Change, you double edged sword

Even for wisest, change can be a challenge.

It's how we grow; however, it's also how we shrink, depending upon our mentality.

Patanjali is clear: Change is potentially one of the four main causes of suffering, and it's listed first. When Patanjali lists something first, we have confirmation it's imperative to reflect on. Whether it's the weather, the schedule, our health status, or a loved one's, a betrayal, a legal issue, or chronological aging's effect on our quality of mind and life, we are always in the inevitable reality of change.

Change can also be favorable. New jobs, relationships, friendships, circumstances. It's literally how the universal force helps us progress, and it's usually somewhere on the continuum of destabilizing and scary.

Yoga-based strategies exist to manage the winds of change, including our Chanting, Meditation and Yoga Sutra studies classes, all beginning in early September. Don’t think you are going to do asana only and this level of adaptability prowess will be yours. It’s a start; yet, progressively subtler tools, the more inward bahiranga and the antaranga sadhana-s, deliver benefits that gradually clear the dust stuck to our minds.

I am short, 5’1 1/2”. I don’t feel short in life, but I miss certain taller visuals on a regular basis. I recently I looked up at my kitchen vent. It’s supposed to be stainless steel, and it is - under a coating of dust that is stuck to it. I cannot simply dust it. I have to use soap and water, and serious elbow grease, and a ladder.

Spiritual practice requires a similar tactic. Practices can help us scrub down the mental accumulation so we can feel and know and abide in a deeper sense of being, and realize experientially this is an option. Through a step-by-step, long term approach, we start to recognize our mistaken perception of reality, to know that change is the nature of all matter. What does not change is hidden within us. It’s permanent. Pure. At ease. It’s the soul. And the main point of Yoga is to loosen the glue between the changing and the unchanging so that we become fluent in change, yet less affected by its emotional wrath. Adaptable. Resilient. And replete with an inner conviction that whatever is happening is not the end, but the beginning of a new cycle of transformation.