Twelve Weeks Ago...

What if someone told you that you wouldn’t be able to go out shopping to certain retailers, you couldn’t go out to eat, and you couldn’t go to work or school, but you still had to work and go to school for TWO AND A HALF MONTHS and counting? You now know how you would fare, but we did this without knowing when it would be over, and truth is, we still don’t know when it will be over. We are starting to return to some of these things in modified ways, but we don’t know what will happen in the next month and we especially don’t know what will happen in the next 6 months. We are living in very uncertain and unsettled times on so many levels.

What we do know is that we are more resilient than we thought we were in mid-March, we can adapt/change/adjust (i.e. we are not fixed and stuck no matter how old we are), and we have all been connected across the country and globe in so many ever evolving ways. Change is uncertain, change is inevitable, change is often messy and chaotic, change is transformation, and change can be empowering and magnificent.

Regardless of if we wanted to or not, we have all been changed in some way over these past 12 weeks by the global pandemic and our country’s hard truth of racial injustice; some changes have been positive, some have been negative, and some may just be neutral. Hopefully the positive changes have outweighed the negative. Either way, what if we could be more proactive about the next 12 weeks (this would bring us to the end of August)? What if we could pause and reflect back so that we could look ahead with more clarity? What if we could use summer to refill our reserves and create conscious change? Summer is the season of transformation in Ayurveda, represented by fire and water (another post on that coming), so Nature is on our side and is the best model of change.

Take some time to consider:

• What’s been working?

• What do you want to keep doing? 

• What do you want to stop doing?

• What routines are working and what aren’t?

• What makes you feel better and what makes you feel worse?

• How do you want to feel at the end of the summer?

• What needs transforming in your life, workplace, community, or country?

• How can you harness the power of transformation without letting your passion, or fire, get out of control?

• Is there a way for change and transformation to be soft and fluid, yet powerful like water?

• What is it that keeps your internal fire or passion burning consistently? And what just adds fuel to the fire?

These questions can be used in so many different contexts and I think we all are due to take time to reflect on how we want our communities, states, and country to change and transform as well. We have work to do internally and externally. Here’s to the chaotic, uncertain, beautiful mess that change is. Change is certainly the only constant.