Working on self is a lifetime activity.
Too often we think this means going to talk to a therapist. I’ve done that, and it helped. So I’m not denying the importance of asking others for help. In fact, I think it is essential. The same brain that thought you into this pickle will not think you out of it. You must have external help.
The help must come from people. People can write books and by reading the books you lean new things and make changes to your life. Books have been essential for me. “The first thing to go is the reading,” Bob Anderson would say. Meaning that the maintenance of your spiritual condition must include, among other things, daily reading to keep you on The Path.
Or the help will come from actual real live talking and sharing with another person. This, too, is essential. I think rigorous self-honesty can only be built when you are willing, one tiny admission at a time, to be rigorously honest with another. Human being. And without rigorous self-honesty, you’re dead.
One easy path to growth—a trigger to get you into therapeutic action—is to start on a humble but necessary and useful task.
There is a @visakanv tweet out there somewhere saying decluttering projects or working on personal finance are (not his words, but this is the idea) a gateway or path to therapy, to uncovering what’s really going on. This is the old “uncover, discover, discard” game, isn’t it?
The Pathless Path contains a similar anecdote, where attention to finance helped Paul Millerd confront his underlying psychology about money. See pp. 134-137.
Moral of the story: any activity I choose to do, intended to make things “better”, will reveal reasons within me for why the situation became unacceptable to me in the first place.
I can’t declutter the house without revealing the truth about why it became cluttered in the first place. And once I confront that root cause, I can do something about it. I can confront the hidden dis-ease that caused the clutter in the first place.