Metanoia
“The
fear of loss is a path to the dark side…Attachment leads to jealousy, the
shadow of greed that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to
lose.”
Yoda,
Master Jedi Knight
I
started out this morning trying to find information about metanoia—defined as a
change in one’s life due to spiritual conversion. What I found were quotes about
letting go of what we cleave to now and allowing life to flow on its own. Pema
Chodron expresses it this way, “We think that the point is to pass the test
or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.
They come together, and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall
apart again. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to
happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” I had to sit down
and think about that.
We
truly do want things to be fixed, don’t we? I cannot count how many times in
the last four years I’ve asked, prayed, for things to just go back to the way they
were; to resume life as we knew it before all the chaos and the pandemic. And
the irony is that people who are on the other side of the political spectrum are
praying for the same thing—to go back to some idealized past where we imagine
that there was peace and prosperity, and all was well. We just have different
ideas of what going back looks like. It takes our bodies and minds far longer
to change than the speed at which change happens around us. Does that make sense?
The
fact is, there is no going back to an idealized past because there is no such
thing. We use our creative imaginations to reconstruct reality using only the
things we liked about the past. What we idealize about the past was pure hell
for many of earth’s people. Pema Chodron is right; human life is dynamic and
not static. It evolves in cycles like everything else in creation. If we want
to be content, we must make room for all of it. If we expect stasis, then we
will be continually disappointed. We must be willing to be fluid, too. Deepak
Chopra expresses it this way, “Every time you are tempted to react in the
same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the
future.”
We will not stop the flow
of life with our violence or our desperate backward grasping. It flows one way.
Our choice is whether to allow ourselves to go with that flow or to fight it. Ebb
and flow: nature’s way of moving life along and we are part of that nature. Listen
to Yoda and let go of everything you fear losing. And then, trust life to show
you the way.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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