Anxiety About Change

In these trying times, we know not what life will offer us with regard to change.

My life changes every day, and I regret that I will never have the life which I've longed for, but I am blessed for the life that I have.

My life has changed, and I accept that. I wished, hoped and prayed for better, but I embrace the life I have with all of its realities and challenges and changes.

Change will occur in almost every aspect of our lives.

We can learn to embrace change while releasing the past with grace.

When we find ourselves going through any kind of change in our lives, our natural response may be to tense up on the physical, mental, or emotional level.

We may not even notice that we have braced ourselves against a shift until we recognize the anxiety, mood swings, or general worried feeling toward the unknown that usually results.

However, there are positive ways to move through change without pushing it away, or attempting to deny that change is happening.

Since change will occur in almost every aspect of our lives, we can learn to make our response to it an affirmative one of anticipation, welcoming the new while releasing the past with grace.

One thing we can do is change our perspective by changing the labels we use to identify our feelings.

We can reinterpret feelings of anxiety as the anxious butterflies in our bellies that come with eager expectation.

That nervous feeling, called "butterflies" also tells us something ... butterflies are signs of change and new life ... transformation.

With this transformation, we begin to look for the good that is on its way to us.

Though we may only be able to imagine the possibilities, when we acknowledge that good is there for us to find, we focus our energy on joyful anticipation and bring it into our experience while allowing the feelings to carry us forward.

We can also choose to do a ceremony to allow our emotions to process.

Every culture has created ceremonies to help people make the transition from one phase of life to the next.

We can always create a ceremony too, perhaps by burning written thoughts to watch the smoke carry them away, thereby releasing them, writing our transgressions onto the shoreline, or placing our intentions on parchment to be planted beneath flowers or trees.

Some ceremonial activities such as a farewell send-off or housewarming party, we may do automatically.

Society also has built-in ceremonies, like graduations and weddings, which may satisfy the need we feel.

Sometimes the shift from denial to acceptance is all that is needed to ease our anxiety, allowing us to bring our memories with us as we move through nervousness to joyful excitement about the good to come.

It can be very challenging to maintain a positive attitude and a measure of faith when we are in the midst of difficult times.

This is partly because we tend to think that if God loves us we will experience that love in the form of positive circumstances.

However, we are like children, and God is our wise Mother who knows what our souls need in order to thrive better than we do.

God is as much as a Mother as God is a Father ... there is no difference or separation.

Just as a young child does not benefit from getting everything that child wants, we also benefit from times of constriction and difficulty to help us grow and learn.

If we keep this in mind, and continue to trust that we are loved even when things are hard, it helps us bear the difficult time with grace.

We are suffering through very difficult times.

Our world is changing every day, and we are each experiencing change in income, family, and society.

This period of time in history is full of difficulty for a lot of us, and we may feel less alone knowing we are not being singled out.

There are extreme energy changes pulsing through the universe at every level and, of course, we are all part of the growing process and the growing pains.

It helps if we remember that life is one phase after another and that this difficult time will inevitably give way to something new and different.

Once again ... "This Too Shall pass."

When we feel overwhelmed we can comfort ourselves with the wise saying: "This too shall pass."

At the same time, when we truly feel that nothing is going right for us, it’s never a bad idea to examine our life and see if there are some changes we can make to alleviate some of the difficulty.

Gently and compassionately exploring the areas giving you the most trouble may reveal things you are holding onto and need to release: unprocessed emotions, unresolved transitions, or negative ways of looking at reality.

As we take responsibility for the things we can change, we can more easily surrender to the things we can’t, remembering all the while that this phase will, without doubt, give way to another.

With love & embracing care,

Rob