As I surfed through my Twitter feed while waiting for my car to complete its Spring Inspection at the Dealership, while sipping a very tasty coffee that they offered me, I found Cy Wakeman’s tweet @CyWakeman which read, “Change is a part of life, and yet we tend to greet it over and over again with a predictable response composed of surprise, panic and blame”. (May 16, 2016).  I tweeted back that same morning that I believe, “Change is possibly the biggest challenge for our mind, body and spirit because we feel loss of control in such moments”.  For the rest of the day, I found myself reflecting on our thorny need for control.

Of course Cy Wakeman is spot on with her observation about our resistance to change even though it is a constant, and the norm in life.  So why do we keep swimming against the current – even if initially?  Even though change is the natural law of things (chaos theory and all that), we are actually not taught that change is part of life until we are actually face to face with an event that represents a change for us.  Think about it, as a child at home or in school did anybody tell you to expect change and that it is inevitable? Were you one of the lucky ones who grew up making sand mandalas only to dissolve them?

I suspect most of us grew up on a diet of reinforced messaging of just the opposite: being taught to make choices and decisions that give you the greatest assurance of permanence whether in a career path, a specific job, long term relationships, be they in marriage (“till death do us part”), with business partners, close friends, and so forth.  Then there is the buying of insurance of every kind, again, with the aim of protecting ourselves in the event of a change in circumstance.

Consequently, when we are rocked by the sea of change, our immediate reaction is to want the situation whatever it is, to return to how things were.  We want things to go back to “normal”.  We don’t typically search for the meaning behind why the change is happening, and then from there, search for what a new “normal”, or a new equilibrium might look like.

We are especially resistant to and resentful of change when we feel it was imposed or thrust upon us without us having any choice in the matter.  It’s one thing to choose to sell all your belongings and take a year of travel backpacking, it’s another when your job loss forces a downsizing in your home and life style.  It’s one thing if you are among the decision-makers regarding a restructuring of your organization, it’s quite another if it is announced to you that the restructuring means your job function is to become something significantly different.

Or take the case of changes in our body’s capabilities: for instance, my right arm rotator cuff.  One day I wake up and become aware that it is causing my arm pain when I try to make certain movements like scratching my back or lifting weights during my exercise regiment. “How could this be”, I ask myself indignantly?  “I was fine yesterday”, I remark to myself.   “Why is this happening, how did I get here, there’s no reason for this”, I tell myself irritated by what I perceive to be non-cooperation by my right arm.

Next I go to the physiotherapist so she can “fix” it.  After several sessions, nothing has improved nor am I more inclined to accept this – middle aged or not!  I go back to the physiotherapist and I ask her to try acupuncture which she does.  Some improvement starts to happen so I resume lifting my weights and I experience a relapse.  I am frustrated. I want my rotator cuff to go back to “normal”.  The physiotherapist suggests that for the immediate future I need to stop lifting weights and at the very least I must reduce the amount of weights.  She also suggests I try Pilates.

Finally, feeling beaten down, I follow the physiotherapist's advice and, low and behold, I start to experience some lasting improvement though the rotator cuff does not perform like it “normally” used to.  However, I come to realize that I need to stop holding on to my insistence that it must return to the way it was in terms of the level of flexibility I used to have.  I get to a place of “wisdom” recognizing that comparison between then and now is unhelpful to me and that instead, I need to accept the new equilibrium is is emerging.  What does that new equilibrium look like?  Well, that too can change over time.  For now, it is an experience of virtually no pain, and an ability to lift weights (using smaller ones and doing it with modified exercises) without experiencing a setback – but I can’t reach to scratch my back with my right arm without pain.

On the plus side, I now have a new found appreciation for what the rotator cuff does for movement.  I learned some Pilates which has had a secondary benefit of addressing core strength issues.  Most importantly, I am starting to learn about surrender and what that means.  Surrender or acceptance is about adapting to change rather than wanting to control it and make it yield to my vision of how things ought to be.  Make no mistake, properly understood and practiced, surrender/acceptance have nothing to do with passivity, with a fatalistic attitude or a victim-like mind set.

On the contrary.  Surrender/acceptance is so freeing.  It’s an experience of relaxing and letting go into trusting that everything that comes our way offers us an opportunity to expand our outlook, our awareness, our resilience, and in the long run, our peace.  It is as effortless as floating in a rubber tube when we are going in the direction of the current.  We save so much energy that we were expending on resisting change and in hankering over the way things were before this or that happened.

With surrender/acceptance we actively listen to the direction we are being called to move towards when we experience that our life has been turned upside down. Actively listening and coming to terms with any given change can be aided by meditation.  If you can bring yourself to a place of stillness to the point of opening the doorway to your inner-self, your inner-wisdom, your Higher Consciousness, you will come to experience the strength to find the meaning behind the change and how to respond to it.  If you can yield the need to control and to have things remain the way they were, you will paradoxically find more stability in your life!

Here are some meditations that can help you move from control to acceptance of, and working with change:

http://sublimitypathways.com/index.php?page=all-is-perfect

http://sublimitypathways.com/index.php?page=the-richness-of-experience

http://sublimitypathways.com/index.php?page=june---non-attachment