Is it for the many or just the few?
With Ria, ‘inner work’ comes up quite a lot in conversation. She's trained as a psychologist, coach etc. and sees herself as doing a lot of it. But what is it?
I had a fair sense of the general meaning, but wanting to check up, naturally I searched on the web for ‘inner work’. What comes up is a general picture that I can recognise, much of which makes a lot of sense. Though some sites seem to be there more to promote the site owners' courses or books or coaching / mentoring services.
Also today, an alert from someone's blog post discussion from nearly 10 years ago brought me back to some conversations about e-portfolios. (I have many comments on that thread, including a new one …) But why I link that here and now is that e-portfolio usage and journalling and inner work all seem to share something in common. The best e-portfolio practice (in higher education, at least) was always intended to develop people's refective capacities – becoming a ‘reflective practitioner’ was all the vogue for professional education at the time – maybe it still is? What I saw and heard back then about e-portfolio practice was that it was generally only a small minority (say 10%?) who spontaneously ‘got’ the idea, and took it on enthusiastically. The majority were reported to engage only grudgingly, and only if it was a course requirement. With journalling, one of the routes to personal development is to reflect on older journal entries and see how you have moved on and developed. That can give people a better sense of their learning capacity, their learning ability, journey, progress, and maybe help develop a ‘growth mindset’ if they're lucky. So I started to wonder, is ‘inner work’ similarly something for the few, rather than the many? My intuition suspects …
This reminded me of Denis Postle's work on ‘Psycommons’ (here or here or here). There seems to be a whole lot of common wisdom (forming a kind of commons) with which most people cope quite adequately in daily life, without needing any explicit ‘inner work’. Yet the purveyors of ‘inner work’ believe in it, seeing it as essential. They want all of us to taste the delights (and terrors, perhaps) of pioneers like Jung. Something doesn't quite ring true to me here, and I'm not quite sure what it is.
So I wondered. Could I, can I, perhaps take on the role of the interested skeptic? It's not that I don't believe in inner work. I can see its potential importance and significance clearly. It's more that I feel myself in a liminal position, poised (or oscillating?) between, on the one hand, wanting to dive deeper into inner work (or at least recognise some of what I have been doing as inner work) and on the other hand, wanting to see how the same general kind of personal development can be accomplished collectively – interpersonal rather than inner work – that doesn't rely on individual motivation, but is responsive to the needs of the moment and the promptings of others. Or, at the risk of sounding banal and grandiose, can I harvest some of the insights from writings about individual inner work, and repackage them, popularise them? (Incidentally, as Denis Postle did for Catastrophe Theory.) I'm tempted, partly because there's something here that plays into my interest in developing competence frameworks and knowledge commons.
I'm not going to answer the question further here, but rather to flag it as a topic which will probably return to this journal. Meanwhile, why not have a conversation with me about it? You would be welcome.
Topics: Journal writing; Personal development
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