What Can We Learn from Autumn? That Life is Beautiful, But Impermanent

Image by Jeremy Thomas

What’s your favourite season? They all have their pleasures and joys, but for me it’s a toss-up between spring and autumn. Spring is hard to beat, especially after a long, dark winter. The vibrancy and effervescence of life bursting forth as the first green shoots appear, the frothy joy of blossom, that delicious day when your winter coats get banished to the back of your wardrobe. Who doesn’t love spring?

But autumn is surely close behind. The colours – the colours! Even in my decidedly urban slice of north London (well, for now anyway) the roads are lined with trees clothed in glorious shades of yellows, oranges and reds. It’s just so lovely and keeps cycling through new palettes daily as the leaves morph from luscious green to lifeless brown, before drifting languidly to the pavement below.

As I often write in these posts, we have a great deal to learn from the man we call the Buddha, who lived in northern India 2,500 years ago. His teachings, wisdom and guidance on how to live a happy, meaningful life remain as fresh and true today as they did millennia ago. One of his core ideas was that of impermanence: that everything, including us, is in a state of constant flux and change. Like those beautiful leaves, nothing stays the same, however much we might want it to.

We are all connected

Another of the Buddha’s ‘three marks of existence’ is that of interconnectedness. As with all the Buddha’s teachings, this concept is a bit complicated and it’s easy to get lost down internet rabbit holes if you try to research it! What I think he meant is that all life is interdependent, none of us existing in isolation. Those trees on my street can only exist because the water cycle creates clouds and then rain, because there is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plants can breathe in (luckily for us, allowing them to breathe out oxygen), because there is just the right amount of sunlight, and so on.

Like the trees, we too are interdependent – on all living beings, but especially other humans. One of the sad things about our angry, polarised times is the idea that there is an ‘us’ and ‘them’, members of our tribe to be welcomed and cherished, while outsiders should be shunned and kept at bay. In reality, we are all ‘us’. You, beloved reader, are part of my family – if we traced our family trees back far enough we would reach a common ancestor, from whom we both descend.

On a more intimate level, we are interconnected with those in our immediate families, our colleagues and neighbours. Humans are tribal animals and we do well in loving, supportive connection with a web of other humans. This is one reason loneliness is so painful for us, because we are not designed by evolution to live alone. That’s why calm, loving people help soothe your nervous system, because your brain, nervous system, hormonal system and every other part of your body is designed for attachment, connection, relationship. Buddhists knew this long before Western psychologists discovered the idea that human-to-human attachment is key. (Of course, the idea of attachment is a tricky one in Buddhist theory, but that’s for another post).

Pain is inevitable, suffering is not

The third fundamental aspect of existence, according to the Buddha, was that of dukkha. This has many translations, but among the most widely accepted are ‘stressful’ or ‘unsatisfying’. Meaning, life is inherently painful and, unfortunately, we can’t escape that hard truth. I love autumn and don’t mind winter overly much, but many people I know just hate it. They struggle with seasonal affective disorder, their mood dipping with the temperature and light levels. For these folks autumn brings a tinge of dukkha, because it leads inevitably to winter, and so months of struggle before spring ushers light and hope back into their lives.

Although I have great compassion for anyone who struggles in this way, I do think it’s an example of the Buddha’s teaching about how humans turn inevitable pain into avoidable suffering. Some aspects of winter – cold, dark days; wild, destructive storms; leaden grey skies – are certainly painful. But suffering comes when we think ‘I just cannot abide winter – I wish it were spring!’ on 1st November. Thinking this way every day for months will of course lead to low mood, unhappiness and frustration, which could also be called suffering.

Instead, it’s far more helpful to remember that change is inevitable and a normal part of life. We are all connected, in countless magical webs of life, to the trees, each other and all living systems on Earth. And that pain – illness, ageing, loss, many things not being as we wish them to be – is also part of life. When we resist this, fight against it or fervently wish it was not so, it becomes suffering. Life is hard enough already without doing that to ourselves!

The practice

You might find my Mountain Meditation helpful, as a practice to experientially explore some of these Buddhist concepts. I adapted it from the brilliant Jon Kabat-Zinn’s guided meditation and it’s one of my most popular tracks on Insight Timer. A deep bow to him, for being at the forefront of the mindfulness revolution for decades – and helping millions of people experience the transformative power of mindfulness.

I hope it helps – and that you enjoy this glorious, ever-changing season as much as I do.

Love,

Dan ❤️

Change is Hard, But You Can Learn to Embrace it

Image by Chris Lawton

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