Revelations Don’t Change Your Life, You Do.
Since the nodes changed, I have felt a massive shift. I am sure many of you have felt it too. Was it the nodes themselves shifting that changed us? Probably not. There were so many things we were doing prior to that shift that allowed us to move through the threshold with enough awareness to see what new way of being was available to us.
If you are not caught up, the nodes moved from Virgo and Pisces into Leo and Aquarius. The path we were sure we were walking down, the one that seemed to be working for us, has disappeared and a new road has appeared. Of course, this is not an overnight process. The understanding that a new path is available, is not the same thing as choosing and walking down the path. I takes time to readjust the GPS, change vehicle for new terrain and recalibrate the path.
We are not robots, we are humans having a human experience, which is vast and really random at times, despite how much we think we can control it. I believe that revelations don’t change your life, you do. Revelation and understanding, through whatever modality you use to come to know yourself, can be incredible, but awareness is only the first step. The next step is taking responsibility for what you now know and practicing a different way of relating.
This is where I think mind-body-breath practices become so important. To understanding a pattern mentally is different from experiencing that pattern as it happens and practicing a different response. The mind-body-breath practice gives you a place to observe the pattern while you are inside of it, because a practice is a reflection.
You can understand why you are the way you are. You can know where a pattern came from, whose “fault” it was, what happened to you and why you respond the way you do. All of that information can be incredibly useful. At some point, though, you have to understand that no matter what has happened to you, you are still an active participant in your life. The things you resist do not disappear simply because you understand them.
This is one of the reasons I have spent so much of my life practicing and teaching through the body. In a mind-body-breath practice, we work with form first. We physically practice another way of organizing ourselves and, through repetition, begin to create another way of relating. You do not have to wait until you completely understand yourself to begin practicing something different. The body gives you somewhere practical to observe yourself. Then, within the structure of a practice, you have the opportunity to do something differently.
That process is far less glamorous than revelation, but I think it is where change is tangible. For me, the nodal change gave me a bit of whiplash. I feel like I am standing in a field and I can’t quite see the North Star anymore. What I do feel deeply is that the way I have organized myself in the past is no longer working for me. The revelation has been incredibly practical: You don’t have systems that work.
What worked in my twenties does not work in my late thirties, and it is time to participate in the maturation of my own existence. For me, that means becoming financially literate. It means knowing how to feed myself in a way that gives me energy and supports the functions of my body. It means learning how to have fun again. It is deeply practical in the way that I am creating structures within my family and clear agreements with my husband about what we each bring to the table when it comes to presence, routines, chores and money.
The opportunity I see right now feels incredibly simple: lay it all out on the table.
What are you resisting? What are you ignoring? What do you know is not working that you continue to avoid looking at?
First, you have to be willing to observe it honestly. Then you can make an adjustment and build a new system, use it, measure whether it works and refine it. This is practice. It reminds me of that drawer in your house that is always a mess. Every ten months you finally get sick of it, take everything out and start over. If you cleaned it every two months, it probably wouldn’t get quite as bad. If you looked at it every week, you would realize you are no longer starting from scratch.
Eventually, if you pay enough attention, you might see the real pattern. You keep tossing things you don’t need into a drawer where they don’t belong. You could put the thing back where it goes, throw it away or give it away instead of creating a mess you will eventually have to deal with. It is just you and your drawer.
Maturing also means realizing you might live with someone else who uses that drawer. You need agreements around how you both use it and how you are going to take care of it. Put it all on the table, take a good look at it and participate differently. Things left unsaid and things we refuse to deal with have a way of festering. This is true of the practical parts of our lives and of our deeper emotional and mental lives. I have found that when I begin cleaning up the physical and practical pieces of my life, the rest begins to get some of that same attention.
This is also why, for me, practice cannot live entirely in the mind. You can talk about the drawer all you want, but the drawer will not clean itself. You can meditate on manifesting a clean drawer, but you can move houses or someone can clean it or you, and the mess will persist because you have not changed your relationship to it. Whatever IT is, will still be there waiting for you to engage with. At some point, you have to put your hands on the thing in front of you and shift. Awareness gives you the information, the practice gives you a place to work with the information, your life is the place to apply it.
The purpose is not simply to become better at yoga, Pilates, strength or meditation. The practice gives us a contained place to observe how we are relating, make an adjustment, repeat it enough to understand it and then take that new information back into our lives. The same process applies outside the room. Money, relationships, food, family, work and the way we care for our bodies all require us to look at what is there, build structures around what we learn, use them and continue refining them.
Your body is the vessel through which you get to experience all of it. Everything outside of you can begin to show you where you do and do not have the systems to support the life you say you want. The revelation is important because it allows you to see something that was previously unavailable to you.
Then comes the practice. Revelations don’t change your life. You change your life, so what are you really waiting for?
Take it into practice.
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