Change

Question: One of my biggest challenges is learning to deal with the unwanted changes that happen in my life. Is there a way of looking at change that would make it any easier to accept and let go of it so that it doesn't create even more problems for me?

Answer: Let me answer this in a bit of a different way, starting with a section from my book Apprentice of the Heart: Lessons in Life Only Love Can Teach called "The Love of Winter."

It always amazes me on sun-bright mornings such as this one how I could have ever forgotten just how much beauty hides in a winter day. The ground is covered in rich brown tones borrowed from curling leaves. Here and there pop up patches of fall-parched grasses just greening, reborn from early rains. And, more than anything else, the stark trees of winter stand like nature's exclamation points.

How I love the trees of early winter, so sparsely dressed in their few remaining leaves, barely hanging on otherwise barren limbs. Their collective voice speaks in a brusque tongue of richer days gone by and of colder days to come.

But it's the unspoken story these bared trees tell that helps warm and strengthen me most. For when the trees are full, and green, theirs is a story already told.

Of course they can be put through an unknown dance by late summer winds, or catch the last moments of the setting sun and stand there, shimmering, in contrast to their own strange shadows. But even so, all that they are is in sight. And this is why I love trees in winter: With their last garments of green removed, I feel more intimate with them, as though neither of us can hide anything from one another.

And even though it may be a subtle one, I confess to feeling a certain hope in seeing this forgotten state of theirs. For if it's true that in this pure barrenness there dwells such honest beauty -- and that this beauty has always been there -- only hidden for the time -- then perhaps your absence isn't what it appears to be but only serves to reveal another form of your love.

Does this last thought sound too much like barren hope struggling for a new spring? I know it is not!

If trees move through seasons -- and their loveliness only changes to reveal itself in new forms -- then why not consider that Love has Her seasons too? And is any season more beautiful than another, or is it just that we tend to forget those very special elements each has to offer in its own time and on its terms?

Is spring greater than winter? Summer more important than fall? Don't they really need one another in order to be all that they are?

So, for today anyway, I find great beauty in your absence. For now the presence of your promise in me is felt more keenly than the residue of these last barren seasons. No, I don't see you; and it's quite clear that I don't know where you've gone. Still… and in spite of all this evidence… or perhaps for the very lack of it… I know that you are here.

How troubled we are by these seasons of our soul, but the only reason they trouble us is due to a lack of self-understanding. We see the seasonal changes occurring every day in the outer world -- with the passing of spring, summer, winter, and fall -- but we don't recognize the seasons in our interior life.

We are creatures that are held captive by a certain kind of conditioning that has taken place -- without our awareness of it having happened -- and now without our knowledge, we serve it. This conditioning that holds us captive is that each of us, every day, has in our minds what the season should be like. "You're supposed to smile at me when you greet me in the morning." "The world isn't supposed to be upside down today." Or, hitting a little bit closer to home, "I wasn't supposed to look like this today." Sometimes we see with far too great a clarity that our spring is gone, that the fall and winter are setting into ourselves, and it frightens and unsettles us.

The changes that we see in the world around us disturb us because we don't understand the whole of things. We live in a world that doesn't love the whole of things; it loves the partial that it calls the whole. It looks at the moment in which we win the accolades, the social power, the money, and because we have held an idea in our mind of what it means to be successful, then suddenly there is a marriage that takes place, and we feel as though we are justified because "Now I'm in the spring season."

Have you ever gotten the man or woman, had the moment in which you were in the sunshine, and then by a very natural form of attrition, a natural declination of your own interior life, the sensation, the vibration, the excitement began to wane? When it begins to wane, when we feel like suddenly things are changing outside of ourselves and we can no longer sustain the powerful, strong sense of self that was there the moment before, we begin to feel like we're losing something.

Why does pain have to be the teacher? Because we don't understand what it means to move with things. The truth is, we only have the pain of the sense of loss that we do because our thoughts and feelings are so fully identified with images that lend us a temporary sense of wholeness. So we miss the experience of being in the whole of Life itself. We don't get to have that rare peace, the true peace that comes with recognizing that, even though everything passes, in these very changes there is an invitation by Love, by the Divine, to discover ourselves in the Ground of an unchanging Good that sits at the very center of our own heart.

Have you ever awakened in the morning with a winter heart? There's no warmth in it. The day holds no promise. It's barren. The winds have come. Everything is cold. There's no hope. The winter heart is the progenitor of the spring awakening, but we miss the movement between the two. We don't see the relationship between these seasons in our heart, in our soul, because we have been taught by the world that we live in to cling to things, to see the good only in what we see as being good based on the culture that we got those ideas from, and to throw out everything else that runs counter to that wish.

The truth of the matter is that inside of the passing of these seasons within us where we go from happy to sad, from angry and frightened to confident, is the invitation for us to step back from ourselves and recognize that no aspect of us is the whole.

Both the fiery feeling that we're going to conquer the world, or the opposite -- that we're a burnt ash on the floor -- are connected to one another. They're not disparate moments meant to bring about darkness, fear, and worry in us. They're meant to teach us that if we could be awake and aware of ourselves moment to moment, we would be participants in a completely different order of life.

That inclusive order of life doesn't deny, resist, or reject the seasons, the ups and downs, the goodness and sadness, because the whole of life -- every form, creature, character, quality -- is a spiritual teaching.

If we want to have a spiritual life, we must learn to embrace the winter and recognize that winter is necessary for spring. Within winter is spring. Some of us say, "But I've been in winter for forty years!" We've been in winter for that long because all we see is a part of us that shows us only a barren heart and then proves to us by the sense of barrenness that that's all there ever will be.

We have another set of eyes inside of us. We can have a relationship with Love itself who invites us to accept its eyes as being the way in which we see the world around us. Then we can no longer be a sharp-edged person, so successful and sure of ourselves. Nor can we be the dark, depressed person who has failed to achieve whatever was thought to be our destiny. Nothing like that happens anymore. We inwardly learn to be not the individual seasons, but to share in their passage through us in an understanding that they can complement one another and finally complete each other. That's a totally different kind of life, and it takes a completely different kind of attitude, a new understanding of things.

Inwardly we begin to see, through enough suffering, how not wanting something to happen doesn't do anything except make what happens into something negative. We are not in charge of the world around us the way that we set out to be. We're created to be awakened within the world in us, and the world within us holds the world that moves around us. But more important, the world within us also holds us in its understanding, its timelessness, in which we see every one of these seasons -- of sadness, sorrow, happiness, joy, power.

The "love of winter" is the love of wholeness. The love of wholeness only comes to us as we start seeing what a waste it is to lash ourselves over what we think is intended to be happening to us.

It's a paradox -- so interesting and mystical at the same time -- that everything about what we do now (based on our present nature) is to try to get hold of what we want to get hold of and to never lose it. But as conditions change and we lose it, we suffer, and then we try to strengthen our grip on life. We're not supposed to have a grip on life like this. We're meant to loosen our grip all the time, because we start to recognize that who we really aren't can't lose anything.

The way I am now, a certain winter-like feeling comes up, and the only relationship I know to have with it is to shutter the doors, put the bars up, close everything down because a winter feeling has come. I don't have to love winter feelings, but I can learn about a certain kind of love that lives inside of me that is created to recognize that this winter feeling, if I'll simply learn to watch it and understand it, will show me beauty in it.

The reason it shows me beauty is because I'm there when it changes to the spring. I'm conscious of the movement because I'm present to the movement within myself instead of being apart from the whole movement of each season by trying to protect myself from it or keep it from changing.

If you're willing to work at understanding this, you can begin to do what almost no other human being on this planet has ever learned to do: You're going to learn what it means to sit back in your own life and realize: "I need not resist what I see or feel." If we could only see how strong that is in us! A pain or worry comes up, a delusion or disappointment passes into us, and it's a seasonal movement. These states and energies are passing forces as surely as the seasons are, only in a different time frame. When they pass into us, the first thing that this nature does is it tries to close the door. "I don't want that!" Or, if it happens to be a good one, we throw open the door and say, "At last! Spring comes!" Then we are identified with the condition that we have said is the cause, and when the interior seasons changes, we say: "What happened? Oh no!" and we start fighting and hating life again.

Let the winter show you the spring. If you'll wake up and let the whole of yourself see the whole of life within you, you won't believe what Love has in store for you.