How To Deal With Regression During Personal Development

[Lior]

Doing spiritual work for several months now, I am experiencing some progress in some areas of my life.
However, I also noticed about some regressions. Some of the good knowledge forgotten and the old habits are coming back.

I must say it is quite frustrating. It rises questions like: 
Can I stay with all the good stuff ? Am I in the right direction ? How can I measure development ? Is there a routine to keep progress all the time ? What if I loose my awareness and fall asleep again ?

 

[Mitch]

@Lior

From experience, I've found it's best to go into progression knowing that there will be an inevitable regression. This way, you're mentally prepared when the regression occurs.

If you are aware of your regressions, you are probably still in the right direction. The path to mastery is never without plateaus and setbacks, so it is impossible to continuously "progress" in the direction you want to be going. Our experiences afford us all different paths and just because another took a perhaps more empirically direct path, it doesn't mean that you lost time or anything else if you took a more winding path to get there. Everything is as it should be: you should be doing whatever it is you're doing.

To gauge your development, you could keep a journal and then later reread what you wrote on an earlier date. This will also build gratitude when you look back at how you once were, provided you keep moving in a positive direction.

Remember to be patient on your journey. There is no need to have everything all at once in life. You'll be much happier provided you don't worry about things falling into place the way you see fit.

[philosogi]

@Lior It's also possible that you had some habits that you judged as "good" back then and had instated them using negative motivations, e.g., "if I don't go to the gym I'll be fat so I have to go to the gym."

Doing spiritual work undoes these negative motivations because they are ego-driven and not higher-self driven. You can still regain these habits you judge as "good," so you're going to have to convince your newer, less-ego-driven self that you really want to.

[Andrea Marchetti]

If regression happens it means that progress never happened.
We can trick ourselves into believing that we progressed and when we do it is a false progression: it's an idea, a vision of ourselves, that becomes the dictator over other competing ideas. Whenever we become more sensible and meditative we can suddenly see that something we thought we resolved indeed we did not and we just fooled ourselves. And it can be frustrating but feeling it is the right way to go.

We can't stay in between the good stuff all the time. We must cross over many bad stuff to face and dissolve them. If we don't then we would be evolutionarily dead. And as I said before, some good stuff was just illusory and delusional. It's better to face the truth rather than stay deluded.

We can't measure our development, we are driven by it. We don't really drive it. One can never really knows where the right path is. For example, depression is often the only door to true life for many.

In my opinion routines doesn't work much. Because it's all about the intensity of will for truth or for peace, or for power. It's the amount of conscious and unconscious will for truth what is really driving down the path. Routines can do nothing if one is not willing to accept truths which go against his ego.

You will not loose awareness, you can't. It's only one way. You can be aware of something and completely unaware of something else at the same moment though. Anyway it's not under your control, and it is something that it's happening every moment behind you, so don't worry about it. Worry only about on how to gain more awareness, don't be afraid to loose it.

So in the end, be passionate about it. Compare everything else, sex job whatever, with enlightenment and ask yourself what you would take if you'd have to choose between the two. Answer honestly and don't force either yourself into willing something that you don't want with all your being, just know it. That is a way to check how far you are from enlightenment, not in terms of time of course. Enlightenment path knows no time. If one is overwhelmed by the desire of knowing the ultimate truth one would get it instantly.