Last week I witnessed a stunning weather event..flash flooding. During my previous five weeks in Joshua Tree it rained once for a minute. Last Tuesday afternoon it began pouring and hailing and pouring with lightning and a few rattling thunderclaps. The entire deluge lasted an hour at most.
For those not familiar with desert monsoons, the ground is so hard it can't absorb heavy rain fast enough. An hours worth of monsoon shut the town down and flooded highway 62 with enough force to push a large SUV off the road. Rivers of mud, cacti, bushes, tree parts and rocks as big as my head came pouring down the roads. A small army of frontloaders worked through the night clearing mud and debris. A week later cleanup is still ongoing. All that chaos from an hour's worth of rain.
We tend to think of change that arrives like a desert monsoon as an event rather than a process. But all change is a process, even if it begins with a event. As with last weeks flash flood, the cleanup and rebuilding is an ongoing part of the process.
Despite all the articles, self-help books and talk show interviews that admonish us to "embrace change", I don't know anyone who consistently welcomes change with open arms. I have a mixed relationship with it. Some change I welcome. Some makes me wince a bit. Sometimes it scares me. Regardless of how I feel, change is fecund ground for growth and resistance is futile.
I've read several times that we fear change because it threatens the comfort we've built for ourselves. While I don't disagree, this seems like a shallow answer. We fear change because it threatens familiarity, shatters our illusion of control and brings us face to face with the unknown.
Fear of the unknown is perhaps the oldest, most innate human fear. The unknown triggers our lizard brain survival instinct and can set off the fight, flight or freeze reaction. Even if we don't run screaming many people experience spaciness, blanking out or an inability to think clearly during periods of intense change. These reactions are variants of the freeze response. As far as fighting goes, we all take a turn at that one.
Most, if not all, of our fear of change is actually fear of the unknown. So how do we get over that? We don't. It's hardwired into our biology. We can't make it go away. We can get that fear down to a manageable size. When it no longer feels bigger than we are we can integrate our fear of the unknown so that it doesn't prevent us from growing.
The unknown is a formless, intangible, inexplicable something. That makes it a blank screen for our lizard brains to project dire visions of loss, disaster and pain on. Fear is an early warning system designed to deter us from taking risks that might threaten our survival. As with any good warning system, the warning comes before anything actually happens.
With fear of the unknown, the brain doesn't have anything to attach the fear to so it makes up stories to explain the feeling. The first step in getting fear of the unknown down to a manageable size is figuring out how much is really about the unknown and how much is a reaction to your projections of what might be in the unknown. Finding this out means being the observer and sitting with the fear.
Change is a confluence of destruction and creation. Change and the unknown are scary. They also combine to hand us a blank canvas for creation. Spending time daydreaming or imagining what you could create on that canvas is a great way to balance your fear of the unknown.
The great things you imagine are no more "real" than your fear. That's not the point. Fear feeds on attention. When you focus on visualizing creation, you aren't feeding the fear.
We all fight change to varing degrees. Some amount of fighting is part of the process of change. There is a big difference between fighting as a form of resistance and fighting as a way to move emotion.
Resistance fighting involves denial, rationalization, excuses, justification and anything else we do to run from and avoid change. All of these reactions are based in fear. Often we unconsciously fight change until we realize what we're doing. Once we're aware, we have the choice to surrender or continue fighting. If we chose to continue fighting, it will take considerably more effort to ignore what we're doing. Denial, rationalization, excuses and justification only work well if we're not conscious of how we're using them.
Often our initial reaction to change is anger and fear. Getting to the place of accepting change doesn't happen until those emotions have their say. Acceptance isn't about liking anything. It's about acknowledging what is and getting real. Acceptance and willingness to move with the change is on the other side of throwing a fit and having a meltdown to release the initial layers of fear and anger.
Aside from changing your socks, change is not a linear process. We don't move from through fighting change and arrive at acceptance. We fight, surrender, avoid, surrender, resist, surrender, etc. Along the way we make choices about how present and how authentic we're willing to be.
Deep change is unsettling, uncomfortable and challenging. Even a small act of surrender can provide some relief from these disturbing emotions. With relief comes a respite where the process doesn't have as firm a hold on you. From this relief point, you may chose to abandon the change process. You step away, telling yourself the process is complete because the emotions you feel aren't as intense and nothing seems to be happening.
That's certainly an option, but it requires an enormous amount of energy to maintain. At some point the same change process will begin calling your name again. Because you've already dipped your toe in the process you can't claim ignorance to avoid re-engaging.
Like every other process, change is watery and moves in waves. When the wave recedes and the intensity subsides, you may feeling a temporary sense of being stronger. This is a gift, a preview of what's possible if you stick with the change process. It's not a place you've arrived and get to stay.
When the next wave comes, most of this new sense of strength will evaporate like mist. You'll be right back in the uncomfortable and the chaos. You may even feel like you're regressing. Hanging onto the memory of feeling that new strength is an important asset in riding the subsequent waves. It's a preview of what's possible that makes the unknown a little less unknown. The new sense of strength is real, but won't have a place to rest inside you until you've ridden a few more waves.
For those not familiar with desert monsoons, the ground is so hard it can't absorb heavy rain fast enough. An hours worth of monsoon shut the town down and flooded highway 62 with enough force to push a large SUV off the road. Rivers of mud, cacti, bushes, tree parts and rocks as big as my head came pouring down the roads. A small army of frontloaders worked through the night clearing mud and debris. A week later cleanup is still ongoing. All that chaos from an hour's worth of rain.
We tend to think of change that arrives like a desert monsoon as an event rather than a process. But all change is a process, even if it begins with a event. As with last weeks flash flood, the cleanup and rebuilding is an ongoing part of the process.
Despite all the articles, self-help books and talk show interviews that admonish us to "embrace change", I don't know anyone who consistently welcomes change with open arms. I have a mixed relationship with it. Some change I welcome. Some makes me wince a bit. Sometimes it scares me. Regardless of how I feel, change is fecund ground for growth and resistance is futile.
I've read several times that we fear change because it threatens the comfort we've built for ourselves. While I don't disagree, this seems like a shallow answer. We fear change because it threatens familiarity, shatters our illusion of control and brings us face to face with the unknown.
Fear of the unknown is perhaps the oldest, most innate human fear. The unknown triggers our lizard brain survival instinct and can set off the fight, flight or freeze reaction. Even if we don't run screaming many people experience spaciness, blanking out or an inability to think clearly during periods of intense change. These reactions are variants of the freeze response. As far as fighting goes, we all take a turn at that one.
Most, if not all, of our fear of change is actually fear of the unknown. So how do we get over that? We don't. It's hardwired into our biology. We can't make it go away. We can get that fear down to a manageable size. When it no longer feels bigger than we are we can integrate our fear of the unknown so that it doesn't prevent us from growing.
The unknown is a formless, intangible, inexplicable something. That makes it a blank screen for our lizard brains to project dire visions of loss, disaster and pain on. Fear is an early warning system designed to deter us from taking risks that might threaten our survival. As with any good warning system, the warning comes before anything actually happens.
With fear of the unknown, the brain doesn't have anything to attach the fear to so it makes up stories to explain the feeling. The first step in getting fear of the unknown down to a manageable size is figuring out how much is really about the unknown and how much is a reaction to your projections of what might be in the unknown. Finding this out means being the observer and sitting with the fear.
Change is a confluence of destruction and creation. Change and the unknown are scary. They also combine to hand us a blank canvas for creation. Spending time daydreaming or imagining what you could create on that canvas is a great way to balance your fear of the unknown.
The great things you imagine are no more "real" than your fear. That's not the point. Fear feeds on attention. When you focus on visualizing creation, you aren't feeding the fear.
We all fight change to varing degrees. Some amount of fighting is part of the process of change. There is a big difference between fighting as a form of resistance and fighting as a way to move emotion.
Resistance fighting involves denial, rationalization, excuses, justification and anything else we do to run from and avoid change. All of these reactions are based in fear. Often we unconsciously fight change until we realize what we're doing. Once we're aware, we have the choice to surrender or continue fighting. If we chose to continue fighting, it will take considerably more effort to ignore what we're doing. Denial, rationalization, excuses and justification only work well if we're not conscious of how we're using them.
Often our initial reaction to change is anger and fear. Getting to the place of accepting change doesn't happen until those emotions have their say. Acceptance isn't about liking anything. It's about acknowledging what is and getting real. Acceptance and willingness to move with the change is on the other side of throwing a fit and having a meltdown to release the initial layers of fear and anger.
Aside from changing your socks, change is not a linear process. We don't move from through fighting change and arrive at acceptance. We fight, surrender, avoid, surrender, resist, surrender, etc. Along the way we make choices about how present and how authentic we're willing to be.
Deep change is unsettling, uncomfortable and challenging. Even a small act of surrender can provide some relief from these disturbing emotions. With relief comes a respite where the process doesn't have as firm a hold on you. From this relief point, you may chose to abandon the change process. You step away, telling yourself the process is complete because the emotions you feel aren't as intense and nothing seems to be happening.
That's certainly an option, but it requires an enormous amount of energy to maintain. At some point the same change process will begin calling your name again. Because you've already dipped your toe in the process you can't claim ignorance to avoid re-engaging.
Like every other process, change is watery and moves in waves. When the wave recedes and the intensity subsides, you may feeling a temporary sense of being stronger. This is a gift, a preview of what's possible if you stick with the change process. It's not a place you've arrived and get to stay.
When the next wave comes, most of this new sense of strength will evaporate like mist. You'll be right back in the uncomfortable and the chaos. You may even feel like you're regressing. Hanging onto the memory of feeling that new strength is an important asset in riding the subsequent waves. It's a preview of what's possible that makes the unknown a little less unknown. The new sense of strength is real, but won't have a place to rest inside you until you've ridden a few more waves.
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