Change for Good

Free yourself from destructive emotional patterns and behavior. We can help you do it with these six simple steps.

By Sally Kempton

When I was in my 20s and taking my first tentative steps along the inner path, I spent a few months working with a Jungian analyst. I went because I felt stuck, paralyzed. I had a novel to write that I couldn't seem to focus on, a boyfriend who didn't seem to love me the way I wanted to be loved, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction with myself. The analyst used to have me lie down on her couch and take deep, full breaths for what seemed like hours, triggering my first experiences of real relaxation. But the most memorable thing she did was to introduce me to the concept of transformation. It happened one afternoon after my deep breathing, when I was lying on her couch going on about all the things that weren't working in my life. "You know what your real problem is?" she asked me. "You don't understand that it's possible to change."

I was shocked. "What do you mean?" I said.

"You think that the way you are now is the way you have to be. That isn't true. You can change all of it. You can change your relationships. You can change the way that you do things. You can change the way you feel."

There is nothing more radical than the moment you realize that it's possible to reinvent your life. I am not talking about changing your grunge look for all whites and mala beads, or even leaving a regular job to work for Doctors Without Borders. I'm talking about reconfiguring your mental and emotional attitudes, shifting your vision of life—the kind of inner shift that turns a pessimist into someone capable of seeing the perfection in everything; that lets an angry person channel rage into creative energy; that makes us happier, more peaceful, more in touch with the love and wisdom at our core.

This sort of transformation is the crux of the inner life: the promise of yoga, of meditation, and of the various forms of inner work and self-inquiry we undertake. Yet it's essential to understand what kind of change we're really after, and also to understand what that level of change requires. We don't want to limit our own possibilities by expecting too little from our practice. At the same time, we don't want to indulge in magical thinking or in the kind of spiritual bypass that makes us think we can simply meditate our way out of life issues.

Change Your Mind

Given yoga's fundamental premise—that all of us, at our core, are made of the same powerful, loving intelligence that gives rise to all life, and that this intelligence is fluid and infinitely creative—it should be theoretically possible to change just about anything about ourselves. Some New Age teachers actually give that impression—they say, for example, that we can harness our power of intention to transform anything about our lives that we want to fix. But can a strong intention really change, for instance, our financial situation or romantic patterns? Can we heal a chronic or terminal illness by transforming our attitudes? Can we change our personality?

To these questions, yoga says yes and no. On the one hand, certain aspects of our basic personality and physical constitution seem to be ours for a lifetime—which is why even enlightened people famously express such individualistic personalities, and why no amount of stretching will lengthen your thighbones. On the other hand, there's no question that when we enter deeply into our consciousness, extraordinary shifts take place.

What yoga can definitely help us change (and, by extension, dramatically shift our experience of life) is the texture of our own mind, the stickiness of certain emotions and views, and above all, the quality of our inner state. The most powerful shifts occur when we experience a change in the way we identify ourselves—when we are able to see ourselves as the Self, the unchanging consciousness behind the mind, or when we are able to identify ourselves as the witness to our thoughts rather than becoming our thoughts and feelings.

Arguably, the core of our yoga practice is the work that we do to purify, reforge, and replace the inner patterns that in Sanskrit are called samskaras. Samskaras are the accumulated impressions—in scientific terms, the neuronal patterns—that create our character, our ways of thinking and acting, and our perspective on life.

The word samskara can be translated just the way it sounds in English: as "some scars." Samskaras are energy patterns in our consciousness. I always picture them as mental grooves, like the rivulets in sand that let water run in certain patterns. Samskaras create our mental, emotional, and physical default settings.

The tendency to think "I can't do this" when you're faced with a new challenge is a samskara, and so is the confidence that develops once you've mastered something that was hard for you. The tension lump that shows up in your right shoulder when you feel stressed is a samskara, and so are the song lyrics that pop into your mind unexpectedly and—in my case at least—often reveal themselves to be the perfect comment on the situation that you're in at the time.

Neurophysiologists mapping neural pathways in the brain report that each time we react in a certain way—getting angry, for instance, or procrastinating yet one more time—we strengthen the power of that pathway. The yogic texts make the same point. The bottom line in each case is that the way we feel, the way we react, and the behavior we manifest at any given moment are the result of samskaras, or neural connections, operating under the surface.

Once the samskaric pathways have been set, most people just keep running down them, like rats in a maze, reacting with the same old patterns and feelings every time they find themselves in a situation that seems to mirror whatever the original trigger might have been.

You probably know, intellectually at least, how this works. When you're feeling abandoned because your friend hasn't called you in two weeks, you might understand that it isn't because he's stopped liking you. You may even realize (especially if you've done some therapy) that his silence is triggering one of your old samskaric grooves—perhaps a childhood memory of abandonment. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily stop you from reacting. Samskaras are powerful, which is why knowing better does not always change our behavior. There's a weight to those accumulated impressions. They are, on a daily basis, the reason we think and feel the way we do.

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