How may I work with the parts of me that fear change?

Question: Serge, I really want to change  so many things in my life. I want a better spiritual life, better relationships with people. I want to be a kinder person, eat a better diet, etc. But it is very hard. I am so stuck in my old habits and I so fear the unknown. Can you give me any advice?

Serge: I think you are very honestly enunciating the real difficulties we all have in changing things in our lives. Deep down we all have a kind of secret prayer that goes like this: ‘O please God, may my life be different; may I feel happier and more secure; may all the things I want, come about. But please achieve this  for me without me needing to change anything!’

Change, as you rightly say, is difficult. We get stuck in our old habit-patterns. Our problem is that we form identities around how we image ourselves and then we get so sunk into  these grooves that we cannot then climb out of them. Gurdjieff talked about this  phenomenon a lot. He used to say that as a species, we were so inert, that unless faced with a shock greater than the sum of our own inertia, we tended to stay as we are. He also suggested, and this I have found eminently true in terms of my clients in psychotherapy, that we will give up almost everything but our suffering, as that is the one thing we remain most attached to!  I mean, who would we be if we weren’t a miserable old  hard-done-by, ‘poor me’ victim!

His words are proving true, aren’t they, in terms of our ecological situation. For years, our scientists have been pointing out how bad things were becoming and how important it was that we changed our high-energy-consuming lifestyles. But did we do so? No! It is only now that things have become really bad - the suffering reaching the domain of  the unbearable - with our tsunamis, storms, earthquakes and droughts bearing down on us - that we are at last beginning to wake up and  change, and are realising  to our horror, that, as the old Chinese proverb goes, ‘Unless we change our ways , we are bound to end up where we are headed!’

So I would counsel you to not let things get that bad in your life, before you begin to work towards change, for it can be that one can leave things too late.  We can reach a point of no return, as well we might have done, ecologically, on our planet!

So think about what you would like in your life - how you would like your life to be. Get an image of a ‘future you’ functioning in the world as if all the shifts you want implemented, have already taken place. And let this new image come into you and feed you. Meditate on it. Then,  from this  new strong place, think about what is stopping you being that which you wish to be and having that which you wish to have. Then think about  what you can do about these ‘stoppers’   and therefore what some of your challenges might be. In doing this,  also know  that whenever we go for something new, there will always be resistance.  And this resistance  is not bad and it cannot be ignored and indeed, must be worked with.

So perhaps find  a wise friend or a  skilled psychotherapist to discuss things with. Or take yourself on an organised spiritual retreat. I am a big one for the therapeutic and the spiritual benefits of  doing this, i.e., leaving behind our ‘normal workaday reality’ to give ourselves  new space to  reflect on our lives, which  is something not enough of us allow ourselves  nearly enough time to do.

I think  that if we really give ourselves the space to let our hearts tell us what we need to do or not do, in order to live a more satisfying life, and, from that place, confront the pain of what is currently not working and standing in the way of this, that we come into a much better place of being able to advance our lives. I think it is far less painful to experience our sadness or despair or whatever emotions are lurking inside us, than not let ourselves feel at all. If we don’t feel, we are kind of dead. It sounds like you want to be more fully alive in everything you do. So celebrate that. Good luck.