From Titled Entitlement to Spiritual Seeker

8 november 2023

(Global Heart | Esther Haasnoot) In a world where achievements and external validation often take precedence, Serge Beddington-Behrens gracefully reminds us that the magic of self-discovery awaits. An Interview with Serge about his new book: “Amazing Grace; Memoirs of a Transformational Journey”.

A Transformational Journey of Self-Discovery

In his revealing memoir, “Amazing Grace,” Serge Beddington-Behrens takes us on a profound and humorous journey of self-transformation. Serge’s journey begins with a search for meaning beyond the trappings of wealth and societal expectations. As a person born into privilege and entitled to a prestigious title, he could have easily settled into a life of material comfort. However, a deep longing for something more led him to question the true purpose of his existence. This initial curiosity marks the beginning of his transformational journey.

Through his personal experiences and spiritual exploration, Serge shares invaluable lessons on how staying true to our deepest vision can bring about lasting change, not just in our own lives, but also in the lives of others we encounter. This transformation inspires us to reevaluate our priorities, prioritize self-discovery over material gain, and embrace the miracle of being human. For those who feel trapped by the pursuit of material success, “Amazing Grace” serves as a guidebook towards an opening inner door.

An Interview with Serge Beddington-Behrens about his new book: “Amazing Grace”

Esther Haasnoot: What motivated you to embark on your personal spiritual journey and ultimately write a book about transformation?

Serge Beddington-Behrens: I think the journey chooses us, or one could say that our soul says to us ‘I need to come more alive inside you as I am the true you’, and I guess I chose to listen to this voice. ‘Many are called but few are chosen’, Jesus told us. I interpret this as implying that Spirit or Soul or our higher-order destiny or whatever we want to call it, calls out to all of us, but many of us don’t hear as we’re not open to hearing. We’re tuned into other things so we don’t do the choosing! I did!

I have already written two books on transformation, one on how to awaken one’s heart called Awakening the Global Heart: A Guide for Spiritual Activists, and another on how to awaken to our soul nature, entitled Gateways to the Soul; Inner Work for the Outer world, so my new book is not just a book about ‘transformation’. It is a book about my transformation and I wrote it a), because I am so used in my profession as a psychotherapist and spiritual educator, to listening to other people’s stories and felt I wanted to tell my story, and b), I wanted people to know that our so-called disadvantages in life – and I started out with many – can be used as assets, and also that if we wish to evolve spiritually, we cannot avoid having to deal with our personality deficiences. I felt that telling my personal story can bring spirituality closer to people and help them realise that the game is not just about sitting on a mountain top in the sun doing a lot of ‘OM-ing’, but also involves confronting our own personal limitations – in my case, working with my sense of entitlement, my narcissism, selfishness, lack of confidence and fear of intimacy.

I also wanted to try and show that if we wish to be more intimate with a Higher Power, we have to learn to be more intimate with ourselves, other people, and our planet as a whole and that what helps us evolve the quickest is doing our best to be of service to other people. Lastly, I wanted to show that while the spiritual journey is challenging, it is immensely rewarding and that not only will a lot of mysterious things and synchronicities start happening for us, but the living of life becomes a very rewarding adventure.

Esther Haasnoot: Serge, your journey began with a search for meaning beyond the outward appearance of wealth and social expectations. You are the son of a titled industrialist and a Russian princess. Tell me something about childhood. How have your upbringing and the challenges you faced while balancing traditional expectations with personal desires shaped your values and goals in life?

Serge Beddington-Behrens: My childhood gave me advantages and disadvantages. The advantages were that it gave me the education to challenge the world I had been brought up in, as well as endowing me with enough money so that instead of having to look around for a job in order to survive, I had the leisure time to experiment with different careers to find out what worked for me and this to start to live the kind of simple life that I wanted to live.

In my childhood, I experienced a lot of material abundance but little emotional or spiritual abundance. My father was always too busy to spend any time with me and had been traumatised by the early death of his mother and losing his twin brother at the battle of the Somme, and my dear mama, who with her mother, had escaped Russia at the time of the revolution, also carried traumas.

As a result, I did not get the kind of soulful loving necessary to enable me to grow up whole and happy. Instead, I grew up believing I was special and entitled – superior to others (solely because I was the son of my parents) – which was painful when one comes into the big, bad world and discovers that it does not necessarily agree with you! Underneath my apparently confident outer persona was a rather unconfident and timid little boy who felt uncomfortable in the social world of my parents, peopled as it was with Royalty and rich and famous people. I felt like a pea in the wrong pod. I did not fulfill my parental expectations, my mother wanted me to marry someone very aristocratic and my father hoped I would follow him into his world and become a successful businessman. As I said, the more I began to discover who I really was underneath my very heavy conditioning, the more I felt moved to find and settle into, a vocation that resonated with the inclinations of my heart.

Esther Haasnoot: How did you gradually move away from the world you were born into to become a spiritual educator, a soul-centered psychotherapist, a teacher of transformation, and an activist for a transformed planet?

Serge Beddington-Behrens: I moved away because, as I just said, it was a world that I did not resonate with and feel comfortable in, and as my father died when I was 23 and my mama lived abroad having re-married, I had the ‘space’ to start looking around for the kind of life I wanted to live. In addition, I chose to follow my heart and listen to the plan of my life that my soul had in store for me. Therefore I didn’t so much ‘do’ things, so much as ‘feel my way’ into how I wished to live my life, and as it gradually dawned on me that I was very much a ‘people person’, had an understanding of how people worked as well as an innate healing capacity, this organically led me to wish to train in different psychological and spiritual disciplines. None of this was hard work. It was all enjoyable work as I show in my book. As I felt moved to work on my own transformational journey, it felt very natural to want to help other people with theirs. What also began gradually to emerge was that my work was not only to engage with addressing the healing of individual souls but I also needed to play my small part in addressing the damaged soul of society.

Esther Haasnoot: Our hearts and souls know that we can step into our full power, and yet ironically I am reminded of Marianne Williamson’s words. ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frighten us. Why is that, and how can we overcome this?

Serge Beddington-Behrens: I fully agree. In psychological lingo, it is called ‘the repression of the sublime’. Any why we resist is because, as Marion says, we are afraid of being in our power and the responsibility that this entails. Jean Huston once said ‘We are all born Stradivariuses and raised to believe we are plastic fiddles.’ So true. So if we’ve had a whole life of being a plastic fiddle, it becomes a habit and we get attached to our habits and the self images our habits endow us with and we don’t want to let them go. At another level, it is a fear of being free and being able to live the life that our souls tell us we are able to live.

I also think we resist the light because we don’t feel deserving enough. If we are a plastic fiddle, we aren’t much and we’re therefore not ‘good enough’ and so why should we receive any prizes!

So often I work with clients and they’ve been struggling to open a door in the metaphorical brick wall surrounding them and suddenly the door appears. ‘All you need to do now is turn the key and you can walk through to a new freedom’, I tell them. ‘After all your hard work, an opening has come.’ This, however, can be felt as scary. They are attached to the struggle, to life being difficult, and so what do many of them do? They turn their back on the door, grab their pick axe, and start trying to break the concrete wall down again!

So how do we overcome this? First, we need to recognise what is happening and that we are scared of our power and we need to claim it and not run away from it. Secondly, we need to work at building up our self-appreciation or self-worth and realise the importance of taking charge of living the kind of life we want to live. We also need to realise that nothing or no one will ‘save’ us. Jesus will not come down from Heaven in a chariot and lift us all up, as many fundamentalists believe! If we are to have a transformed future – if we are not to perish as a species – all of us need to take responsibility for creating a new and better world and realise that our world leaders and corporate bigwigs aren’t going to do it, not least because they are generally part of the problem. Our challenge is to become giraffes and stick our necks out and take stands for a transformed world, and not be ostriches burying our heads in the sand.

Esther Haasnoot: Awakening is not limited to individuals; it extends to communities, businesses, and governments as more people become aware of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life on Earth. How do you envision the future of humanity?

Serge Beddington-Behrens: My thesis, which I develop in the very long, last chapter of my book, is that we will break through; we will make it. A new and better world will emerge and I describe 24 areas where this will happen. Regarding the emergence of a new spirituality, for example, I suggest that more people will move away from their involvement with fundamentalisms, pseudo-religions, and cults and begin to embrace a spirituality that has depth to it, leading them to understand that we are all united, all equal in the mind of God and that there is a divinity both within us and that is greater than us.

But it will be a very tough journey getting there. And it will take time. It won’t happen all at once as some kind of magical quantum leap! I quote from the visionary philosopher Duane Elgin, where in his recent book Choosing Earth, he tells us that ‘It is the immense suffering of millions – even billions of precious human beings coupled with the destruction of many other life forms, that will burn through our isolation and complacency. Suffering is the psychological and psychic fire that can awaken our compassion and fuse individuals, communities, and nations into a cohesive and consciously organized global civilization’.

Elgin’s words tie in with what Professor Chris Bache believes, namely that we see the species-mind as a unified psychic field and that this field will be driven into a very tumultuous state by the extreme suffering generated by a monumental global ecological crisis, and that in this hyper-aroused state, the species mind will exhibit the capacity for rapidly accelerated change, heightened creativity and higher self-organization.

Put simply, humanity will gradually break through to a higher level of consciousness, but the next fifty years will be extremely challenging and ask us all to do all we can to awaken our deeper spiritual selves and thus activate the deeper love, courage, vision, and wisdom that lies inside us all and face our suffering in the knowledge that it has the capacity to transform us if worked with in the right way.

Esther Haasnoot: Do you have any advice or special tips for people on a similar path today?

Serge Beddington-Behrens: Be strong and brave and realise that newness casts its shadow in front of it and that today, species-wise, we are currently being presented with all that is worst and most unresolved in our personal and human collective lives, as well as in the social, economic and political realities around us. This is appropriate as we need to transmute these dark patterns in order to open up space to move on, so don’t be afraid or ashamed if you begin facing sides of yourself that you find hard to accept. This is your Shadow that requires confronting and integrating. The evils of many of our world leaders and the various terrorist groups and the non-workability of the system are all out there in the open for us to see, and these evils constitute the ‘stuff’ of our spiritual initiations. Big challenges can bring out the best of us which is why taking responsibility for our lives and being the best that we can be, is so important. Find that part of you that is an activist for a better world and activate that part of yourself. Don’t run away from the challenges in your life but face them and know that they exist for your growth and development. Also, be aware of the power of thought to change the world and work at opening your heart and sending peace to the many war-torn areas of our planet. And don’t give up. Choose to have your life be part of the solution to the problems of our world, not part of them. Or as Gandhi put it: ‘We need to be the change that we wish to see happen’. In other words, don’t just talk about change but embody it.

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About Dr. Serge Beddington-Behrens

Dr. Serge Obolensky Beddington-Behrens, MA (Oxon.), Ph.D., K.O.M.L., is an Oxford-educated transpersonal psychotherapist, writer, lecturer, activist, and spiritual educator.. For forty years he has conducted spiritual retreats all over the world. In the 1980s, he co-founded the Institute for the Study of Conscious Evolution in San Francisco. The author of Awakening the Universal Heart; a guide for Spiritual Activists and Gateways to the Soul; Inner work for the Outer world, he now lives in Mallorca. For more information or to connect with Serge Beddington-Behrens: sergebeddingtonbehrens.com, YouTube, Facebook. His email address is infosergebb@gmail.com.