How Do Embracing Change and Positivity Go Hand In Hand?
Embracing change gives you control you won’t otherwise have – and that’s hugely positive.
There is only one constant in the Universe – change.
Change happens all the time. You can’t stop it. You can either ride it out, stand in resistance to it, or do the work to embrace it and take what control is in it for you.
Change is scary because it’s anathema to comfort. Or at least that’s the perception. Change will pull you from an existing comfort zone in your life – which is where your often-dominant ego likes to be.
Sometimes change is huge, obvious, and impactful. This can be tangible, like a sinkhole opening up and swallowing your home. Or it can be an intangible change like the end of a job, dissolution of a government, or divorce.
At other times, change is nearly invisible, or slow and steady. The seasons change, you are not who you were mentally, physically, emotionally, or spiritually a decade ago, and the like.
No matter how it happens – change happens. Always. And you can’t do much about it. At least, in the abstract.
When it comes to your life experience and change – you can resist it, just let it happen, or embrace it.
Resist it or just let it happen
Please allow me to clarify. Resistance to change, in this context, is not attending protests against artificial change – like terrible public policy causing hurt and harm. Resisting change, in this context, is a denial of what is. Blind ignorance of things that are not how you believe them to be or how they ever were (real or imagined).
For example – black history and gender studies. We are not a world of only white, male, and female. Changing curriculum to reflect this truth – and resistance to it – is unhealthy and unrealistic.
But even deeper than that – resistance to change is not being the most you that you can be. Or most importantly – not the egoic construct you most likely see yourself as. Change will butt heads with ego – and that causes the kind of resistance I’m writing about here.
It does you no good because you’re holding onto falsehoods, lies, and the already done and over past.
What about just letting it happen? This is healthier than resisting/denying/fighting change, but not very empowering.
When you just let change happen, you cede your power and control. It’s the equivalent of getting onto a flowing river in an innertube and going with it wherever its current takes you.
That’s all well and good sometimes. The problem comes when – since this is inevitably a river you’ve never navigated or mapped out before – you reach a waterfall. Now, if you just let the river of change carry you along and just let it happen, you might be fine. Or you could be dashed on the rocks below, and/or take a hell of a tumble – but utterly uncontrolled.
But this is why just letting it happen all the time can be detrimental to your health, wellness, and wellbeing.
Embracing change is empowering
While resisting change is actively ceding control and disempowering – and just letting change happen is more passively disempowering – embracing change is the key for you to take control.
When you embrace change, you open yourself to controlling how it impacts you – good or bad.
Embracing change does not necessarily mean accepting change. Rather, embracing change is recognizing and acknowledging change, then seeing how you can work with it. What control do you have regarding this change? Is there anything you can do to affect how this change impacts you and your life experience? That’s what embracing change entails.
It’s about control and empowerment. Embracing change means using your conscious awareness to see what you can do to work with that change, alter it, or shift it.
Very little in this world is set in stone. Numerous changes that occur are themselves changeable. Resisting that or just letting it happen might feel empowering – but ultimately they’re not. Embracing change, on the other hand, gives you the control to actively work with how it will impact you and your life experience.
How do you embrace change?
Practicing mindfulness
The only person in your head, heart, and soul is you. Nobody else can think, feel, intend, or do, for you but you.
To some people, that feels horridly lonely and negative. But that’s a matter of perspective and not the truth. Because you are the only one who is you, that means you can take the wheel and drive your life experience where you desire to drive it.
This is done via practicing mindfulness.
Mindfulness, in this context, is conscious awareness, here and now. When you are consciously aware in the present, you gain the ability to know what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, any and all intentions you have, and the actions your choose to take or not.
This is empowering. Why? Because you have the power to choose both mundane and amazing things. That means you choose when to get out of bed and what to wear on any given day – as well as to sell everything and spend a year traveling the globe or going off on a humanitarian mission in a far-away land, and so on.
Mindfulness puts your conscious self, your mindset/headspace/psyche, in control. Rather than your subconscious, rote, and routine beliefs, values, and habits – or – your ego, the artificial construct you project within and without.
Most of the time, resistance to change is from the ego.
The ego is a comfort zone
Ego, as I explain it, is a construct between the conscious and subconscious mind, formed at some point when you were mindful enough to create that reality.
The trouble is that the ego is fragile – because it’s a comfort zone. And not necessarily comfortable – because comfort zone, in this respect, is a place of stability and familiarity. So, it might not be genuinely comfortable.
For example – it might have been formed after a nasty screw-up of some sort. So you might believe that you’re worthless, undeserving of good, and other things that don’t help you at all. And that is not only how you project yourself to the world – but also reflect yourself to yourself.
The ego knows change is its enemy. Thus, it will prefer to direct you to resist change or just let it happen. But that, of course, is disempowering.
Embracing change is a conscious act. That opens the way to making choices and decisions to better your life experience. And that is your superpower.
Embracing change faces the positive end of the spectrum. Why? Because it means you are working with possibility and potential. Rather than inevitability and hopelessness – embracing change presents options.
This is why embracing change gives you control you won’t otherwise have – and that’s hugely positive. But more than that – massively empowering.
Recognizing that embracing change can be positive isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.
When you work on embracing change, you give yourself the ability to take control of your life experience and be proactive – rather than reactive – to the inevitability of change. Knowing that change is the one and only constant in the Universe – and that resisting it or just letting it happen is a matter of ceding control – embracing change opens you to mindfully asserting control of your life experience.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. Then that can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
Lastly, the better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can also open those around you to their empowerment.
To me, that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the four hundred and seventy-fourth entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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