Change: Mastering Patience Through Transition and Dynamic Surrender
Our previous chapters on self-love and freedom stressed the necessity of setting intentions along the path of self-actualization and the power of rules to provide structure and direction for freely and fully expressing oneself. This might lead some readers to think the spiritual process is one of setting measurable goals and organizing a plan for exactly how to achieve those goals in a certain timeframe. Setting goals and tools like SMART are useful but mostly exist in the domain of things we do in the material world. As we discussed in Chapter 3, so much of our freedom exists in the space of feeling rather than doing. In our spiritual work, our intentions are more abstract; they exist beyond the world of measurement and linear timelines. For example, wanting to feel a deep sense of peace, love, and belonging. These are not measurable goals. They cannot be measured or achieved on any timeline because they are already eternally true. However, so many of us do not regularly genuinely embody these feelings of peace, love, and belonging. Spiritual intentions align us with that which is already true, but sometimes our brains and bodies forget. This is why we use language like “spiritual awakening”; you are awakening from Tara Brach’s “Trance of Unworthiness” to see things that have always been there for you. The truth is that, like the silence that lays beneath all sound, we have peace within us and around us that lays beneath the noise of all turmoil. The spiritual journey is one of patiently unfolding layers of separation. Each layer you peel back lets more of your light out and more of the universe’s light in until there is no separation and there is just light. This process of unfolding is often uncomfortable, unfamiliar, confusing, and disheartening. In this chapter, we’ll address some of the challenges of embracing change with patience and eyes wide open. This chapter will start by discussing the challenges of change in general and then get more specific about the challenges that one faces when becoming more spiritual.
Impermanence
Throughout different cultures and schools of philosophy, we hear the eternal echoes of the tenant that “change is the only constant.” A true acceptance that the natural state of being of the universe is ever-changing is the basis for adopting a philosophy of non-attachment. The great double-edged sword of impermanence is that none of our obstacles are permanent, but neither are our achievements. Non-attachment looking forwards is great, it is the path to freeing yourself from the addiction to familiar patterns that lead to familiar suffering. Non-attachment, looking back, is more challenging, knowing that any accomplishment, relationship, or sense of stability is subject to the inevitability of changing. You may have graduated medical school, but if you don’t consistently put in the work to show up to heal others to the best of your ability, what does that degree even mean? Literally, nothing. Our relationships are conditional, and, as we discussed in Chapter 4, it is the natural state of social connections that they flow in and out of your life. There are so many things out of our control that can threaten our sense of stability. You cannot simply meditate, move, and self-care yourself into a place where you couldn’t be thrown off by unexpected illness or injury, other people’s behavior, natural disaster, or war. Those practices might help you come home to a sense of peace and flow amidst the chaos but do not allow you to control the universe’s tendency towards change. Thermodynamics tells us that the universe tends towards entropy and disorder; energy wants to move and change. In this way, it is more powerful to work with this natural chaotic flow and change of the universe by aligning our focus on change rather than stability.
Growth Mindset: Dynamic Surrender
This is the natural propensity of the universe to change is the foundation for the reasoning to adopt a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. The universe wants to change, and this force of change is extremely powerful and will sweep you up. A fixed mindset, an attachment to your current state of security, is like building a house on stilts on the sandy shore of a powerful ocean. Putting your energy toward erecting a rigid structure of security is doomed to be demolished by the next inevitable tsunami of change. Putting your time, focus, and energy into keeping things the same is, frankly, an ignorant strategy. You might ask, but what if I am content with the way things are? In fact, in yoga philosophy, we have the Niyamas, a set of central duties of a yoga practitioner, and the second one is Santosha, which means being complete content with things as they are. A crucial part of a truly deep sense of contentment with all things as they are is reconciling with the nature of all things to change. In other words, contentment with things as they are now is fragile. An anti-fragile sense of contentment must not be attached to the singular state of the universe in a fleeting moment in time. Embodying the power of Santosha means embracing all possible realities and timelines of the quantum multiverse: being as grateful for things that haven’t happened yet as those that have. There’s a whole tangent thread to continue here in the practice and philosophy of manifestation, which we will come back to in a later chapter.
A growth mindset is like learning to surf the tsunami of change. Surfing the tsunami of change starts with a deep acceptance that where this wave takes you will be far from where you are right now. Often, this is a difficult thing to accept when you’ve cultivated some sense of comfort. You must dynamically surrender to the power of this wave of change. Dynamic surrender means working with your body and your tools (in this analogy, your surfboard) to react to the wave as it unfolds. You must keep your head above water, not only to breathe and survive the change but to see the breaks in the wave, the opportunities to turn and direct your course, the opportunities to harness the power of change in your favor rather than just getting blindly tossed. It’s having a loose grip, and eyes wide open to possibility. In other words, dynamic surrender is what this entire book is about: finding Balance in Flow.
It’s worth noting that it is human nature to go through phases of attachment to how things are. Inevitably there will be waves of change that you don’t see coming or instinctually resist. You’ll get knocked over and turned around, but by orienting your mindset to one of dynamic surrender, you’ll be able to resurface, get your bearings in this new state, and chart a course forward. These times of loss and confusion of being absolutely demolished by the washing machine of a wave of change are ridiculously painful, and sometimes you do not know when they will end. But the only way you can guarantee that this painful transition will never end is to remain attached to how things were. Upon resurfacing from the white water, you will glean great clarity for viewing the painful transition as a reminder to embrace change. Confusion and figuring it out are the same thing.
The Impermanence of Self: Embracing the Fluidity of All People
To think that “who you are” is permanent is extremely limiting and somewhat ignorant. In reality, you are a piece of this universe which is always changing, and “who you are” changes either by pressures of the culture and community you live in, or by you taking the reigns and defining those changes with intention. To embrace this with dynamic surrender is to constantly and intentionally change who you are. At the beginning of every change is an acceptance that who you are in this moment is not who you will be forever, not who you want to be forever. Joe Dispenza wrote an excellent book about this very process called “Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One” in which he deconstructs the word “personality” into “personal reality,” postulating that in order to change your reality, you must change who you are. You can either do the work of defining and guiding that change or let the tides of reality change who you are. It’s extremely empowering to believe you can change who you are. Embarking on the path of unfolding more layers of your spirituality by engaging with this text is in itself a process of changing who you are.
This impermanence of self also means that everyone you know is constantly changing. In a way, every single person you know exists only in your head. You have some snapshots of “who they are” that you’ve assembled based on the limited information of the behaviors you’ve observed and stories they’ve told you, plus some of your added distortion of interpretation, judgment, and desires of how you’d like them to be. The recurring advice I hear from couples happily married for many years can be distilled to “We had to fall in love at least half a dozen times. A Dozen different versions coming together. The changes don’t always happen in sync. The understanding, the faith, is that each next version will be as loving and loveable as the last.” And if not, as we discussed in Chapter 4, we’ll engage more with new and unexpected sources of love in the complex web of support that unites all of us.
Patience Through Transition Provides Stability at Your Destination
Patience: Dissolving Definitions of Origin and Destination by Letting Go of Language and Timelines
When transitioning from one origin state to some destination state, there is a continuum of infinitesimal intermediate states we occupy along this path of change. Again, we return to the fractal nature of reality: every change can be subdivided into smaller changes, and each sub-change can be further divided into smaller changes, and we can recursively explore these intermediate states and sub-changes. That language can get a bit mathematical, so we’ll explore this idea with a physical example. For those of us who practice yoga, let’s take the example of a common transition from Extended Side Angle (ESA) to Half Moon. For those of you not familiar you will have to get the gist from my sketch below. Those studied in philosophy will recognize we’re essentially applying the Ship of Theseus thought experiment to a yoga transition.
Any transition that we go through has an origin (in this case, ESA) that must be accepted and some destination, hopefully intentionally defined (in this case Half Moon). It’s quite obvious that in order to direct your efforts along the path from origin to destination, you have to accept that there is some difference between the origin state and destination state. If we were to move as slowly as possible through this transition and “pause the video” many times, we’d observe many shapes of the body that are not ESA or half-moon. Each of these still frames is an equally real and important part of your journey from ESA to half-moon. Quickly these intermediate shapes begin to exist beyond what we have words to efficiently or effectively communicate about. Though everyone will take on some similar transitional states, we’re kind of alone in figuring the nuance of the change out. Even in reflecting on the experience with a friend, it will be easier to describe the origin and destination than everything in between. These transitional states even exist when zooming way out on your timeline of revisiting the same path from origin to destination. You might even be looking at the picture above and thinking, “Today, my best half-moon looks a lot more like the ‘tilted almost half-moon’ image, and I remember when my fullest expression of half-moon was more like the ‘floating ESA’ image.” In fact, every single body will have a unique expression for each pose and each transition between poses on each attempt that body makes. The poses and alignment we’re able to cue with language are actually purely theoretical. At what point does the transitional shape become the next pose? Is it when the toe comes off the ground? What if the toe was up on a block is it ESA or half-moon? Does it depend on the height of the lifted foot? What if it were propped on 10 blocks and looked like the final shape? What if I told you those images were a bird's eye view, that stick figure was actually lying on the ground, not standing on their feet? None of the answers to these questions actually matter to your ability to perform the transition. I ask them only to highlight the point that language, while useful, has limitations when understanding change. In this way, we can quickly dissolve origin and destination into the continuum of the transition experience. However, finding grace through transition is cultivating the skill of accepting each of these infinitesimal transition states. Because these states exist beyond what can efficiently and effectively be analyzed and described, graceful change must be embodied rather than understood. We can prepare, theorize, and experiment with changes, but at the end of the day, the only way through change is to experience it.
Flow State: Iterative Acceptance
High performers of all kinds describe the flow state as a sense of deep focus, immersing them in ease even through challenging activities. It’s a common phenomenon of this flow state to be associated with massive time dilations (experiencing time as moving far slower or faster). Finding the flow state through change is a process of quieting the analytical mind and experiencing the texture of the fleeting transitional states. In the flow state, one is engrossed in the present moment, unconcerned about how far you are from the origin or destination, deeply accepting exactly what state you’re in. In the flow state, one is aware of the direction towards the destination and the direction of the current flow of energy. In this flow state, one aligns the direction of energy with that towards the destination without judgment of or attachment to where you’ve been or where you were headed.
There is only one direct path from A to B, and expecting that to be your journey must be this direct path, closes your eyes to the infinite other paths from A to B. There may be sections of this path that are headed away from both points (in mathematics, we call this orthogonal) or even headed in the “wrong” direction. When in flow, you do not worry about why you ended up turned around; you just reorient to the goal state. To recap, flow is found through deep focus, non-judgment, and non-attachment to the shape of your path. It’s not about doing things perfectly, it’s about constantly accepting your current transitional state and re-heading in the right direction. While these “more creative” paths from A to B may seem silly when drawn on paper, our lives are not so simple; non-trivial change is always affected by a million external forces. Sometimes, orthogonal or backward movement is necessary to contend with an unforeseen obstacle. The overly attached academic spends weeks figuring out how to dig a tunnel through a large boulder to stay on the “most direct path,” while the flow state practitioner simply accepts the boulder and walks in the “wrong direction” around the boulder. They both get there.
Challenges in Spiritual Unfolding
This chapter is about change in general, but as mentioned, there is a current change that everyone reading this text is going through right now by the nature of engaging with a text like this. Each of you is evolving into a more spiritual person. While the abstract tenant of this section could apply on some level to any change in your life, we’ll come back to this deepening of spirituality as it unites us. Spiritual processes of becoming involve changes beyond our comprehension. As you become more spiritual, much like the graph in the previous section, your “spiritual progress” is likely to feel anything but linear. In a way, that is because the spiritual process of becoming is a process of coming home to who you really are on a soul level. You’re already the origin and the destination of your path. Sure, there’s a lot of change involved in aligning with your purpose and shedding the identities and behaviors that do not serve that purpose. However, ultimately, you are just coming home to who you already are inside, taking things out of the way to let that beautiful person shine out in the world.
These challenges along the path of spiritual unfolding are fraught with opposing feelings. In the meditation practice of Yoga Nidra, we address this through an intentional phase called the “pairing of opposites.” During this section of a yoga nidra experience, the practitioner is guided through the process of experiencing two seemingly opposite emotions or sensations at the same time. This is a really powerful exercise for taking the seat of the observer and metabolizing painful and even traumatic experiences. The idea is to break down the polarity between two opposites and create space for concurrent opposing feelings, which is more true to how we actually experience the world. In fact, many of the “opposites” we engage with are really not opposites at all but a side-effect of the limitations of language and cultural conditioning. For example. What comes to mind when I say “the opposite of a dog?” Probably most of you thought “cat”. A dog and a cat are both living mammals with four legs and a tail. How “opposite” is that really? If this is a concept foreign to you, Alan Watts dissolves the nature of opposites by considering our concept of “black” and “white” in a lecture he gave on the “nature of consciousness.” You can listen to the pertinent section of this lecture here. The following are common polarities experienced along the spiritual path. For some, spiritual growth will be stunted because they are not patient enough to sit with these polarities, believing that both can exist as part of the same experience.
Loneliness on the Path to Belonging: As you become more open and more interested in aligning your actions to your life’s purpose than the friends who used to keep you company, you may encounter relational strife or falling out before you have discovered your next constellation of friends to exchange support with. Why? because you aren’t the person who started this journey anymore.
Loss on the Way to Abundance: Oftentimes, aligning our day-to-day actions with our purpose means confronting measurable, foreseeable steps backward and an unclear path forward. For example, taking a pay cut during a career transition.
Feeling unstable on the path to groundedness and alignment as you meditate and self-study, your sensitivity, and awareness go up before understanding sets in. You can become more sensitive to emotions and sensations that you were previously bypassing and suppressing. Ultimately, suppressed feelings are felt on their way out. This is uncomfortable but also necessary for cultivating inner peace.
The body revolts when confronting attachment to patterns of addiction, pain, and separateness. Your body has chemical addictions to substances, behaviors, and relationships that only bring about common patterns of pain. The process of teaching the body it can be safe without these things involves an uncomfortable adjustment period.
Meaningful Change is More About Landing Than Launching
The best manager I ever had was Josh McGinley, a man fascinated with simple, effective tools and practices. He was coaching me through Google’s notoriously competitive and thorough performance review process and said, “We need to paint the story of how Jake changed Google in the last year. No one cares about how many things you launched, only the impact of what landed.” This is a helpful way of thinking about change:
Launch in a way that prepares you for a successful and stable landing.
If this change matters, see it through to the landing, and do not be distracted by other things.
In my yoga asana practice, I relearn this with new arm balances all the time. The impulse at the beginning of an exciting change is to kick up hard with reckless abandon, hoping momentum will carry you to balance. In practice, you’re more likely to catch the balance you seek if you lean in patiently. By mindfully leaning in, you are able to experience some of these transitional states on your way to the pose and build strength and stability with every degree closer you lean. But learning to hold a not-perfectly stacked handstand is going to teach you a lot more about how to handstand than falling over after over-kicking every time. The muscles get stronger and more precise for future handstands. But something even more important happens: you confront the emotional experience of handstand before you’ve really nailed it. In your not-quite stacked wobbly handstand, you get to feel the “oh shit, look ma, I’m doing it” moment and how to keep your focus through that experience. It’s this emotional training that makes yoga a transformational practice, and this transformation exists in the space between the poses in our experience of change.