STAGNATION, REGRESSION, BACKSTEPPING

Sometimes we may need to stop growing.  We may need to backstep and regress.  Growth, so often assumed automatically to be a goal in life, can become a sentimental value that overlooks the necessity of such things as stagnancy and slippage.

-Thomas Moore

I’VE GOT 20 DIFFERENT WAYS to talk to you about how people change.

We could start with habits.  How to put down unhelpful ones, and take up skillful ones.

We could talk about the three components required for change.

There are 23 books and 7 podcasts and 14 poems that I could recommend that might help you change.

I could introduce new physical practices that may encourage you to change.

On my LinkedIn profile you can read a bunch of testimonials from people declaring that I helped them change.

Change change change change change change change.

(“Changes,” by the way, still holds up as a great Bowie song.)

Some of you may have a garden.  Writing that sentence I realize that no, probably none of you have a garden.

Let me try again.

Some of you may have once seen a garden.  Gardens are biological, they contain flowers and vegetables and fruits and bugs and other stuff that are alive.

But I am not aware of anything in a garden that is in a constant state of growth.

In the winter months when things get cold, gardens are barren patches of fallow, ugly dirt.  No signs that growth is occurring.

Given the bountiful fruits of the summer garden, it seems that in this winter garden regression has occurred.  The garden has stagnated.  De-grown.

Death Valley in America is the hottest, driest place in the country. Temperatures of 56C (134F) have been recorded.  I’ve never been.  I don’t have any plans to visit, because as a general policy, I avoid places named after death.

Something weird happens in Death Valley every once in a while though.  The valley is blessed with the perfect mix of sun and rain, and that arid, desolate place explodes with flowers, called the ”Super Bloom.”

Which makes me wonder.

What does one call Death Valley when it’s full of Life?

And it’s ALWAYS full of life.  Life ready to spring forth when the conditions are right.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if human babies could be born in 1 month?

Last time I checked science hadn’t figured out how to optimize the baby growing process.  It has been holding steady at 9 months for a long time now.

If you are growing beautiful red roses in your garden, and every morning you go out and pull on the stems to make them grow faster… well, you know what happens.

We are biological beings.  We grow at our own pace.  The pace that is the right pace for us.

Just as we contain warm spring and bright summer, there is also winter in us.  We experience times of stagnation, slipping, regression, and backstepping.

Early November and it’s still warm in Hong Kong where I live.  I’m looking forward to the cooler months ahead.  Others of you are already tasting winter in your locales, as you begin to button up in preparation.

The winter of our souls is not so predictable as the seasons.  Faced with an internal winter we might ask ourselves, “What is it doing here?”  We might wonder, “What am I being asked to notice?”

I was talking to an ayahuasca shaman the other day.

I realize that is quite a loaded statement.  Nobody is reading this far anyway right?

So I was talking to this shaman.  We were talking about physical pain, and how we relate to it.  In his offhanded ayahuasca shaman way, he told me that the plains Buffalo that used to be plentiful in America were well-equipped to thrive in even the most severe winters.  When the arctic wind blew down from the north, the Buffalo didn’t migrate to warmer climes.  They turned, he told me, to face the wind.

Head on.