Transitioning with Ease

(waves crashing) So I thought it would be interesting to explore transition. For me, I find that there are certain transitions in life, certain moves, changes, losses that feel more difficult. That I find are more uncomfortable than others. And I think part of what is helpful in navigating through any transition is that recognition, that it's all transition. That everything is changing all of the time.

That there aren't particular moments where we're actually more challenged than others. It's just our perspective is such that that's the case. And if we can transition, actually shift our perspective, if we can rest in the knowing that there's a constant flow, that the universe itself is set in this perfect motion, that the moon and the sun and the earth are rotating, that the blood in our bodies and the oxygen flow in our bodies, and even the neurotransmitters in our bodies, they're changing. That every situation and every relationship is constantly in flux, then it helps us not to grasp and cling so much to particulars staying the same. In fact, that's what creates the suffering.

I know for me, that's what creates the suffering, and the pain is clinging to what's known. But what's known actually is an illusion. It was known. By the time we know it, it's already in the past. So if it's a relationship, if it's a place, if it's a position, if it's a collaboration, if it's a situation, whatever it is that we think we know already, that probably is the thing that your understanding of God, your understanding of the universe, your understanding of wisdom is going to offer to you in order to help you grow because we weren't meant to stay the same. I work often with people who struggle with negative body image and with eating disorders, and I hear so much, I wish I were that weight.

I wish my body looked like it used to or could look like this other ideal than what it is. Sometimes I say a little bit sarcastically, "Well, if you want to go all the "way back to your birth weight," right? That would be the original. I know when I was born, I weighed 6 pounds and 7 ounces and I don't want to be that weight. We're meant to change.

We're meant to always be growing. We just build up so many resistances to it. I feel like part of the way in which we can navigate our own lives peacefully is to develop some tools that help us relax into the uncertainty of what's coming. I'm fortunate enough to be sitting in front of the beautiful Pacific Ocean and hear the waves are coming in and they're going out. Every particle and molecule of that water is in flux and in flow, just like we human beings are.

So for each of us, we're on a path, right? We're on some sort of trajectory that's uniquely designed for our own well-being and for our own growth so that we can, with our uniqueness, become part of humanity. So that we can become part of an existence that's moving toward love, that's moving toward sustainability, that's moving toward growth and creativity, and that requires for each of us all the time that we're growing, that we're learning, that we're renewing. So when we cling, when we want sameness, when we want sureness, when we want certainty, and when we're upset by, or undone, or unraveled by change, we're necessarily withdrawing ourselves from our own life curriculum. From our own life lesson.

From our own ability to grow into a new moment that would allow our hearts, that would allow our mind, that would allow our whole being to be in the flow that the universe is offering to us. So often at the same time, we want opportunity. We want relationship. We want capacity. We want a new platform. We want a canvas. We want to create, but we don't want to let go of what's known.

We can't have both, so we have to be willing to let go of what was. We have to recognize loss is inevitable. We have to understand that what comes from, and it might be heartbreak, it might be disappointment, it might be just a full surrender of what we used to have, is no longer necessary for us. If we still needed it, it would still be available. Not we think we need it, but something greater than us knows we no longer need that thing, that being, that relationship, that situation, that job, that opportunity.

It's no longer serving us. Even if we think it would, it isn't. Our opportunity then is to open to the now. To open to the space of transition. To open to the what's going to come for us next.

So for us, the recognition that we're always in transition, that everything outside of us is always shifting, and that our responsibility is to shift with it. To be as much as we can in alignment with our truth, and to have our actions not be reactive, but to be responsible to that truth, to that inner knowing and to that inner wisdom so that we can be alignment with the flow that's bigger than us and that's outside of us, and that's inclusive of us, if we're not grasping on so hard and clinging so fiercely to what we used to have. When we can open into what's new, that's where the magic is. That's were the opportunity is for us to become new, to grow, to become more aware, to become recipients of the blessings of life, and to become fully participative in the growth of the planet and the growth of humanity, and the growth of our own relationship to yourself and to God and to spirit. For me, I'm in what I would say is the biggest transition of my life.

I've just let go of what I knew. I let go of a decade long of a private practice, and of a family in a community in a particular city that I knew I had to release in order to take on whatever it is that's coming next. I'm sitting inside of, in this moment, the big, I have no idea. I don't know. And so when I share with you some of the tools that I'm using to sit inside of this transition without completely falling apart.

If you haven't read it, a book I'll recommend just because I said those words is, of course, Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart. When I went through my first big transition, which was a divorce, that book saved me. It healed me in so many ways. So if you haven't read that book, I just want to recommend it. But for now, for me, this mat, this life raft, as it's sometimes referred, has been so grounding.

The tool of the practice itself. Even though I'm in a new city, and I'm in a new community, and I'm launching a different kind of way of making a living and way of sharing my gifts with the world. Finding my breath, finding my body on this mat, on this surface. It's a 2 by 6 sticky matt. I call it a miracle and a therapist.

It's this reflective surface that every time I come to it, I can feel the ground. And in that grounding, I can feel what I know is true. I hope that's also true for you. Another truth I can share is that the extent to which we're clinging, again, is the extent to which we cause our own suffering. It's going to feel painful to lose someone that you love.

It feels painful to transition out of a job or out of a community when there are people or a person there that you cared about. But it's also necessary to the extent to which you can let go of the grasping and lean into, I'll call it the fear. The discomfort of what you don't know equals the ability to find joy. Joy is in the present moment. We can remember something in the past that might've brought happiness, but it's not the same as experiencing it in the now, in the present.

Joy is only available when we can let go of the clinging. The clinging, the wish for it to have been the way that it was, or the clinging in the wish for us to understand or to know and to be able to successfully predict what's coming next, causes us complete suffering. The truth is we're in transition all of the time. So allowing ourselves to be at one with that truth. To settle into the truth means refined like a comfort in the groundlessness and anchoring in.

There are very few truths. There are very few truths that I know, for sure. One of them is that we are all lovable. That each of us are enough. That we come into this world with a birthright to matter.

To be seen and to be heard and to make a difference. That's always the case. So no matter what's happening outside of here, which shifts beyond your ability to control, which is everything except for your breath and the way in which you respond to other people, it doesn't matter. Those truths are always the same, and they're always within you. So for me, coming to the mat is an anchoring into that ground.

Coming into the breath, recognizing that you can at any moment drop into a pranayama practice. Even it's as simple as feeling the oxygen as it hits or leaves your nostrils. That's an anchoring and a grounding to what's true to what's real to what you can, I don't love the word control, but what you can be in somewhat control of. And the other truth, and it is a practice, and it is a commitment. It comes up for me again, and again, and again is the knowing that it's all going to change.

Its already changed. It already happened. So it's kind of like a gentle compassionate guiding to yourself of get with what already is. This is already true. Any time that we're in resistance to a shift, the shift has already occurred or it's about to occur. (laughs) So our resistance itself makes it bigger.

Carl Jung said what we resist persists. When we defend against something, whether it be a feeling or a change, it's going to be even bigger. Because we each have our own particular life curriculum, nobody else outside of you can predict when things are gonna shift or change for you. It doesn't matter even if they could. For each of us, it's our task to stay open and to stay accepting to what is changing.

To stay committed to the recognition that it's changing because it should change, because it needs to change, because it has to change. The changes are occurring for us. They're actually in our favor. Our ability to accept those changes comes from our willingness to see that they're necessary. That we grow from them and through them, and that we allow ourselves to be then part of the change, truly the change we wish to see in the world.

So I hope if you're in a moment of transition, and all of you are because all of us are all of the time, having talked through this in some way has been useful. Thank you for listening. Namaste.