This is the season of change. The leaves fall with each gust of wind and the sun in the sky drops fast at dusk like a sinking stone. This season reminds us that, in all actuality, we live in a season of perpetual change. This is hard for our small brain that gets attached to comforts and routines. When we get used to things as they are, any Big Change involving relationships, finances, your home or body feels spooky. This is why virya—courage— is one of the five bedrocks of a lifelong practice, alongside faith, remembrance, focus, and wise discrimination (shraddha, smriti, samadhi, prajna). Each of us needs courage to not duck away from uncertainty but to stay in the flow itself. Fear keeps us in an old way of being, an old way of perceiving ourselves and others. The tricky thing is, we may believe we know who we are already, but we can never know what we may become. Thus, you can’t remain idle but must lean in—heart first— into change.
In the midst of the ever-changing, it is valuable to have a direct experience of that which never varies. In meditation and contemplation it is a source of profound solace to realize the constant, immutable source that pervades everything. In yoga, it is prana itself. Prana is something you can’t see with your eye, or grasp in your hand. In Tibetan Buddhism it is wonderfully described as the “immeasurable” or the “indestructible”. In those that follow the Tao, it is known simply as “the mountain”. It is like space. You can’t lose it and you can’t possess it. So go about your days riding the tides of the ever-changing, while at the same time, opening to the vast space that is all around and inside of you.
-Tias Little
