What Helps Healthy Change?
There are many tools and practices that help us to respond to change in good ways, even welcome it. Challenge and crisis are also opportunities to find new strength and capacity that we haven’t needed before. Some people see change as a crossroads – we can shut down and become more fearful or open up to more feeling, life and experience. Stories abound of people who faced extreme hardship and possible death and found a new sense of connectedness, community, and love – the blitz during the war; survivors of hurricane Katrina; people risking life and limb to help others after earthquakes, fires, tsunamis. What helps people to respond to change with courage and compassion rather than fear and selfishness?
In the section on Tools and Practices below we list some of these tools – many already in existence and many that have already been offered by the Heart and Soul group in Totnes. A group looking at support healthy inner change might offer any or all of these – and the list is certainly not exhaustive – depending on what skills are available locally, what facilities, and what the local needs are. For some celebrating nature’s abundance with an outdoor ritual will be very uncomfortable but fine as a harvest festival in a church. Some will feel ok about joining a support group; for others having one to one support is more acceptable.
One of the important aspects of inner transition is that our culture has taboos about expressing our true emotions, especially in front of others; that vulnerability is often judged as weakness, getting support is self indulgent and celebrating our successes is showing off. The very processes that we need most to get us through challenging times are likely to feel deeply uncomfortable at first. Can we even use words like Heart and Soul in a community process without alienating local government, the business community, others? And yet if we can’t talk about what we love and what we long for, what kind of process will we create?
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