Be the change. That was Obama’s campaign slogan–borrowed from Gandhi, who got it from his father. Now it’s morphed into an inspirational mantra; President Obama is putting the responsibility for change back on us. Are you ready?
When you hear the word “change,” do you tense? Change is often accompanied with fear. We resist change. Change might mean not being in control.
But at least change produces something new. Without it, we’re bored. So at what point does your feeling shift from excitement to fear? When do you cross that line into the survival response of fight-or-flight? Is this economy causing you to cross that line?
As prey animals, deer are hardwired to sense the slightest change in ambient noise level. The sound of a twig snapping tells her to run. As the predator, the mountain lion watches the woods to notice a change in the landscape to detect her prey. We also rely on changes in our environment to tell us what we need to do. When the change produces a critical situation, we rally our survival response. Your body might do this even while the rational part of your brain is saying, “Whoa! It’s ok. It’s not that critical.”
How to Change
How do you shift out of fear of change, so you can enjoy the exhilaration of change? A few simple tactics:
- Breathe. Taking a few deep breaths tells your body that it’s ok to relax, that you’re safe.
- Feel the fear-and any other emotion that comes up. Express it. Move that energy out. As you change, keep feeling it. Use that energy, that fear, to move you. You will live.
- Don’t deny what’s happening. Regardless of how you think you should respond, if you are feeling fear, anger or sadness from impending change, then feel it! Then you can release it. You can’t release what you won’t acknowledge. Release it by experiencing in your body where these emotions are. As you allow the physical and emotional feelings to exist, they’ll get more intense at first (which is what you’re really resisting). Then they will subside as you release the feelings.
- After a few good breaths, ask yourself, what is at risk? If this change occurs, what do you risk losing? What don’t you know? What will the new be like? Use these questions as more than a head-trip. Feel your response. We often avoid addressing the fear directly. When we know it and begin to own it, the fear often dissolves.
- Learn what the change is teaching you. If you knew the lesson, the intensity of the change would be less. What haven’t you learned before that you’re learning now? It could be that you never learned to express what you want and this situation is prodding you to express your needs.
- Get help. Is there a person who can help you figure out this lesson? You don’t need to do it alone. Maybe you need to find a person who can model how you dance this change. It could be a person from history. Learn from others’ mistakes and successes.
- Seek change. Shift from avoidance to allowance. The chaos that change produces can become a wave of pleasure. As a skier, I learn the slopes that once scared me now excite me. Use other venues to build your change muscles.
Change is always present. Today with the economic situation, it is constantly in our faces. We can’t hide – it will find us.
So let’s make change our ally. I believe that to change the planet, we first must change ourselves. It is essential that we begin to integrate the parts of ourselves that we separated from in the past because of stress. As we become whole, change begins to work for us; we naturally start affecting the planet in positive ways.
A small cadre of fellow change agents has joined me in creating www.WholeRevolution.com as a blog that supports us in being whole. Join the revolution.
Photo: Chuckumentary
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