Often at this time of year we reflect on our lives. Maybe you’ve reviewed where you’re at now and what you might want to be different. We all know the challenge of New Year’s Resolutions that maybe only last the month at best!
Being immersed in the personal growth and development world, I spend a lot of time musing on how real change happens. In a nutshell, the challenge is, we want both change and we don’t want change. The very habits and ways of being that can keep us stuck, also represent safety and security.
Change scares us!
And yet that’s why we’re here. Most spiritual traditions offer that life is a journey of growth, change and transformation. All of this requires flowing with the currents of change within ourselves and around us. For life is change itself. But it’s so easy to get caught up in just getting through the day, preoccupied with all the details of “living.” With little time for listening and reflecting, and in that space, catching the subtle messages and energies afoot in the midst of it all, we are lost to the movement of change.
Change takes courage, deep intentionality and on-going awareness to all the currents of will and desire that live in us.
Going with the Flow of Life or Changing through Crisis
Recently, I’ve been studying the Pathwork Lecture #183 The Spiritual Meaning of Crisis. The lecture offers the idea that crisis happens when old structures need to be dissolved, but we resist the organic movement of the change that can move us forward. So, missing the momentum of flowing with the change that’s afoot, we’re thrust into the chaos of crisis, to dissolve what’s not working, what’s not life sustaining, and through the process of crisis, the necessary shifts are brought into being.
This is an interesting concept in application to the “crisis” of the pandemic. In the wake of all the loss and change, lay opportunities for deeper change within us, and in the systems, that have shaped our world to date.
We can’t make deep change happen.
The lecture also offers that “we” on our own, can’t make deep level change. This might be big news to some of you! By the word “we” the lecture is referring to the ego self.
A healthy ego is capable of many things in the process of change, such as aligning with an intention, practicing awareness regarding the issues at hand, and asking for spiritual help. When these things have been done, then it’s also the ego’s task to surrender into the greater forces at play, that truly transform us.
Holding True and Faith
Letting go and holding trust and faith that spiritual help will come; nurturing the knowing that it is the greater universal energy that will carry us into a new way of being, is also a task of the ego. In this way, the ego is integrated with spiritual realities.
As you allow yourself to long for change – both within yourself – and in our world; a world so in need of transformation, perhaps the recognition of what is in your capacity, and what is not, will add potency and optimism to your actions towards the shifts you desire.
The full lecture The Spiritual Meaning of Crisis can be accessed at this link.
I will be hosting an evening on this lecture Wednesday, January 20th from 7 to 8:30 pm, on Zoom. If you’d like to attend contact Jill Chitra at jillchitra@gmail.com to register and receive the Zoom invite.