There Is No Place Like Home!!

Often when we move to a new city or country it can help us undergo transformative change.

The best way to promote growth and healing is to take a trip, to go in search of adventure. Travel through space, whether by land, sea, air or mind is the universal metaphor for change. The hero’s journey creates new futures. New patterns and possibilities emerge. Many cherished beliefs come into question. New strengths, insights and talents unfold. When the journey is over, and you return to where you began, you are faced with new beginnings. You are at a turning point, a place where new paths make themselves known. If the journey is successful, you return a changed person, a hero in your own eyes. - Jeffery Kottler

The most long lasting changes start with simple gestures that make vital contributions to the whole. The small and subtle acts that you perform in your life may effect the most long lasting changes. Living in a new environment sometimes means that a lot of small and subtle acts will be different due to new circumstances.

The most fundamental skill of the creative person is the ability to constantly re-vision the world. Everything is subject to reconstruction and renewal. The “re” factor is the basis of resurrecting, reshaping, regenerating, reviving, and rejuvenating. Creative persons live in a state of constant search and exploration. - Shaun McNiff

Change helps us be in the here and now. Until it becomes familiar there is a freshness, newness in the way we perceive others and ourselves.

Living in the Here and Now:
1. Be present.
2. You can choose your attitude in any set of circumstances.
3. Wherever you go, there you are.
4. Being alive is being in a state of constant search and exploration.
5. Trust the process.
6. Change is an integral, continual process that unfolds throughout your life.
7. Everything is always changing embrace impermanence.
8. Transformation of consciousness is a continuous process.


Creating Change
Iyanla Vanzant expresses the challenge of change in the following quote:
“Often, when you are on the spiritual path, there is a war that goes on between the person that you once were and the person that you are becoming. Some call it “thought patterns.” Others call it “habit.” My experience was that there were two distinct personalities needing to be integrated. The old you, the one who helped you survive, the one that was there for you in the rough times, is going to fight to stay alive. The old you, knows your secrets and your history. The old you, knows your defense mechanisms, what you will do when your buttons get pushed, and exactly where your weaknesses lie. The old you, knows what works for you and is terrified by the thought of trying something new. The old you is comfortable with the way things were and are. The old you, wants to stay in control. The old you has home-court advantage.
The new you, the spiritually conscious, spiritually grounded you, is fumbling around trying to figure out what works now. It is the part of you that has yet to be proven. You may believe strongly, you may want deeply to change, and for your new identity to emerge. But the new you, is not quite sure it will work. It is there, in the glimmer of doubt, that the old you, goes to work. It nags at you. It challenges you. It is called self-doubt and lame excuses. The new you views problems as challenges, knowing that with every problem comes the solution, the way out. The new you is willing the confront challenges and wants to do so in a spirituality grounded way. When, however, the new you, is backed up to a wall, it will, out of habit, borrow from the old you. The instant the borrowing occurs, the new you, is rendered dead, even if it is only for a moment. The challenge is that when the new you is brought back into focus, there is a probably a pile of old-you crap that needs to be cleaned up. I learned the hard way that you must be disciplined, vigilant, and obedient about the practices that will build your spiritual muscles and put the old you to rest.”

What is so fearful about this situation that you have started to act like the “old you”?
What does the “new you” want?
What old issue needs to be faced?

We were meant to move. Our ancestors were wanderers, hunters,, and gatherers. They followed herds and water. They relocated themselves continuously, depending on the weather and seasons. Our very survival once depended on our mobility. On every continent, tribal communities traveled to where the best opportunities lay-they moved or they died. To this day, we carry this legacy within our genes, programmed over millennial.
-Jeffrey Kottler