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The author of Ecclesiastes wasn’t lying when he said, in the oft-quoted verse 3:1, “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
We all go through seasons in our lives whether we realize it or not, but these seasons aren’t just a time for change, but also a process of transformation as we fall, learn, and integrate the lessons into our daily lives. In an article I have recently read by Sally Kempton, she writes how Yasuhiko Kimura, a contemporary philosopher, defines transformation as a dance between becoming and being. Being as the still center of ourselves and becoming as our personality, bodies, and worldly interactions. Thus, transformation happens when the experiences and insights of being meet with becoming and start to imbibe within the daily grind of our lives.
I have found myself neck-deep in this transformation process. The timing of everything converging to push me to an edge I didn’t know existed has completely rocked my world and set in not only a new mindset, but a confrontation of many things I have kept suppressed. The beginning of this process, while it has been going on for a while, was kicked into high gear when I missed a class that I teach because I was so stressed out, I could not longer function properly. I was trying to do more than I could handle and as a result things were falling apart. After all, this is life and trying to cram as much into a single day as possible, quickly becomes doing without living, without being. Not a lifestyle I desire to live.
Past seasons in my life have been times of changing and learning, but not necessarily applying and making a reality of it. There’s a difference between contemplating something and letting it integrate itself and ignoring something until it dissipates like it never existed. In my process right now, I have come face to face with the fact that life is full of unknowns and we can plan until the cows come home, but that doesn’t it will all work out. Letting go of the need to control and instead allow myself to be present in the present moment has been the crux of my struggle. The unknown is a big, black, scary place that guarantees nothing and accepting that, even embracing it, I know will be the ultimate freeing of the Self. But even though I know I am not there yet, I feel confident this transformation which has so timely collided with my life will lead me to higher grace and peace.
As Kempton so elegantly ends her article, she writes, “When we enter the gates of the transformation process, we can never predict how the journey will go. What we can say is that it will involve a dance between insight and application, between practice and grace, between Being and Becoming.”
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[…] Sally Kempton (Durgananda) spiritual teacher and author of The Heart of Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience […]
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