Should You Start Something New While You Are In A Transformation Process?

To prioritize the inner changes or the ones we seek to create out there

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Since I have started writing about my own consciousness journey I’ve connected with lots of people going through similar experiences. This includes entrepreneurs who somehow found themselves in a spiritual awakening process while running or in between companies.

One thing life has reiterated to me time and time again is the importance of:

1. Realizing you are in a transformation process

2. Accepting you are in a transformation process and not fighting it

The more you try to hold on to the old world and way of doing things, the more difficult it is going to be.

The challenging thing is that we often can’t see all the little ways we hold on. This is the crux of the deepening of awareness.

The Context Of Starting Something

Holding on to the old world can take many forms. For many entrepreneurs, it can be the compulsion to be building something.

I remember I was pretty set on doing a new company over 3.5 years ago while my process was really starting to ramp. I was fully vested in my startup and my interests were taking me elsewhere.

Then life began to pile on challenging event after event leaving me with no energy to do anything. 

I found myself in a complete mental and physical malaise. 

I simultaneously felt increasingly disinterested in the outside world, but also guilty that I was not making the most of my talents by doing a new company. It was a very confusing and frustrating place to be.

I’d wake up, sew into my spiritual practices, drink a coffee with the intent to prolifically achieve, and then find myself needing to go lay on the couch an hour later. The physical symptoms ranged from being in an intense fog to having so much energy & pressure in my body that I couldn’t focus. This cycle would happen day after day and anger built up around the idea that “I should be getting better” because I was doing everything I could possibly think of to return to my old self.

What is very obvious now is that I was not able to accept that I was in a process. 

And amplifying this was the compulsion to build something and make the most of myself. 

What I eventually learned was that the motive behind building something was mostly oriented around the ego's desire to be valued and acknowledged. My ambition to build was more accurately a compulsion to feel worthy and okay. And in my covert struggle to appease this feeling, the spiritual transformation seemed to be getting in my way. 

Eventually, I realized what was going on and was able to fully embrace the situation. This took time as there was lots of energy tied up in this pattern. Gradually I became more at ease with the fact that I was going through this process and I had no idea how long it would take. Turns out it never stops! And with this understanding, there is now acceptance that my life is not going to look like what I once thought it was going to be. 

Everyone’s experience is different, but it seems like many people I have spoken with have had similar experiences where their awakening process has literally taken over their life. At the onset, this is incredibly frustrating because you can’t do all the things you’re used to doing that make the ego temporarily feel good about itself.

This is kind of the whole point. The old word needs to be deconstructed so a new one can be built.

You fight and fight until you one day see what’s going on. You realize that you’ve been living in a reality that is based on having to do things to feel good. This may have been accepted as the norm based on cultural programming, but the whole situation makes you start to question whether this conditional way of living is actually required.

It isn’t. You can feel good just being. It just takes a shit load of work to get there.

What Once Served You Is No Longer What’s Needed

The main conflict for entrepreneurs and achievement addicts is resisting this process relative to all their tried and true feel-good strategies. 

When I think about practically what you can do to aid this experience, one thing that sticks out to me is removing external pressure and expectations. For example, committing to starting a new company or big project while you are going through something like this means you might constantly be fighting the trade-off of doing vs. being gentle with whatever arises. For me, this meant some days just laying on the couch and letting my body go through whatever it needed to go through. This is a lot easier if you’ve set up your outside life to accommodate the prioritization of your inner transformation.

One entrepreneur I recently talked to alluded to how he started to treat his business more like a lifestyle company vs. raising more money so that he could balance all the ways his reality was shifting with more ease.

And if you are really going through a process and haven’t prioritized it, then you might just find that life forces you to. At least that is what happened to me.

I understand that everyone might not have the luxury of setting up life so that you can be gentle and patient with yourself. You might have just started something new that demands your full attention. In these situations, it seems like the task at hand is still to recognize you are in a process and submit to it the best you can. This probably means communicating to others around you that you are going through something and maybe even making adjustments anywhere there are dependencies on you.

The other alternative is having the humility to recognize you may have overextended yourself and having the courage and self-love to bow out so that you have the flexibility you need. There are no trophies for doing things in hard mode with spiritual awakening. 

I can’t reiterate this enough. The more you stop fighting and resisting what is happening, the easier the whole thing will be. The hardest part about this is we often can’t see how we are fighting. So the job becomes to catch ourselves when we notice we are fighting reality as it is. Usually the fight we witness is in our own awareness. And each time we do this the grip gradually loosens. Over time you will likely develop an acuity that allows you to detect more subtle impulses and ways you resist with expanded awareness. 

This is the work.

Prioritizing Grace Is Noble

So if you find yourself in the midst of a spiritual transformation, it is more than okay to just prioritize that and not do something new or big. In fact, it might just be the best thing you can do which probably opposes every story the old you have been conditioned to believe. It’s time to say goodbye to the old you. Its ideas served you up to this point in your experience, but at a certain point, they no longer aid the path forward like they once did.

It’s my experience that inner transformation and the evolution of consciousness is the most ambitious and beneficial endeavor you will ever take on. It can make doing a startup look easy. And as far as benefits go, the increasing levels of inner freedom outweigh the rewards of financial freedom. Although that’s nice too.

I’ll be the first one to say that I don’t think you need to drop out of life if you are going through a transformation process. This can be done while you are still an active participant in the world. You just need to be okay with having an inward orientation which might mean pressing pause on things “out there” for a while. It doesn’t mean forever and when you are able to re-emerge and harmonize the inner transformation and outward experience, everything you do out there will take on a new form.

When does this happen?

It’s not something that needs to be figured out. When it is time to integrate the inner and outer more meaningfully and take on that next big project it will seemingly just fall into your lap.

At least that’s my belief.

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If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏