Beyond Becoming: When Transformation Turns Towards Love

For many years, I have been drawn to the language of transformation. How do I become more present? How do I become more conscious? How do I become more whole? How do I awaken to what is true?

These questions have carried me into deep places of exploration through the Enneagram and contemplative practices inviting me to honestly examine the interior world. Through this inner work I have come to see my patterns and strategies for living more clearly. I’m also recognizing the ways I protect myself, and understanding how much of my life has been shaped by unconscious movements that I did not even realize were operating.

There is a profound gift in this kind of self-observation because becoming aware of oneself is to begin the journey of freedom. We cannot transform what we are unwilling to see.

Recently though those questions of “how to become” have begun to be replaced with another question. The new question is along the lines of what is this transformation for? I’m sensing that transformation is not the destination and that perhaps becoming more present, more conscious, and more whole is not the final movement. What if it is the doorway into something larger? If feels like the question is shifting from “How can I become?” to “What is Love doing?”

This slight shift in the question is a subtle but important distinction. The first question turns primarily toward the self. The second opens the self toward participation in something beyond itself.

Much of the spiritual and psychological work available today is centered around healing, integration, authenticity, and discovering our essence. I value this work deeply. It has helped me understand myself and others with greater compassion. It has opened many places within myself that had been hidden or forgotten, but I find myself sensing another movement beyond this work. Not because healing and wholeness are insufficient, but because it now seems to serve something greater.

I’m wondering what happens when the self I have spent so much time discovering becomes an offering? What happens when presence is no longer only something I cultivate for my own freedom, but becomes the way through which Love moves into the world?

Questions like these are one reason I continue to return to scripture. The biblical tradition has always seemed to point toward a mystery larger than individual transformation. The invitation (Gospel) is not simply to become a better version of ourselves, but an invitation into participation. It is to participate in the life of God, or the new creation, or the mystery we call Love.

Christ does not seem primarily concerned with self-improvement. He speaks of a reality that is breaking through, a way of being in relationship with God and with one another that transforms not only individuals but creation itself. The more I sit with this idea of relationship, the more I sense that heaven and earth are not separate realities waiting to be joined someday, but that they are already mysteriously intertwined. The spiritual is not an escape from the human, but rather a fulfillment of the human.

This is where I sometimes feel a little out of step with the abundance of self-help conversations around me. I deeply appreciate the work of becoming more conscious and more whole, yet I find myself longing to ask what comes after that. Not because the individual journey does not matter, but because the individual journey exists in service to something much larger; Love.

This Love is not simply an emotion or a virtue, but a mystery that underlies the movement of reality itself.

I have recently been using the word “hatching” to describe where I find myself. I do not feel as though I have arrived at a final understanding or that my message is fully formed. Something is still emerging, and taking shape.

Perhaps this is how all true transformation is supposed to feel. When we look around the natural world we see that becoming cannot be manufactured. Instead there is just a simple participation in the conditions that allow something already alive to emerge. A seed does not force itself into becoming a tree. A child does not consciously construct the person they will become. There is a mysterious intelligence within life itself that knows how to unfold.

I see this mystery reflected in my granddaughter, Clover. We recently had a conversation about what she wanted to be when she grew up. I expected the usual answer children might give: a doctor, a teacher, an artist, or clown. Instead, in her three year old wisdom, she simply said, “I just want to be myself.” Wow, is this not exactly what every one is searching for?

There was something profound in her simplicity. She seemed to understand and apprehend her natural state of innocence before accumulating identities, defenses, and adaptations. I almost sure that we have all been aware that In the presence of a child there is a natural openness, curiosity, and capacity for wonder that we later spend years trying to recover.

This does not mean childhood is some perfect state to which we must return. Children are also growing, learning, and forming the structures necessary to become distinct human beings. But there is something about their natural presence that reminds us of a truth we can easily forget: love is not something we create. It is something we learn to uncover.

Perhaps the journey of transformation is not about becoming someone other than who we are. Perhaps it is about removing the obstacles that prevent what is already true from expressing itself more fully.

In this way, the journey feels as if it brings me full circle. I began as an innate openness, but throughout life developed strategies to protect myself, and in doing so lost contact with that openness. With practice, intentional awareness, and grace I’ve slowly returned home to myself. Not to the innocence of an unaware child, but to the innocence of someone living fully, suffering honestly, and discovering that love was present all along.

And it seems that this becoming is in relationship to something larger than ourselves. The interior, open self we discover at the center is not meant to become a fortress, but a doorway. Through that doorway Love continues its work of transformation. I do not know exactly where this path leads, but I have begun to sense that the deepest question is not “Who am I becoming?” but “How is Love asking to become through me?”

Reflection Inquiry:

Where in your life do you sense something “hatching” and what posture might you take to best support that hatching?

What shifts in you when your question of “Who am I becoming?” becomes “How is Love asking to become through me?”

Image: Awakening by Seward Johnson in Chesterfield, MO taken by Kim de Beus