How are you with change? Do you love it, hate it, or somewhere in between? I must be honest – I’m not the biggest fan. My friends and family often tease me about my strong liking for things that are comfortable and familiar. Change can be unsettling for me – or rather, parts of me.

And I’m going through a somewhat turbulent period of change at the moment. Having decided to move out of my office and take my therapy practice online, I am having to negotiate a lot of logistical and other changes around that. We are also using the opportunity to do some much-needed work on our flat, so the builders arrived today – cue huge amounts of dust, noise and general chaos for a while!

As if to rub salt into the wound, my beloved gym did a big refurb last week – not very well, in my opinion – and has become a much less inviting space for me. So I’m looking to change gym too – which may not sound like much, but that place has been my haven for years. It’s a key resource for self-care and stress relief, so it’s a bit of a wrench to find somewhere else.

Although parts of me are excited about all of this, other parts are freaking out! And that’s how it is for most of us, no? I am always intrigued by the fact that lists of top-10 stressors feature a number of apparently positive events, like moving house, retiring or getting married. Although in many ways we enjoy change, finding it exciting, stimulating or rejuvenating, it can also be disorientating, uncomfortable and downright stressful.

The Buddha’s great insight

One of the Buddha’s profound insights was that humans naturally resist change. We don’t like it, fight against it and want things to stay the same. And we cling on to the idea that things can be permanent, unchanging and settled, especially if that helps us feel comfortable – like my gym. But the Buddha taught us that this idea of permanence is an illusion. In fact, everything is impermanent – constantly changing, evolving, breaking down and being reconfigured.

Take my body, for example. It’s made up of atoms, up to half of which were formed when giant stars reached the end of their lifetime and exploded in unimaginably vast supernovae, millions of light years from Earth. When I die, those atoms will become parts of other life forms, like a tree or snail shell. This is the way of life, constantly shifting, changing, evolving – because everything is impermanent, as the Buddha so brilliantly understood, over 2,000 years before modern science proved his theory to be true.

So I may not love change, or find it entirely comfortable, but I cannot resist it. That is futile – and a bit silly, really, because the Buddha also taught that this is how we create much of our suffering. We want things to be different, all the time. We’re all getting older, but want to stay young. We don’t like our job, but think we will be happy with that job, or this much money, or that pretty/handsome new partner.

Instead of this constant yearning for something else, the key to happiness lies in accepting that all we really have is this moment of existence. Everything else is like trying to grab smoke with our fingers, because the future is unknowable.

Learning to embrace change

So your challenge is to help the (young, anxious) parts of you that struggle with change. They need understanding and validation, as well as teaching that change can be tough, but it’s a core part of life. Change will happen whether we want it to or not, so we need to accept and embrace it, as much as possible. If you would like some concrete help with this, try this practice I developed for Insight Timer, Calming Your Parts: IFS Meditation.

It gives you a step-by-step guide to understanding and gently speaking to any parts of you that might be anxious, stressed or worried about change (or anything else you might be struggling with). I hope you find it helpful – and that you, like me, can learn to embrace change, bit by bit.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan