*** The Paradox of Transformation - Good News About Your Bad News

Every so often we seekers undergo a significant transformation. It's as if our spirit gets restless and takes off after something that only it understands, dragging us behind.

It is often chaotic and painful, because change is disruptive and can feel like crisis.

It is also a great gift, because unde
eath the exte
al reorganization, the truly meaningful transformation is in the depth of your relationship to and experience of your spirit. Its desire to express a "higher octave" of itself through us is what creates the need for transformation in the first place.

Much of whom and how you used to be was designed to support the expression of your spirit at that level. The level you're moving towards requires the evolution of your instrument.

This is where, for most of us, the "gift" gets harder to appreciate.

As you approach this higher octave, much of what used to serve you becomes obsolete and begins to fail, and much that may have defined you, protected you or represented your highest goals may disappear unexpectedly.

You must shed this "stuff" to make way for updated versions, but we tend to experience this as disaster. The world doesn’t make sense. Things keep breaking down around you, and possibly on you or in you. And somehow things that you used to do well aren’t there for you when you reach for them.

This is an example of how attachment doesn’t serve us. It makes it very hard to surrender things gracefully. It could be a coping skill, a belief system, a boundary, a success strategy, and frequently some sense of my very identity.

During Al Gore's bid for the presidency in 2000, his life purpose as he understood it was ripped away from him and publicly destroyed. At that point he could hardly have been expected to embrace change or consider the upside. Eventually, though, he came to see that he was being set free to have a much more profound effect in the area of climate change, for which he was uniquely suited. What must have seemed like the ruination of his dream allowed him to change the world in a way he never could have within the restrictions of politics.

What’s so hard to understand during a major transition is that these things that feel so important to you – skills, beliefs, even relationships - belong to this level of consciousness and only work at this level. They will be useless to you at the next one, which is currently opening up.

It’s like insisting on bringing your American money to a country that only honors its own currency and doesn’t exchange. You would be best to leave your money behind. It will do you no good in this new place.

Now imagine you find out that they don’t even use money where you’re going. Now your mind goes into overdrive. “What do you mean they don’t use money? Everyone uses money. I’m used to money being very important. How can this possibly work? I’m not sure I trust this.” And your spirit says, “Trust me, just go. It will all make sense when you get there.”

So against your better judgment, you decide to risk it, and leave for the airport. Only when you get there, they tell you there is very limited room on the plane, and you can’t take all those clothes you packed. Now this is sounding like a horrible idea. Is this a joke, or a nightmare?

In the middle of your protestations, you’re told one more thing. “When you get off the plane, your passport will be confiscated, and never returned.” “Well, that’s it. Now I’m definitely not going!” screams your ego. “This is an abduction; this is a scam. There’s nothing you can say that would ever get me on that plane now.”

At this point, what you can’t hear, and certainly wouldn’t listen to if you could, is your spirit telling you that “once you get there, you won’t want your money or your clothes, and you most certainly will not want to come back here. In fact, if you think about it, it’s not so great where you are. Your clothes are out of style and falling apart, your money doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to, and your passport expires soon anyway. When you get where we’re going, you’ll look back and say ‘If I’d only known how much better this is, I never would have wasted so much time trying to hold onto a place and a bunch of stuff I didn’t really want all that much.’”

But that’s precisely the dilemma. You can’t know ahead of time. That knowledge belongs to that higher octave of your spirit that you’re moving toward. If you’re insisting that everything make sense ahead of time, you’re going to be sitting in that airport a long time, if you even get there in the first place.

What you can do is learn to trust your spirit. Learn to hear it and get in the habit of following what it says. Whether it makes sense or not.

I believe that it’s, perhaps, the primary function of faith, to help you take the leap into the unknown of the next octave. So, if a small transition is like trying to jump across a hole that seems wider than you think, a spiritual crisis might be more like coming to the edge of a cliff, where there’s no other side, and hearing your spirit say, “Trust me, jump.”

Faith is the willingness and ability to hear that, and say "yes," so we can discover that we’re not going to fall, because we can fly. In this case, flying means giving authority to your spirit by surrendering to the transformation of your circumstances, your experience and your consciousness.