CHANGE IS ABOUT SELF-STUDY

Reading this blog will change your life. 

Got your attention? Pretty big claim I'm making. 

Not really ... 

Not reading this blog will change your life too. 

Whatever you do will change your life - from minute to minute - every day of your life from birth till death. That's because the only thing unchanging about life is that it changes. Consider these words on what the Zen Buddhist tradition calls an everlasting truth: 

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transiency, we suffer. So the cause of suffering is our non-acceptance of this truth.

What is this truth? It is the simple fact that every moment of your life is change. any given moment changes your life. 
But this point is not the main one I want to make. 

Saying something will change your life is a common attention-getter in marketing. Whether it's a self-help book promising a new breakthrough technology, program or system, or a product based on a 'new science', the underlying premise is that our current lives aren't that great and some instant change would improve things a whole lot.

I don't know when this desire not to be living the life we're living overtook us, but we've certainly been trained to expect instant, permanent solutions to whatever is wrong - and if one solution doesn't bring immediate results - we're off to see the wizard for another. Or, more likely, we slide back to our old behaviours and attitudes .... and the accompanying restlessness and discontent 

When it comes to moods and attitudes, relationships and values, one's sense of well-being, our technologies and instant-changes solutions hardly ever work. But that doesn't stop us from looking for a magic answer - the switch we can flip to fix it. We look for this switch because we've come to expect, if not instant results, at least 'new scientific' solutions that will change our lives and eliminate the deep-down pain, shame and anger we detest in ourselves.
      
Everywhere there are experts with answers to our problems - with prescriptions to make life better overnight. But we become discouraged when we find that the change we crave and the goals we desire for our lives and relationships are really a matter of slow, steady retraining of our attitudes, actions and reactions - a daily process of vigilance over our own behaviour. 
      
After a lot of my own trial and error, that's how I see it happening. Creating the life and relationships we want is an unending series of tiny victories won over months and years of practise, of sustained effort, of self-awareness and mindfulness. And, in my case, the trial and error continues.
     
Even Dr. David Burns, the author of the 'clinically proven' 'cure' for depression in the book Feeling Good doesn't claim to have found the instant prescription or switch you can flick for happiness and contentment. He simply offers a program of retraining the mind. He says: 

If you're willing to invest a little time in yourself, you can learn to master your moods more effectively, just as an athlete who participates in a daily conditioning program can develop greater endurance and strength."
      
Our relationships and the heart of inner beings are healed, not by flicking a switch or by the flash of insight brought about by some miracle prescription or breakthrough system or new science.
     
Healing comes about in the same way that water breaks down rocks.

Last word to Larry Rosenberg in Breath By Breath: 

A certain amount of what we're doing is a kind of reeducation, a clear seeing of what has been happening all along. You are the teacher and the taught. You can read books like this one, listen to tapes, go to talks: all those things aim you in the right direction. But finally, you're not studying Buddhism. You're studying you. If you know all about Buddhism but don't know about you, you've missed the whole point.