Even if we don’t feel ready to change, we can change to feel ready. Start from wherever we are, not where we think we need to be.
During the course of our life, we all, sooner or later, recognize that we need to change. Among all the rooms we may live in during our life, the largest room is the room for improvement. Despite being aware of the need for improvement, we often feel strangely, strongly reluctant. Very few moments actually make us feel ready to change. Such moments come from factors beyond our control or from situations that suddenly make us aware of how far we are from where we wanted to be, or even where we could have been if we had pulled our life together. These moments may also come when we see someone, whom we consider our equal or peer, rise to heights that seem stratospheric to us.
Such moments of reflection or realization can be powerful drivers of change. Yet, these moments come only intermittently, even rarely. And the drive from those moments dwindles with time until it eventually disappears completely. That’s why, for most of our life, we don’t feel ready to change. And that is why we stagnate where we are, frequently not even noticing that stagnation. What we think of as stagnation is sadly, but certainly, leading to degradation. Rather than staying where we are, we get pulled down or even dragged down by the force of the world externally and the force of the mind internally.
When we don’t feel ready to change, what can we do? We can still change. We can decouple our actions from our feelings and simply cultivate the intention to change, then leap from that intention to action without requiring the bridge of emotion to link the two. We can cultivate the intention to change by using our intelligence, especially intelligence sustained by the conviction that comes from studying wisdom texts like the Bhagavad Gita and understanding the nature of the mind and its reluctance to change.
Additionally, if we put ourselves in environments where change is more feasible and probable, such as spending time in associations where changed people frequent, we can just start functioning or behaving differently. Instead of waiting to feel like meditating attentively, exercising regularly, or studying diligently, we just start and, by doing so, realize that changing is not as difficult as we thought it would be, especially if we just focus on small steps rather than worrying about sustaining the steps for days, months, and years. If we focus on taking small steps, we’ll find it’s not that complicated, and that our mind makes much ado about small things.
By bypassing the mental level, going to the intellectual level to cultivate intention, and moving to the physical level to take action, we can commence the journey to change. Gradually, emotions conducive and supportive of change will build. Starting can feel difficult, even like poison, but if we choose not to depend on our feelings for our actions (a choice that can seem like poison initially, as the Bhagavad Gita 18.37 warns), we will eventually reach a state of nectar where supportive emotions will come more frequently and forcefully, making change easier and more sustainable.
Summary:
- We don’t generally feel ready to change because the impetus to change comes intermittently and declines with time, leaving us with the daunting prospect of an effort that seems enormous, even prohibitive.
- To change for the better, we need to bypass our emotions by cultivating the intention using our intelligence and then leaping to action by taking small steps, independent of how we feel.
- Though moving from the intellectual to the physical level without the bridge of supportive emotions can feel like poison, actual incremental change will eventually bring supportive emotions and take us into the state of nectar, where change becomes easier and more sustainable.
Think it over:
- If you wait for some impetus to come to start the journey toward improvement, what’s wrong with that?
- What can we do when we just don’t feel ready to change?
- How does changing make us eventually ready to change?
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18.37 That which in the beginning may be just like poison but at the end is just like nectar and which awakens one to self-realization is said to be happiness in the mode of goodness.
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