Change in Spring!

Spring is coming

The days are lengthening. There are signs of spring everywhere. Plants are starting to emerge from their hibernation of winter.

The seeds that were planted are starting to use the energy stored within them to grow. The landscape we have seen barren over winter is changing. New life is starting to emerge all around us.

It can be another period that you can reflect upon the things that you want to change and use the newfound energy of springtime to help you in your quest. Reflect upon the projects that you considered over winter and enable them to grow in strength. Your time for daydreaming can start to become more definite.

However, you also to be aware and acknowledge that with change comes uncertainty. The feeling of insecurity. Change can be challenging. It requires effort and determination for dreams to become reality. It can take letting go of people, ideas, habits and behaviours to allow for new people, new ideas and new experiences to come into your life.

Just for a moment consider how many changes have already occurred in your life. How many times have you felt uncertain about change, knowing that change is coming, sometimes unable to do anything about it? Think about how many times you fought against change to prevent or ignore the change only for it to happen anyway.

Yoga and change

Some of the underpinning philosophies of yoga, as laid out in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, go directly to helping equip you with the skills and tools to deal with changes. Acceptance and letting go are at the heart of our practice. During a session on your mat, you are encouraged to accept what your bodies can and can't do, to let go of the judgement of yourself and others, and to surrender to a higher power.

By staying mindful, and present in your practice, you can use the time on your mat to help remind and teach you how to work with change. As you work through the poses you can seek out the physical edge of sensation. Here, you need to decide as you hold a pose at the limit of the physical self, whether to push past the edge of sensation into a realm of wilful effort where growth can occur, understanding that it is also potentially a path to injury and frustration. Or whether to pull away from the edge to a place of safety and comfort, understanding that this might also be a place of stagnancy. As you move to the limit of the pose, you breathe, you stay present, and the body relaxes and opens naturally in its perfect timing. The same is true when the ramblings of your mind are released. Your focus becomes present, and the mind opens.

Off the mat, you can use these learning of releasing to help open you up to the possibility of new life, of change. To accept the natural flow and rhythm of life. To flow with it. This allows the seeds you planted to grow and bloom.

There is a beautiful poem for this time of year about awakening and how we often wait for the right conditions to make changes. It reflects on how changes are constantly occurring in nature and how they happen anyway.

Waiting by Lisa Lowitz

You keep waiting for something to happen,

the thing that lifts you out of yourself,

catapults you into doing all the things you've put off

the great things you're meant to do in your life,

but somehow never quite get to.

You keep waiting for the planets to shift,

the new moon to bring news,

the universe to align, something to give.

Meanwhile the piles of papers, the laundry, the dishes, the job –

it all stacks up well you keep hoping

for some miracle to blast down upon you,

scattering piles to the winds.

Sometimes you lie in bed, terrified of your life.

Sometimes you laugh at privilege of waking.

But all the while, life goes on in its messy way.

And then you turn forty. Or fifty. Or sixty….

and some part of you realise is you're not alone

and you find signs of this in the animal kingdom –

when a snake sheds its skins, its eyes glaze over,

its links under a rock, not wanting to be touched,

and when caterpillar turns to butterfly,

if the pupa is brushed, it will die  -

and when the bird taps its break hungrily against the egg

it's because the thing is too small, too small

and it needs to break out.

And midlife walks you into that wisdom

that this is what transformation looks like –

the mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life,

the yearning and writing and pushing,

until day one day, one day

you emerge from the wreck

embracing the immense dawn

and dusk of the body,

glistening, beautiful

just as you are.

How can you embrace the new season and work with the energy of change?