We all want to make a change for betterment when shown that we need to shift in our way of thinking or feeling. But how to make a good change? I have been watching my
brugmansia plant wake up from spending the winter season inside—and this seems a good image for understanding how to make a good change. First we have to wake up. The trigger that says “AWAKEN” can be a jolt of insight from an
Oracle card reading or divination, or from a session with a counselor. A friend’s recommendation of a book about
energy medicine can reveal a next step in our own healing. An instruction DVD about a Qi Gong that has lain beneath a layer of dust for years can suddenly fall on our foot and cause us to explore a whole new way of moving. I think these forces that help us make a good change are like the slowly growing urgency of spring. At first the movement is almost imperceptible; the stirring is beneath the old bark and scars of past ways of being. Yet soon enough we cannot deny something is going on.
At first the change is easily dismissed. We may find ourselves pushing back down the new in favor of the comfortable, but what we have learned cannot be denied, and when we do not resist then good change can grow.
The experience of change is a dialog between the plant of our desire for change, and the soil of our lived experience that nourishes or impedes that shift. Support that gives time for gradual assimilation of new ways of thinking and feeling, help that reveals more than covers over our assumptions about the unknown, information that opens more than restricts our dreams of what is possible: these are the allies of good change.
And yet I suspect if we ask a plant working its usual magic for reaching toward the sun, we would hear that while change is natural it is not easy. I think we would be told that true beauty requires a throne of grief to sit upon. We would see in the mature towering stalk and translucent blooms the beginning of age and decay and death, which is again the beginning of the next cycle of good change.
