We all know change is inevitable
and yet we often resist. There have been
changes aplenty for me in the last year and I am finding that,
counterintuitively, one of the things that helps is a willingness to be in the
in-between place. A friend recently
shared a sort of mantra, I think from Joan Boryensko, “No longer and not yet.” That’s a good one—how do we let go of
something when we don’t know for sure what is coming next?
It seems like at least part of the
difficulty has to do with identity. Ego
(ahankara or asmita) likes to say, “I am . . . ” or “I do . . . ” The more ego turns something into an
identity, the harder it is to let things change. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this in
relationship to how I eat. A few months
ago, I decided to do an elimination diet to see if I have any food
sensitivities. Pretty soon, I was
getting used to eating very differently than I had been and even though I didn’t
find anything dramatic, I was feeling pretty good and it just seemed to make
sense to keep going. It seems to me that
if I had held on to my old identities as someone who eats dairy or sugar or
whatever, I may have reverted back as soon as the official elimination protocol
was done. Then the diet change becomes
an aberration, just a thing I did.
The other side would be to create
a whole new identity as someone who is “gluten-free” or “vegan” or whatever,
which doesn’t really feel right. I don’t
know how long I will eat this way. I
didn’t set out to become something different.
I mostly just think, “This is how I’m eating right now” and that seems
true.
I went to a workshop with Sonia
Nelson recently that was about change and she was talking about Sutra 2.15 and saying
that one of the ways change causes suffering is when it is happening too
quickly or too slowly. And I wrote it
down, even though it seemed not that earth-shaking to me. But maybe this is getting at the same
thing. If I am holding on to an old
identity, then the change feels too fast for me. If I am grasping after or trying create a new
identity, then the change feels too slow.
If I can allow myself to be in the in-between, then the change can go at
the speed it wants to go and I have time to adapt and to actually see what is
happening instead of trying to control it.
