Change is in the Air

Sometimes we crave change. Other times we dread it. Either way, we can't escape it. Here's how to live with it—and learn from it.

By Chris Colin

Separate Your Feelings
Once you've accepted your utter lack of control, it can still take some doing to accept the emotions that often accompany a sudden unraveling of your expectations. Even minor setbacks challenge us. Take Frank Jude Boccio's experience of returning to his Hudson Valley home after time away; the famous fall colors had just faded. "I was really disappointed," he says. "I found myself wishing I could change it back, or have come home earlier. And that wasn't right."

By that, Boccio doesn't mean that his disappointment was unjustified—that he should learn to see winter's colors as just as pretty as autumn's. His idea is more nuanced: you can be disappointed with certain changes, but you accept that disappointment the same way you'd accept delight.

What does that mean? Surely you can't be expected to rate disappointment the same as delight. No, says Boccio, but you can separate your feelings from your response to them.

As for Erik, while he's nervous about impending parenthood, he's accepting his nervousness instead of worrying about how he'll pay the bills or getting angry about having to leave his program.

By distinguishing your core emotions from those that pile on afterward, you don't limit your emotional life; on the contrary, you unclutter it. As Boccio says, it's the clutter that leads you away from your true experience and into murkier territory.

Mitra Somerville, a teacher at the Integral Yoga Institute of New York in Manhattan, looks at major life changes and their constellations of angst in terms of what is, and isn't, permanent. Your duty, he says, is to recognize that in the midst of radical transformations, the Self remains stable. If you can come to an understanding of this—through asana, breathwork, meditation—you can soothe the discomfort brought on by external changes. "The yogic thinking is that there's part of us that's unchanging—the spiritual part of us that has peace and joy and love," he says. "The nature of the world, however, is in flux."

Tap Into Wisdom
Learning to make peace with life's calamities—lost jobs, romances, dreams—does not mean you have to be passive.

"Sometimes we try to provoke change in our lives," Boccio says. "Rather than just be with sadness, anxiety, or anger, we want to change it. And that inability to sit with what's happening is duhkha, suffering."

But does that always mean choosing inaction? What about when there are wars to resist, house fires to flee? Are you meant to be sanguine about any old change of plans that comes along? "If we listen to our hearts, in that deepest silence we will be guided toward the appropriate action," says Pelle, who agrees that certain events require out-and-out protest—and that yoga helps you know which ones.

"We practice so that we can be guided from within," says Somerville. In stilling your thoughts, you free up a more reliable inner wisdom. "The more peaceful your mind is, the clearer and stronger your intuition is, and the better able you are to make the proper decision."

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