The challenge of change
Change in Your Life
Today, the only thing that you can rely on is that everything is on fast-forward. Nothing remains the same as it was. The pace of change in our modern times is so rapid that the personal protective mechanisms you’ve painstakingly built up over your lifetime may now feel to be inadequate and in danger of being finally overwhelmed. If you take time out to pause, to take a good look at yourself from the outside, as it were, you’ll begin to see how the personality you’ve acquired – in other words, your ego, that which you’ve come to regard as who you are – functions to a greater or lesser extent as a shield that protects you from experiencing the fact that you’re really not a fixed and unchanging object that’s set in stone, but fluid in nature and part of a continually changing flux. So what is it that sets you apart from what’s really happening around you right now? It’s the in-built, resistant bits that are stuck within your personality – those fixed attitudes, out-dated beliefs and rigid patterns of behaviour that prevent you from accurately assessing the here-and-now situations in which you find yourself – and, from becoming aware of the true nature of the people you meet.
So, in a very real sense, your personality gets taken over by the resistance to change. It becomes a false, a disempowered, self – a fixed attitude, a mask that’s designed to cover up an outdated way of thinking. It gives its presence away by the words and phrases that habitually come out of its mouth – phoney scripts, ‘acting-out’. The rigid pattern of behaviour that goes with it is heavy armour, designed to resist the expression of long-denied feelings.
Maybe it’s become part of your nature to fear change or to respond to it with worry and self-defensive mistrust; to deny it exists, because you feel threatened by it. We all like things to be familiar to us. So when we meet a new situation or set of circumstances, we look through our filing cabinet of pre-learned attitudes and patterns of behaviour to find some personal response that will enable us to cope. If we can’t find one that fits, we go into a panic of stage fright. Depending on past experience, we decide either to take the risk of being real, or, we start to act out all over again.
Changes in our personal and working lives are very often associated with feelings of fear or insecurity. This indicates that the phenomenon of resistance to the inevitability of change is very deeply embedded in our human nature. The familiar signs of tension, anxiety or stress show that an inner conflict is being fought – between the need for an ideal (that is, an unchanging and stable) social and working environment, and the fluctuating reality of what’s going on right now. It’s our resistance that over the years largely moulds our individual sense of who we are. The inescapable fact is, that before the experience of true awareness can be achieved, your personal ‘unfinished business’ needs to be brought to completion, in order to free the energy bound up in maintaining your out-dated resistant attitudes and use it for creative work in the present-day world.
You’re caught between yearning for a perfection you can’t achieve, and attitudes that are fixed in the past. You’re stuck. You can’t remember yourself as a child anymore, so you don’t know what your authentic needs are. You haven’t truly been you for a long time.
When are you going to take time out to learn how to simply ‘be’?
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