Breathwork, Yoga & Conscious Psychedelic Use.
Grow
The Grow domain is about increasing mental complexity, sense-making, problem-solving, skill development, and polymathy. It’s about discovering/developing our talents and using them to take purposeful action. To the degree that these capacities are aligned with our healing & awakening is to the degree we can have a beneficial impact on the world.
Predominantly working with: Cognition and language.
Main needs met: Purpose and exploration.
Manifests as: Beauty & Meaning
Imbalance: Over-intellectualizing, hyper-rationalization, avoiding emotions and feelings, over-prioritizing thinking, believing everything can be known by logic, believing science will eventually explain everything, addiction to information and knowledge, left-brain dominance, addiction to control, over-emphasis on separation and isolation.
Omniscient focus: Values of wisdom and intelligence
Practices: Writing, Reading, Philosophizing, Coaching, Consulting & Focused Skill Development.
Awaken
The Awaken domain is about transcendence, liberation, deconstructing experience, the recognition of deep interdependence, and nonduality. As we let go of narrative and the elaboration of thoughts there is a deepening into the mystery of experience and a realization of what can’t be put into words. With enough work in this domain, we can experience a fundamental shift in our sense of identity and an increased capacity to be of service to the world.
Predominantly working with: attention and awareness.
Main needs met: Transcendence
Manifest as: Truth and liberation
Imbalance: Spiritual bypassing, Spiritual materialism, dissociating, using psychedelics excessively, attachment to mystical experiences, or altered states of consciousness.
Transcendent focus: Values of mysticism and spirituality
Practices: Meditation, Inquiry, & Conscious Psychedelic Use.
Embracing the paradox
Although an oversimplification these three domains can be seen as cognition, emotion, and awareness. Awareness is the ground from which all content of experience, whether cognition, emotion, imagination, or sensation arises. When we are deeply entrenched in the contents of experience we can forget awareness.
We can also remain aware as awareness and work with the contents in awareness and on a deeper level we can recognize that the contents that arise in awareness are not separate from awareness. This is where language starts to break down and where only our immediate direct experience can reveal our nondual nature.
We can say that awareness waking up to itself is the simplest and deepest level of experience. A deep awakening can lead some people to think that there is nothing left to do or work with which is one of the imbalances in this domain.
Even if on an ultimate level everything is complete and whole, on a relative level the way this wholeness can be integrated with our work and our relationships is endless. This dance between being and becoming is the paradox of our experience.
I’d love to hear what of this framework resonated with your own experience and what didn’t. Feel free to respond to this email or comment directly on this post.