(Warning: This may be a bit tangential. Such is the nature of change…)
In the past few months there has been enormous transition in our lives here at hOMe PYM. We've gone through changes as a family and as individuals we never anticipated. Like many folks, 2018 was a hell of a year -- really, really good stuff and really, really challenging stuff!
Like many people, change can frighten me, even when it is necessary. Little change…. I got that. I am master of the adrenaline rush. Take me to a new city, wind me up, and watch out world! Who knows what adventure I'll have that day?! Big change...hmmmm...not so much. Usually when I go through a process of big change, I am pretty dramatic about it. I do it kicking and screaming, spitting out fire balls and throwing grenades the whole way through.
The first month of our major change here I was pretty messy about things -- following my typical pattern of mass destruction and melodrama--but, that pattern didn’t last long. Somewhere in the back of my conscious now are a few key parts of my adult psyche—my Buddha brain (who was grinning from atop of the mountain as it watched me chase my own tail around in circles); my very own psychoanalyst explaining to me clearly why this whole ordeal unfolded as it did; and the compassionate internal mother part of my psyche, calming me down and letting me know, everything is and will always be okay and that I am loved now and always.
With these three aspects of my mental/spiritual psyche on board, I set off do something about my process rather than trying to force the outcome. I humbly invited in the unknown, trusting that Spirit/Source/God/Allah/All that is, had my back and all I had to do was show up to life and be quiet enough to listen. I went to a private retreat with my meditation school, the Institute of Applied Meditation on the Heart founded by Susanna and Puran Bair. Like we do here at hOMe, I underwent seven days of intensive meditation and self-reflection guided by my teacher and friend, Susanna Bair. The experience was then, as it always has been, deeply and profoundly life changing. There is nothing that can compare to the process of transformation that occurs in these retreats.
I also doubled up on my psychoanalysis and rediscovered the deeply nurturing process of letting my yoga mat hold my tears of grief and my laughs of joy. I had forgotten how much my yoga practice holds me, how many memories and emotions that rubber mat will fold into itself without asking anything of me and without sharing a single secret.
I'm still in the process of negotiating all the changes. But reflecting on how I handled myself even just six or seven years ago when faced with some enormous life changes, I feel such profound gratitude to see actually how much I have changed in relation to change. I am humbled to realize that I actually have faith and trust in the unfolding mystery of my own life. This has been hard earned. Growing up with a certain measure of trauma and uncertainty, trust in the process really has been hard to come by.
We are such a funny species, aren’t we? The one truth that is inevitable is change. This is the nature of life itself. Quite literally at every moment, at all times, we are vibrating which means we are always in the process of change. There is never a moment in which change is not occurring. And yet this is the one thing most of us kick and scream about the most. I’m not sure I have any profound answers or theories for you. I find that most people with profound concepts on change secretly hate change (best part of my job….constant bs detection).
This really is more to say to you all, “Hey, you human out there…what can you also share with us about your own process of change? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t?” Let’s have a conversation….
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