Self Destruction

“Why is improvement hard? Part of the issue is everyone wants to improve, but nobody wants to destroy. Change often requires destruction. Or, at least, unlearning. Let’s call it gentle elimination. You may have to leave little habits, update current beliefs, eliminate comfortable patterns. When you want better outcomes, your daily norms may need to change. The process of improvement is not just about adding things you like. Sometimes habits and patterns belong to who you were, not who you are trying to be. If you’d like something better, then a routine you are comfortable with may have to die.” -James Clear

“The way we feel about ourselves depends on our relative positioning more so than our absolute performance. Our scoreboard is relative, not absolute. This is why growth feels like destruction. Why getting better feels like getting worse. Why building up feels like tearing down. Because growth forces a change in environment. You can’t reach your true potential in the tiny pond where you started. You have to leave the safety of what you know to explore what you can become. At some point, you outgrow the places, people, mindsets, behaviors, and beliefs that once felt like home. That provided comfort. Stability. Grounding. In those moments, you have a choice: You can stay. Embrace the comfort and safety of your small pond. Or, you can leave. Push into new frontiers. Enter a bigger pond.
But if you choose to leave, if you choose the path of growth, do so knowing that it’s going to hurt….You asked for the growth, so pay the cost of entry with pride.” -Sahil Bloom

“We are not very good at realizing that there is a secret way to God… We have to strip ourselves of our false selves, not in order to have nothing, but in order to be real….For me, to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I truly am and of discovering my true self.” -Thomas Merton

“When you are able to move beyond your false self—at the right time and in the right way—it will feel precisely as if we have lost nothing. In fact, it will feel like freedom and liberation…Your True Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God, ‘the face you had before you were born,’ as the Zen masters say. It is your substantial self, your absolute identify, which can never be gained nor lost by any technique, group affiliation, morality, or formula whatsoever. The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find “the pearl of great price” that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.” -Richard Rohr

“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.” -C.S. Lewis

To change your self, you have to destroy your self.

That’s the only way the new can fully take over the old.

Are you willing to self destruct?