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My Journey: A Story of Transformative Learning

Hoi An, Vietnam, January 8, 2018

I was born to a fifteen-year-old, uneducated mother, in an Arabic-speaking Muslim family, in the heart of a centuries-old Moroccan medina. I am the oldest of four siblings. At seven years old, I was admitted in a French elementary school attended mostly by French children. Needless to say, this first learning experience was a shock. At eighteen, and in the grip of teenage angst, I dropped out of twelve grade and traveled by car with a boyfriend and a team of book salesmen to Europe, the Middle East and Africa selling French books for a living. After four years, I had enough savings to return to Morocco, this time after rationally weighing my options for the future. I enrolled in a correspondence course in preparation for the French Baccalaureate Exam as an independent candidate, and passed it with mention.

Six months later, I traveled to New York, Japan and Hong Kong and upon my return home, recognized that I needed to learn English to engage with the wider world. I immediately signed up for an intensive six-month study in London. Only weeks after I passed the TOEFL, and with the financial help of a generous uncle, I started college at the University of Florida where I graduated just two and a half years later with Honors and an induction in the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a distinction which was still a mystery to me. By then, I had fallen in love with academia and I applied to a few prestigious graduate schools knowing full well I couldn’t afford any of them (my uncle’s largess having ended) but hoping they would come through for me even though I was a penniless foreign student. 

I was quickly accepted by Johns Hopkins and Harvard, among others. I chose instead New York University because it was the only institution that offered me a full fellowship including a monthly cash stipend, provided I maintain straight A’s. After I received my Masters Degree and finished the PhD coursework and comprehensive exams, I was awarded a generous year-long doctoral research internship by the Guggenheim Foundation, which was interested in the subject matter of my doctoral dissertation: International Terrorism. Unfortunately, I hit a wall before completing my PhD. I was struggling with stress and anxiety and lacked proper guidance and mentoring. It turned out there were limits to my independent, intrapersonal, self-learning abilities. I found a way out by becoming pregnant and giving birth to a colicky, hyperactive baby and forever remained an “All But Dissertation.”

After that, my life took on a radically different path. My love marriage to my college sweetheart collapsed after years of discord and, as a divorced single mother, I faced financial ruin and looked for jobs primarily to make money and support my daughter and ailing mother. After a couple of years as a Manhattan real estate agent, I answered a Merrill Lynch employment ad in The New York Times. I was hired as a rookie broker in a midtown branch and studied for the various Series Exams required to work in the financial industry and stock markets. That was the easy part!  When in the first few months I started prospecting for clients, I found I loathed cold-calling. But I persevered using networking and, within a decade, became a rising star; one of only a handful of women in the industry.

As a Merrill Lynch Senior Financial Adviser and VP, I occupied a large office overlooking the East River on the 47th floor of the Citicorp Tower. In the eyes of all those around me, I was the embodiment of the American Dream! Only, inside, I was a wreck, reacting to not only the stock markets debacles but also all kinds of other events, such as 9/11, the Iraq War, and my Muslim identity. Needless to say, I was always stressed, lived in perpetual fear, and carefully kept up appearances thanks to anti-anxiety medication and strenuous gym workouts. By the time, my mother’s illness led to the complete loss of her mobility and she required around-the-clock care, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The decisions I took then were for the most part irrational and short-sighted. I took a leave of absence from my job and when my mother passed away within months, I had just undergone a full hysterectomy and was in the midst of utter mental confusion. I never went back to work, turning my back in doing so to an enviable Wall Street career and loads of money.

Fast forward fourteen years later, the mature woman I am today finally figured out some of the big problems that caused the devastating crashes that ended my promising career paths before their time. For even though I had entered and pursued those careers wholeheartedly, their unplanned endings came about reluctantly and irrationally. My decisions stemmed from deep emotional turmoil and a reactive and negative state of mind. For a while, I was so enthralled by the capacity of the intellect to create and control events in my life, I had pretty much dismissed my unconscious emotional self and I was perpetually at war with it. Because my mother and most of the women in my family during my childhood were all either completely illiterate or uneducated, I viewed education and reason as the holy grail for a fully independent life. I entered a male power system with a man’s mindset, and I couldn’t understand why I harbored so much angst and why I couldn’t control my circumstances when they took on unforeseen turns. My capacity for lasting transformative learning was showing its limits. And that is where Mezirow’s theory with its over-reliance on the rational mind stops being helpful for people like me.

After four years of self-reflection on the content, process and premise of my life experiences (Mezirow, 1997), I was met with the same stumbling blocks, namely the values and judgments of the dominant white, male, middle class culture I was living in, the one I had so proudly conquered. Only that which causes the problems cannot beget the solutions. I was stuck and desperate. Time and again, my rational mind came up with actions to get me out of my predicaments only to present me with further problems instead of lasting solutions, because they were marred by fear and doubt. The light at the end of the tunnel appeared one spring day when a friend called to recommend I read Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth,” and I suddenly realized I was a prisoner of my mind. My incessant thinking had tormented me to the point of despair. It was time for me to learn to be still and open my heart to my emotional being in order to integrate my shadow self, as Carl Jung calls it.

Robert Boyd understood this missing aspect in Mezirow’s theory and, borrowing from Carl Jung’s work on ego, shadow, persona and collective unconscious, expanded the purview of Transformative Learning Theory further. The deep conflicts between the ego (the conscious mind) and the unconscious within the individual’s psyche must be resolved for true transformation, defined as: “the fundamental change in one’s personality involving conjointly the resolution of a personal dilemma and the expansion of consciousness resulting in greater personality integration.” (Boyd,1989) From that moment on, I went on a quest for spiritual expansion and emotional growth that’s still ongoing. All my life, I had been oblivious, or rather dismissive, of my feminine/emotional being, whilst exhibiting a self-assured, rational persona, which depleted my energy and left me wanting. I aspired to fit in and succeed in a world that devalued and derided feelings and emotions and appreciated above all the analytical mind, the ego and the Newtonian model of cause and effect. Feelings are anything but rational and explaining them rarely makes them go away. We end up repressing and denying them, which over time comes back to haunt us in the form of mental and physical sickness.

More importantly, the over-reliance on the intellect at the exclusion of the heart deprives us of our wholeness and ultimately of our expanded consciousness and full cognitive abilities. I was busy pushing away my conflicting negative emotions lest they be seen by others, so intent on appearing strong and confident that it almost destroyed me. I preferred to run away rather than be found out as a fraud and admit to my vulnerability. My lack of self-worth and tragic need to prove myself over and over again manifested as insurmountable obstacles when life threw me a curve-ball. My “disorienting dilemmas,’ as Mezirow calls them, were impervious to self-examination and critical reflection. They yielded and transformed only when I sat still with my negative emotions, embraced them despite the pain, and surrendered to my shadow self. When that happened, my negative feelings turned into deep peace and compassion. It was only then that my critical mind became productive again, creative and potent, not before.

In Kabbalah, it is asserted that the less we react to events, circumstances and others, the closer to God we get. Hence, just as I started to settle into a feeling of authenticity and wholeness, integrating my shadow self and transcending many of my subconscious negative feelings and beliefs, I began contemplating yet another challenge: expanding to still higher levels of consciousness and love. Inside me the impulse was growing, an instinctual urge I couldn’t ignore much longer, only this time, it was not born of confusion or dilemma, it was emanating from a deep state of knowing and bliss, which does not mean my ego was not in full panic mode at times. This type of transformative learning is an entirely different animal. It is a spiritual drive motivated by the desire to know god within, to embrace the unknown armed with faith alone. I believe that many of us today are feeling that calling and have set on the path of bringing more love and awakening onto the world, an endeavor that starts with greater individual awareness.

Shortly after my birthday, in the summer of 2016, I gave away all my material belongings and most cherished possessions, left my home, family and friends and went on a solo travel around the world to countries where I had never been. In my view, there is not a bigger trigger for transformative learning than overseas travel. And I am not talking about the kind of travel that seeks to duplicate the comforts of home while away and shields you from the imponderable, but of the type of solitary travel that throws you into an altered state of consciousness. The kind of travel that obliterates your identity, habits and frames of references and finds you naked and raw in the face of the unknown and utterly unfamiliar. I recently returned from that adventure and have been reflecting and writing about the extraordinary changes I have experienced. My journey, it turns out was not so much about the wondrous countries and peoples I discovered as much as about the deep emotional shifts and altered mindsets that have taken place within me while stretching the envelop of my awareness.

Eighteen months, fifteen new countries, and a new book later, I am back home ready to embark on a whole new chapter, my Life’s Third Act, as Jane Fonda famously calls it in her 2012 TED talk for Women. This latest phase of my personal psychic development and transformative journey has moved beyond the personal ego-centered development to a desire to share with others the fruit of my spiritual expansion and higher consciousness. Scott (1991) wrote: “When one transcends his/her ego, collective needs, wants and desires represent a stronger force… [and the] group can serve to represent symbolically alternative thoughts, structure, directions and images for what is appropriate in today’s society.” The group I am thinking about is the growing army of light workers who are seeking enlightenment and empowerment while spreading love and compassion in the world today.

This was the story of my own evolution. The intent to share it with you stems from my desire to shed light on some of the basic premises of Jack Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory and highlight a couple of alternative perspectives that appear to support my own transformative journey. Transformative Learning, as a fundamental change in the way we see our world, has been crucial in my life experience from early adulthood. For most adults, their perception of themselves, the perception others have of them, and fear of judgment make them impervious to taking risks and expanding beyond their current perspectives. As we get older, most of us tend to root ourselves into daily routines until our unconscious mind becomes so hardwired that attempts at change are not only difficult but also painful. Yet, some of us, have a seemingly infinite capacity to undergo a multiplicity of perspective changes throughout our lives and to reinvent ourselves time and time again.

My hope is that my journey will inspire others, especially older women who are the largest demographic in the Western world today, who like me yearn to be the best version of themselves while living their best lives. And perhaps, since we are talking about transformative learning in adults, let me say a word about this phenomenon of our time which is the explosive growth of seniors in the developed world. These so-called Baby Boomers are entering the third act of their lives at unprecedented numbers and many of them do not feel they are on a path of decrepitude or decay but further growth and expansion and most of all service. To them, Fonda, today at the beautiful ripe age of 80, offered a different metaphor for aging, one that is no longer defined by an arch but a “staircase,” symbolizing in her own words: “The upward ascension of the human spirit bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity. Age not at all as a pathology, age as potential…” Because after all, scientific research now shows, the brain, with its magnificent plasticity, has the ability to form new neural pathways, expanding our capacity to learn and transform into very old age. Neuro-plasticity is opening the door to the secret of immortality, which is infinite flexibility and creativity: Transformative learning as a lifelong voyage.

Note: This article was written as a story illustrating Jack Mezirow's  Theory of Transformative Learning for Teachers College 20th Anniversary of the International Transformative Learning Conference in November 2019.