Who does the dishes

A Hindu-influenced spiritual teacher. A travel writer. A rebel guru. The Dalai Lama. A Buddhist nun. A Roman emperor. A West African oral historian. A shame researcher. Two Stanford professors. A conflict mediator. Two therapists. What's their view on growth and on personal growth in particular according to their books and/or recordings?

One distinction kept surfacing that I think is worth naming on its own: the difference between an obstacle and friction.

An obstacle is mostly static. It’s a wall, a delay, a barrier you route around, climb over, or push through. It doesn’t care about you; it just sits there. Most of what we call “growth” in popular language is really obstacle-clearing — remove the thing in the way, keep moving and/or accumulation.

Friction is different in a way that matters. Friction only exists in contact — it requires two surfaces actually touching, which in human terms usually means two people, or a person and a system that pushes back. It releases something in the moment it happens — heat, in physics; in human terms, emotion, tension, sometimes insight. And it’s mutual. An obstacle acts on you. Friction acts on both parties at once.

That distinction turned out to split the twelve thinkers I looked at almost perfectly in half.

The self-dissolvers

Five of the voices converge on a version of “growth” that’s about loosening your grip on a fixed self.

Ram Dass framed it as remembering rather than becoming — waking up to who you already are underneath the roles you’ve accumulated, treating every experience, including his own paralysis after a stroke, as curriculum rather than interruption. He also returned often to the dance between the discipline of retreat (inner work) and the discipline of return (outer life) and suggested that the practice is the movement between them.

Pico Iyer got there through subtraction instead of accumulation — stillness, retreat, and a comfort with not-knowing, developed across decades of travel writing that eventually convinced him that the real movement happens when you stop moving.

Osho took the same territory and made it confrontational — growth as de-conditioning, stripping away everything parents, religion, and culture installed in you, in favor of what he called your original nature.

The Dalai Lama systematized it: the mind is trainable like a muscle, compassion is a skill, and self-centeredness is the root obstruction — not to any specific outcome, but to clarity itself.

Pema Chödrön made the sharpest version of the claim: growth isn’t adjacent to difficulty, it happens inside it. Leaning into groundlessness, treating your own pain as a doorway into compassion for others, refusing to let a search for security become the whole project.

Different vocabularies — devotional, contemplative, rebellious, systematic, raw — but the same underlying move: the self is the thing in the way, and growth means holding it more loosely.

The two counterexamples

Two voices refuse that frame entirely, in opposite directions.

Marcus Aurelius wanted a disciplined self, not a dissolved one. Stoic growth is about sharpening your judgment, not loosening it — separating what’s in your control from what isn’t, examining your own conduct nightly, treating virtue as the only good worth pursuing. This is growth as duty, not surrender.

Amadou Hampâté Bâ, drawing on West African griot tradition, relocated growth outside the individual altogether. In this frame, you don’t grow by discovering something inside yourself — you grow by receiving what elders and ancestors pass down, and growth isn’t even complete until you’ve passed it on again. It’s communal and generational, not personal at all.

Brené Brown sits somewhere adjacent to both camps, translating the contemplative intuitions about shame and vulnerability into something empirically researched and teachable — closer to a social scientist’s version of what the spiritual voices describe.

The friction cluster

The following voices are where the obstacle/friction distinction really earns its keep, because all four are explicitly about what happens between people — not only within one person.

Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao study friction inside organizations, and their central move is refusing to treat it as uniformly bad. Some friction protects an organization — a confirmation step before an irreversible action, a deliberate slowdown before a risky decision. Growth, for them, is a design problem to be solved: know which friction to remove and which to install on purpose.

Adam Kahane takes the same idea into political and interpersonal conflict. His years mediating some of the world’s most fractured negotiations led him to a counterintuitive conclusion: real collaboration doesn’t require agreement or harmony — it requires staying in contact with people you don’t like or trust, without converting them into an enemy. The danger isn’t the friction of disagreement; it’s what he calls “enemyfying,” which turns a live relationship back into a dead obstacle you can ignore (or remove).

Esther Perel locates the same dynamic inside intimacy. Her argument is that long-term desire depends on holding two competing needs — security and mystery — in permanent, unresolved tension. Try to dissolve that tension by fully merging with a partner, and you don’t get a stronger relationship; you get a duller one. The friction of otherness is what keeps things alive.

John Gottman, after decades observing thousands of couples, found something more procedural: conflict itself doesn’t predict divorce. Specific corrosive patterns do — contempt most of all. What separates couples who last from couples who don’t isn’t the presence of friction, but the presence of repair: small gestures that de-escalate a fight before it spirals, and enough of a positive foundation to absorb the inevitable negative moments.

And underneath all four of these sits something Ram Dass said decades earlier, in a lecture called The Yoga of Relationships: that the most valuable relationships are the ones built on a “truth contract” rather than an agreement to keep each other comfortable. He was describing the same mechanism Kahane, Perel, and Gottman would later formalize — that friction with another person is often the thing showing you exactly what still needs to grow.

What doesn’t stick

One more voice joins this conversation: Krishnamurti would likely reject the whole premise of "growth" as a path at all — his claim was that the very idea of a self striving to become more evolved is the mechanism that keeps it stuck, and that real insight is instantaneous, not built through practice or contact. He's not alone — he's one branch of a wider non-dual family converging on the same claim from different lineages: Ramana Maharshi's line through Poonja to Gangaji, and the Direct Path tradition behind Rupert Spira, both teaching some version of "you are already free, and the only obstacle is the belief that you aren't."

Sudden insight does seem to happen without any framework at all — spontaneously, in crisis, on a riverbank, in exile. Nobody seems to argue you need a community for the glimpse.

Krishnamurti's closest collaborator, the physicist David Bohm, spent 25 years in dialogue with him quietly wrestling with why the insight never seemed to fully stick. Their recorded conversations, published as The Ending of Time, are themselves a kind of friction — two rigorous minds, genuinely in contact, not always landing in the same place. And Bohm's own answer is telling: he made the insight collective rather than solitary.

Structured group dialogue, no leader, no goal, as a container where the fragmentation of thought becomes visible together, in real time. Faced with the problem of persistence, the most rigorous student of the most anti-communal teacher in the tradition built a community.

Insight lasting

That distinction between insight occurring and insight lasting may be the matter that dissolves the apparent conflict between the two camps.

Perhaps the self-dissolvers are describing what it takes for something to happen: stillness, loosened grip, the willingness to stop improving yourself long enough to see what's already there.

The friction cluster may be describing what happens when it becomes embodied in a life shared with other people: contact, correction, people who won't just agree with you.

These might be answers to different parts of the question: what allows insight to occur, what allows it to endure and what allows it to become embodied in the way we actually live?

What community actually provides are continuity (structure that keeps the thing happening when motivation drops) and normalization (the state treated as ordinary rather than as an achievement to defend). Though the same functions can, under some circumstances, unfortunately invert — continuity becomes entrapment, normalization becomes the normalizing of abuse — which is the other half of what a container does, and the reason "find a community" is not on its own always good advice.

Thich Nhat Hanh is an interesting case: monastery training from sixteen, then the actual test — organizing relief work in a war zone, then thirty-nine years of exile with no monastery, no sangha, no support. And his famous teaching about washing dishes as practice. What held him was work, relationships and a tradition internalized deeply enough to run without scaffolding. Plum Village came later.

Who does the dishes

Which brings up something the self-dissolvers rarely or just sometimes name: they had communities too.

Papaji's satsangs happened in a cramped family house in Lucknow — devotees sleeping in the front room, his wife sleeping on the kitchen floor, meals appearing at a dining table full of guests. Ramana had an ashram. Gangaji has a foundation.

The stillness that looks so unsupported on a recording has always rested on a structure of people, and often on labor that rarely made it into the record.

This doesn't make the insight false. But it does mean the demonstration was never a demonstration of insight alone — it was insight plus a container. Zen at least names it: samu, work practice, is formally on the schedule.

So the honest version might be this. “Growth” needs both registers, in some proportion everybody works out for themselves — enough stillness to loosen the grip, enough contact with people who won't let you stay comfortable to find out what's still gripping.

What started as a question about “personal growth” turned into a question about maintenance and embodiment — what holds a change in place, what happens to it in contact and who's doing the holding.

Someone always does the dishes. Monasteries share it out. The guru model can make it somehow invisible.