From Change Comes Growth

Today I will discuss the inevitability of change, why we find it difficult, how change and growth go hand in hand, the importance of having goals, and to welcome change! WHEW! That’s a lot to think about! And all of those thoughts are also part of the mechanism that keeps us “stuck” where we are and resisting changes.

It has often been said that the only constant is life is change! Yet most of us find it difficult to change, especially when it takes us away from our routine, our conditioned ways of thinking. 

In actuality we’ve been changing our whole lives! Some of the changes may have seems “natural” but at the time, we may not have realized just how difficult they were. When we were you young, the world was new to us. We needed to make changes to explore who we were and how we were meant to fit into the world around us. It was the openness to the possibility of failing that helped us get our hands and knees under our bodies so that we could crawl! It was the lack of fear that prompted us to take our first steps and falling so many times before we could totter around. It was the desire to move in different ways that helped us try out some dance steps, climb onto a bicycle, to figure out swimming, to put on skates, or maybe skis. 

And we grew from all of these experiences and couldn’t wait to reach a certain stage of life to experience more changes. I remember when I learned to drive our speed boat and pull others on water skis when I was 12. I remember turning 16 and learning how to drive the car, and yes it was on a manual shift. To this day, I remember lying in bed at night visualizing the steps of pushing in the clutch, other foot on the brake, starting the car, putting it into gear while simultaneously moving from the brake to press on the gas as I slowly lifted the other foot off the clutch and continuing the process of getting to the “right” gear with increasing speed.

At what age did we start to resist the changes that would bring so much growth and freedom? When did we become so resistant to change and where did that resistance come from? As we grow older, we usually turn our awareness to the world around us, seeking affirmation from outside and we often lose touch with our need for self-acceptance and self-empowerment. We live our lives based on a lifetime of conditioning by our families, our schools, our belief systems, our friends and work associates. 

I’ve come up with 8 common reasons that might help identify the thought distortions that keep you stuck! 

I recall in 1997 when I decided to leave the profession of anesthesia and open a holistic health center that ultimately became a yoga center. Any one of these thought distortions could have stopped me.

1. Complacency? My life is okay. I’ll just leave things as they are. TD-I am making good money vs money isn’t everything.
2. Lack of self-worth? I don’t think I can do it so why try? TD-Am I going to be able to do it vs when I’m determined I can accomplish what I want.
3. Timing? I just can’t manage to find time for that now. TD-It will be too much work vs I’m working 2, 24 hour call shifts per week so I do have time available to use.
4. Social conformity? What will people think? TD-Having been a big people pleaser, people will think I’m crazy vs maybe I’ll find a more supportive tribe
5. Lack of knowledge? TD-I don’t know anything about running such a business vs I’ve helped my husband open businesses from scratch.
6. Are you the exception? Well, it might work for others, but not me! TD-What if I fail vs what if I succeed?
7. Selfishness? What’s in it for me? TD-How can leaving my profession and the money I make be good for me and my family vs I will still be helping people, just in a different way.
8. Fear? What will happen? And this is the big one!! It’s a thought distortion on its own. It’s fear that really underpins so much of our resistance and “stuckness.”

So, I keep using this word “stuck” and it’s really the force that keeps us from being all that we can be. In yoga, it’s called tamas. According to yoga philosophy, there are only three qualities that make up all of the universe in varying proportions. These are tamas, rajas and sattwa. They exist in everything, including each of us.  

Tamas is defined as inertia, darkness, depression, immobility, rigidity, stability. stillness. Stuck!

Rajas is movement, dynamism, ego, passion. It’s rajas that can help us get unstuck! To move forward, to take chances and to possibly reach the third guna…sattwa.

Sattwa is balance, luminosity, goodness, harmony.

Most people live in this world fluctuating from tamas to rajas and back to tamas. We might have glimpses of sattwa but it is hard to achieve without considerable self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-actualization and developing the power to leave past conditioning in the past and welcome change as an opportunity for growth regardless of potential outcomes. Yoga can be the medium through which this process begins. 

Not the workout style of yoga as is often practiced in the West, rather the classical version of yoga whereby the physical practices are used to develop more inner awareness. It is this inner awareness that can then grow to a point where there is a desire to practice the subtle and more powerful practices of pranayama (breathing practices) and meditation. 

As the awareness continues to grow, we see the thoughts and patterns of conditioning, first during the practices themselves, but ultimately during our daily lives. This is when we can truly begin to make the necessary changes to accomplish our goals.

Up to this point, we may set goals, but usually fall short due to the self-sabotaging patterns of conditioning and thought distortions that lead to abandoning our goals, or once the goal is achieved for a time, then falling back to our previous state.

I’ll use the example of losing weight. All of my life I have had a weight problem. I think I went on my first diet when I was 11 – the Atkin’s diet. I have yo-yo’d up and down for the last 60 years, trying one thing after another. I was frequently told as a child and teenager, “you have such a pretty face, if you would just lose a little weight.” The undercurrent of that message was that I was imperfect, not accepted, and uglier due to being overweight. It also contributed to the conditioning that I had to do what other people wanted to be accepted.

I’ve often said that if I would never have dieted and felt more accepted, I probably wouldn’t have ended up being morbidly obese! As student nurse, I basically starved myself down to my low weight of 140 pounds, and even though I was 5’7”, I still felt fat! When I look at pictures from that time with wiser eyes, I looked so thin! My internal image and thoughts were distorted by the popularity of the late 60’s and Twiggy!

For the next 20 years, I went up and down between 170-240 depending which diet I tried along with a lot of physical activity. This was a time when I did a lot of trekking in the Himalayas, even to Mt Everest base camp! I also spent days biking, river rafting, scuba diving and more.

My highest weight ballooned to 307 pounds about 30 years ago. I then tried some new diet drugs and lost nearly 50 pounds before the drugs were pulled from the market due to a life-threatening side-effect of pulmonary hypertension. I was lucky to only end up with a heart murmur. My weight stayed around that range, going up 20, then down 30, and up again.

What I had failed to do up until this point was to look seriously at the underlying conditioning and patterns of behavior that kept me stuck in my fat. However, being fat didn’t keep me from becoming a yoga teacher. In fact, in some ways it allowed me to accept others and give them a welcome space no matter size or physical abilities. My weight also allowed me to learn modifications for the variety of body types that I taught. Ways of practicing yoga that thin, very flexible yoga teachers might not be able to understand.

Don’t get me wrong, some didn’t accept me as a yoga teacher. I remember early on someone getting up and walking out after the opening meditation and later complaining to my manager that having a fat yoga teacher was unacceptable. When I went to yoga conferences I felt so out of place and was made to feel invisible or was confronted by others in a “teacher intensive” by asking me if I was a teacher! 

After 23 years of running my yoga center and teaching literally tens thousands of students there and elsewhere, I sold it right before the pandemic. During the lockdown, I created the time and space to be alone and be still. And in that stillness I decided to give up all of my feelings about my size, all of my underpinning patterns and conditioning, and found the strength to be healthier. The ability to do this arose from years of meditation, yoga nidra and looking at the task at hand as an opportunity to bring more awareness into my life and to let go of expected outcomes.

As Deepak Chopra has said, “To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.”

Faced with my oncoming birthday when I would be 70, I made a choice and set a goal. It wasn’t to lose a specified amount of weight. My goal became to GET AS HEALTHY AS POSSIBLE regardless of how long it takes. 

This is where we need to talk about setting goals and some important parameters. 

The first thing is to be willing to change. You might think, well of course. If I’m not willing to change, why set a goal that will require it. In reality, it’s important that you truly understand that you will need to change to reach your goal, or you would already be there. In fact, you must welcome change and watch your attitude closely. Welcome the need to do things differently, to become different. You may need to get the necessary support and knowledge to find a different way.

Secondly, once the goal is set, know that there will be times when you may feel that you are not moving toward it. Don’t stop. Break it into bits each day and commit, commit and commit some more. As long as you are moving forward when looking at the overall progress and not just at the moment, be reassured you are heading in the right direction.

Lastly, live your goal! Don’t focus on what you “have to do”. You have the choice not to do it, so if you are doing it, then you’ve made the choice, you have set a goal, end of story.

Back to my personal story about being healthier. Since the lockdown about 18 months ago, I’ve totally changed the way I eat due to working with an Ayurvedic practitioner and I’ve lost 86 pounds. I’m back to being a little overweight rather than obese. I’ve gone from struggling to walk a half mile due to arthritis in my feet, to walking 2 miles per day at double my earlier pace. My overall health and energy have improved remarkably. I’m making great progress.

But people keep asking me about my goal. “How much more weight are you going to lose,” and I tell them I honestly don’t know. My goal is to get as healthy as possible and in my mind there is no finish line to cross.  And I am looking forward to meeting who I will become over time as I welcome further changes and growth!