The Dharma of Life Changes

Does your desire to make New Year's resolutions come from wholesome motivation or unresolved issues in your life?

By Phillip Moffitt

You can see how these qualities build on one another. Faith allows you to initiate change in your life, the actual moving towards change requires effort, and you need to concentrate on that effort to keep persevering. Then to know if all of that is happening, you need mindfulness.

The fifth of the spiritual faculties is wisdom, or panna. It's wisdom that allows you to redirect your movement toward change when you realize that your goal was incorrect or that the way you are going about it is not skillful.

The five faculties come together to allow you to change in wholesome ways. When you are trying to make a difficult life change, cultivating each of these qualities is a wise and proper thing to do. These five qualities are truly spiritual characteristics, so they are not to be treated lightly, but rather evoked in the pursuit of finding your own Buddha nature when coping with change.

Owning Your Intentions

Before committing to a major life change, you may want to ask yourself if it is truly needed. Is your desire for the new a way to avoid some inner work in the unfolding of your own maturity as a human being? Are you trying to avoid a necessary ego surrender of your wanting mind? Is what you think you need to be happy just an old idea that you've outgrown or was it simply unreal all along? Instead of trying to get more of something—money or attention, for instance—would you better serve yourself by practicing letting loose of your attachment to having life be a certain way? Each person has to go through this agonizing, self-doubting process as part of a major change.

These hard questions are most alive when asked in the context of the spirit and allow a deeper sense of meaning to emerge. For sure, trying to get life arranged just as you want it never works. Looking back on my own life, it sometimes seems that it mattered less whether or not I made a certain change than that I grounded myself in this process of self-examination. Somehow it was coming into my full range of feelings that was the most important step toward continuing vitality in my life. Needless to say, the times I have failed to do this grounding in authenticity I paid the consequences.

Without this deeper sense of meaning, life is dull at best and most often filled with suffering. Usually, it is not life's difficulties that cause the most suffering, but rather the lack of being connected to self, to others, and to life as a whole. Separation from your natural enthusiasm dampens or kills your spirit. Therefore, the question in contemplating change is always: Are you moving more fully into your essence, your most authentic self?

Once you commit to making a major life change, be prepared to embrace darkness as part of that change. Just as the Earth uses the short winter light for renewal, so in moving through change your own psyche may well need to go into an inner darkness. In the darkness that which has been ignored or denied—be it unsettling feelings, difficult events from the past and present, or ambivalence about yourself—will be given time to decay and be renewed. This little death of the psyche mirrors your ultimate physical death. Experiencing this kind of psychic death is a vital part of aliveness. It is scary business surrendering to death before rebirth, which is why tribal cultures have rituals to help them cope with the anxiety of seeing the days become shorter and trusting that another spring will come. This concern was so great in some cultures they performed rituals for the setting sun each day to ensure its return the next morning.

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