Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage: Learn to Embrace Change as Part of Your Spiritual Homework with this Pathfinding Guide
352
Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage: Learn to Embrace Change as Part of Your Spiritual Homework with this Pathfinding Guide
352eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307574343 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/04/2009 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Change challenges, relieves, frustrates, threatens, saddens, or exhilarates us. Mainly it forces us to grow. It is the mechanism through which nature ensures evolution and the way God calls us home. It scares away our illusions about ourselves and others. Angel of mercy or Saturnian disciplinarian, change is constantly tailoring us to become all that we are meant to be. It molds us as surely as winds sculpt a tree or flowing waters reshape the hardest rock. Through change we are initiated into higher and higher states of consciousness. Our consciousness is our total awareness, a synthesis of heart and mind that enables us to act.
Change invites us to stretch and risk. It offers new births in consciousness to the degree that we are willing to die to the old. When change is only stoically endured or loudly protested, nothing is learned and the inevitable is delayed. Yet when change is accepted—no, more than that, embraced—it catalyzes our lives, expands our understanding, and shifts our perspective from one of fear to one that affirms life. For life is change.
There are ways of dealing with change creatively and without fear. One of them is by understanding the dynamics of change itself. Caught in the drama of a sudden personal crisis, it is often challenging to be able to see any purpose in it. But change is always a matter of process, even when it comes suddenly. Change often seems to be chaotic and threatening, with no intelligent direction. The key word here is seems. From a larger perspective or in retrospect, in change we see the workings of personal or planetary evolution.
THE RHYTHMS OF CHANGE
There is a rhythm in the way change occurs. I gradually became aware of this rhythm through years of being privileged to share the “classrooms” of hundreds of people as they met their challenges, even though the arenas and specifics were as different as the people themselves.
As I attuned myself to the rhythm of change, I realized that many of the people who came to me for counseling for the first time were either twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-five, forty-two, forty-nine, fifty-six, or sixty-three. In time I realized that this meant that they were in the first part of a seven-year cycle.
I came to see that the major turnings in their lives that heralded profound changes—marriages, divorces, deaths, births, career moves—all clustered around the actual year of a cycle change or a few months going into it or coming out of it. In case I missed the point, I would occasionally have clients who would insist that I see their teenagers, who were, like as not, age fourteen.
At first I casually assumed that this occurrence was in sync with the biological and psychological developmental tasks of the various ages. And I do think there is some correlation there, certain broad strokes that have to do with the desire to marry, likely times for career promotions, our own aging, and the aging and deaths of our parents.
However, it stretches credibility pretty far to make all the changes I was observing fit the scientific models. And this point of view made no sense at all when a man experienced a car wreck that crippled his body and changed his life exactly when he was thirty-five; or when a young woman’s mother would suddenly die when she was twenty-eight. Why not twenty-six or thirty? Why did the divorce occur precisely at forty-two? The lawsuit at fifty-six?
Many cosmologists from around the world suggest that creation takes place in cycles of seven. In the biblical account, God created for six days and rested on the seventh. Metaphysicians would say that cycle symbolizes seven great epochs of time and would point to corresponding versions in Zoroastrian beliefs and in Japanese Shintoism, in Hinduism, and in the myths of a number of other world cultures.
From sunspots and economic crashes to the spawning of fish and changes in fashion, all life moves in cycles. Good astrologers are rarely surprised by predictable cycles of activity. They look at the horoscope of an individual person or an entire country, plot the cyclical paths of the planets through the symbolic signs of the zodiac as they overlap, oppose, or complement each other, and indicate the likely times and intent of upcoming changes. They don’t know what specifically will happen, but they can successfully indicate that something profound is going to happen.
The universe is just that—a universe—and we are in rhythm with the energy that holds it all together. We affect and are affected by all that happens.
Whether we’re working through a deeply ingrained pattern, in which the dance of change might last a lifetime, or addressing a more superficial pattern in which the stages of change might be worked through from beginning to end within a few weeks or months—we are always in process with many changes at one time. Our lives are made up of cycles within cycles—some turning over rapidly, others moving slowly.
THE 7 STEPS OF CONSCIOUS CHANGE
How we perceive change begins with our understanding of who we think we are. The collection of habits, attitudes, and beliefs we gather around ourselves tell us who we think we are. Events might come and go, but there is no real change in us until one of those events actually challenges our perception of who we are. It’s quite possible to simply endure with the same mind-set until the next big event. But once a deeply held belief about ourselves is really challenged, then the dance of change begins. We may resist, or we may join the dance—usually the former before the latter—but we’ll eventually resolve the conflict between the status quo and the challenge, commit to a new direction, endure the necessary purging of the old habits, and finally surrender fully to the new.
It is this journey, through these seven stages of conscious change, that is the focus of this book.
1. The first step is the FORM. This is the basic belief we hold about ourselves on any subject. It defines the boundaries of our perception, dictates our opinions, and, most importantly, establishes our personal reality. This is the point at which all change begins.
2. A sense of movement in the process of change begins with the second step, the CHALLENGE. Some event happens, or we are exposed to something or someone that disturbs the status quo, and our original Form no longer works.
3. RESISTANCE, the third, and usually quite uncomfortable, cycle of change, when our old way of being and our new perception lock horns in a battle of ambivalence and indecision. Logic, conditioning, and history argue for the past, yet the strongest pull is toward the new.
4. Eventually we’re rescued by the fourth stage—the AWAKENING. This is the exhilarating part of the cycle in which a breakthrough occurs in the previous struggle. At this point we make the critical shift from indecision to the new viewpoint.
5. Next comes COMMITMENT. This is the point in the cycle when we put all our resources—time, money, energy—into the new direction. This stage presents us with a series of choices that help us bring our new goal into manifestation.
6. PURIFICATION is the inevitable next step—one that takes us totally by surprise. This is the time the actual transformation takes place. And it is often painful. Old hurts and fears repressed during earlier parts of the process rise up to be acknowledged and, ultimately, transformed. It is a time of dying to the old; a time that tests our faith in the new.
7. Finally we reach the last stage—SURRENDER. This is the point in the process of change when we actually become the new belief. It is characterized by synthesis and integration. The new becomes one with the whole being, and the old form is but a memory.
When events in the outer world challenge our beliefs—our form—we have the option of refusing to change. We can deny the new, defend the old, and cling tenaciously to our existing understanding. Or we can stop, pay attention, and ask, “What can I learn from this challenge? How can I become really conscious with this?”
We’re always making choices about our inner world, whether consciously or unconsciously. These choices create patterns that attract certain kinds of future experiences. When we choose to use the challenges that force us to confront our ideas about ourselves, when we choose to use events as stepping-stones toward greater understanding, then we opt for conscious change.
A MUTUAL CONTRACT
There is an expression from Iceland that says “I won’t sell it to you more expensive than I bought it.” That’s my contract with you. The ideas about the dynamics of conscious change that I’m sharing with you in this book have emerged from my personal laboratory of over fifteen years of healing, teaching, and counseling. I will report events and experiences honestly and interpret them as clearly as my understanding and skill allow.
As for your part of the contract, I ask that you read with an open mind and listen between the words. At best, words catch only a thimbleful of meaning. When we attempt to describe the nonmaterial in concrete terms, we find ourselves instantly on tricky ground. It’s like using a net to catch flowing water. Spirit is everywhere and in all life. To pull any one thing out of Spirit and name it is immediately limiting. The whole can’t be made specific. But we can understand more about the whole by studying its parts.
If a story or a phrase stirs you into remembering a bit more clearly who you are, I will be grateful. If the thoughts in this book help you to go through your changes with more understanding, my intention will have been fulfilled.
And if this book should not be for you, then I ask that you gently lay it aside and make neither of us wrong. Our conflict-ridden world needs us to celebrate, not argue about our diversity. There are endless prisms through which the Light breaks—one Light, many colors. I infuse my words with the prayer that, above all, you may find the color that is yours and live it and that both of us may grow in our understanding of the many colors within the one Light.
As I write and you read, our worlds do indeed touch. They touch like the smile that says “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”