From The Goddess Bookshelf:

Change Your Outlook on Change
By Charlene M. Proctor, Ph.D.

Author of Let Your Goddess Grow! 7 Spiritual Lessons on Female Power and Positive Thinking

Make no mistake about it, change is challenging, whether it is conscious or unexpected. Viewing adversity as change, not loss or failure, is part of empowered and positive thinking. Humans develop resiliency through change, both physiologically and emotionally. It’s necessary for all life forms to evolve. Change comes through many vehicles: some hit us hard, others are rather sneaky. But despite the challenges change brings, we know it is our natural state. It’s inevitable -- the world grows and we grow with it.

We are already designed to express sorrow, frustration, anger, and resentment, even to give up for a while -- and most of us choose to explore these feelings. But we are also designed to have hope, recover, be stronger, and inspire others as a result of change. You are never alone because emotion gives us plenty in common. As a society, we are not yet Vulcans.

What makes one person survive loss triumphantly and turn it into positive energy, while another person in similar circumstances resigns? It has to do with our underlying assumptions about change. Two of my very dear friends have had double mastectomies after breast cancer. Losing body parts is devastating, and it’s followed by the daily strain of not knowing whether you are still in remission. Yet one woman has forged ahead as a life-force warrior, focusing on the triumphs and wins of today. She doesn’t look back. The other has difficulty moving forward; she has quit her job and is waiting for “something” to happen while in a self-imposed limbo. They’ve processed their information completely differently. Why?

It’s because people want certainty before they decide to accept change. It’s a natural reaction. A current cultural disease we suffer from is predictability dependence, reflected in our inability to accept change at a deeply personal level. It applies across the board to choices we make with our finances, careers, or relationships. Science, especially when applied to health issues, has given us a false sense of security. After all, it seems we’ve been able to control nature. We like to think we’ve cornered the market on predictability and good planning, when the truth is that we live in a time when prediction is more intuition and common sense than science.

To embrace change, we need to release the umbilical cord we think we have to outcomes of certainty. In other words, stepping off the cliff requires a huge amount of trust. Your fall will be broken somewhere at the right time. Believing that is what allows us to cope. It is the first step, unsupported by any scientific doctrine. And it’s a big one.

No matter what science pronounces, whether in the form of a diagnosis, a prognosis, or a prediction about the environment, there is no sure thing. Science has already given us permission to accept truth with a margin of error in just about anything. There is always the possibility that something may exist, or not exist, despite what patterns indicate. It is useless to let scientific standards, or lack of proof, for that matter, hold you back. After a health crisis, job loss, divorce, or death, you will successfully navigate through change and elevate the quality of your life by knowing that anyone can beat the odds. There is evidence everywhere, not just from Christopher Reeve, Mattie Stepanek, or those whose stories you find in People magazine but from the dry cleaner, your third cousin, your own child. Let’s pay attention to the real evidence, instead of looking for ways to prove that we can’t make it or that the odds are just too great.

Adopting a new attitude about adversity requires big-picture thinking on the subject of change. Life, including spiritual development, can be seen as an upward spiral where we experience some of the same lessons over and over again. Is it because we just aren’t getting what the lesson is telling us? Yes, but that’s not the only reason.

We’ve deliberately put those circumstances in our soul charts in frequent doses to allow ourselves an opportunity to see how we’ve been progressing on the upward part of that growth spiral. Adversity is an inescapable indicator of how we handle the bumps. We are meant to become stronger and more insightful each time we get walloped. With each business obstacle, make a stronger commitment toward your goal of service to humanity; each time you grieve, become better at comforting others and showing compassion; after each funeral, return home knowing that life is a precious gift. All setbacks drive the point home on the one true certainty in life, which is that we must use our time wisely to make conscious change in the world. Change is designed to get us outside of ourselves and make us conscious of our place within a community of souls. Without change, there is no transformation. Change is good, making us stir the self-development pot a little faster.

It’s also important to cast the concept of change in a wider time frame. Although we gain power from present-moment thinking (here and now is important, not the past), it is helpful to view adversity and change over many lifetimes. How could you possibly perfect your soul in just one time around? There is so much to learn, with so many shades of gray to experience. Extending our perspective to the universal time frame relieves the pressure we often place on ourselves to get it all right at once – and gives us more patience with ourselves and with the others we are hauling along for the ride.

Reprinted from Let Your Goddess Grow! 7 Spiritual Lessons on Female Power and Positive Thinking by Charlene M. Proctor, Ph.D. (Published by The Goddess Network Press. May 2005;$19.95US/$24.95CAN; 0-9766012-0-6) Copyright © 2005 Charlene M. Proctor, Ph.D.

Author:

Charlene M. Proctor, Ph.D., the author of Let Your Goddess Grow! 7 Spiritual Lessons on Female Power and Positive Thinking and The Women’s Book of Empowerment: 323 Affirmations that Change Everyday Problems into Moments of Potential, helps lead people to a more positive mind and heart set.  Her powerful suggestions circulate worldwide through her website, newsletters, articles, and books.  She believes in your potential to transform the world through higher levels of conscious awareness.

Learn about the new Goddess Gift book by the author of this website
Return to Goddess Gift