The Downside of Seeking Change
At some point, many of us begin to seek change, to search for something deeper in our lives, consciously. This could be meaning, love, authenticity, reality, truth, or many other expressions. Often, this is referred to as a spiritual search or a movement toward personal growth or development.
All of these endeavors have one thing in common: we are seeking something. It is the phenomenon of seeking that keeps us trapped.
- Why are we seeking change?
- Are we missing something
- Is our awareness that something is missing, and we know what it is and are going after it?
- Or, are we aware of something already in our experience, but we want more of it?
Many of us seek knowledge; we want to know or understand something. Perhaps we seek change to gain insight into ourselves or others, understanding why we or they act in a certain way. Possibly we notice a pattern that we want to change. Maybe we want to know why life unfolds in a certain way.
Many of us, at some point, seek love or acceptance. This usually involves relationships – forming a relationship, improving an existing one, or ending a relationship.
Another thing commonly sought in our culture is success or status. We want more money, a better position, a bigger office, to be seen on TV or recognized as an expert in our field.
Maybe we don’t know precisely what we want. Still, we are aware of a sense of dissatisfaction, anxiety, ennui, apathy, or another emotional state that seems to drive us to want to change our situation.
The word change appears to be intimately involved in the search. We want to change our state, circumstances, sense of self, or something else. Again, this change can focus on something that is missing or enhancing the presence of something already present.
When we think about seeking change, what do we want to change? If we find that perfect relationship, what will that change? If we find the knowledge we seek, what will change? Or getting recognition or success – what changes?
If we take some time to contemplate the situation, we find that what changes is us. Most of our seeking is oriented around changing our subjective experience – our experience of ourselves.
But, if we examine the notion of change or seeking from this perspective, we usually find a rejection of our present state, sense of self, or circumstances first. Can you see that? Why else would we want to change or feel the desire or drive to seek change?
Take a moment right now to reflect on this, on your sense of seeking change. Do you find a sense of wanting to leave your present experience of self for some other experience – an experience of more fullness, completeness, satisfaction, peacefulness, love, or lovability? This can be subtle, but do you see how rejection is implicit?
This is the conundrum of seeking change. It’s a puzzle and a bind because to reject our present experience, we have to contract, pull away from it, push it away, or put a barrier between us and it.
If we are seeking love, acceptance, knowledge, success, or fame, how does our present experience feel? What’s it like to experience the lack of what we seek? What will our experience be like when we get what we want? In short, it’s not how circumstances change, but how we change. Do we change? How does change affect our present experience?
It is the experience of our experience that we want to change the most.
To involve ourselves in this change in the usual way involves leaving the present for some fantasized future. But our experience is always present experience. How can we leave the present to find the present?
There is nothing else but our present experience.
How can we leave ourselves in this location, walk across the street, enter a different building, and discover a more complete version of ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. This is the answer to the riddle – we can’t.
What we seek is right here. What’s needed is not seeking change but not rejecting our present experience. What we need is a more productive orientation to change. When we let go of striving and rejecting, and assume an inward direction toward our experience that is most conducive to organic change, things start to change without the seeking, without all the effort, and without the false starts and disappointments that follow.
This inner orientation is openness.
Being open to our experience is how real change happens. We are open to the knowledge of our expertise. Openness toward our experiences brings us closer to them. Being closer to our experience means we’re closer to ourselves.
When we’re closer to ourselves, we’re more intimate with our situation and more in touch with our capacities. Being closer to ourselves, we see things more clearly, and more openness arises from this clearer vision.
There can, of course, be some reactivity toward what arises, but we can be open to that. We can be open to allowing ourselves time for change.
If we seek love and are open to our present experience, we may discover a longing for love, which can lead to a sense of emptiness. If we accept our experience, if we remain open to our experience of our experience, we can discover many things about how our experience got shaped this way. As the process continues, our whole relationship with love and ourselves unfolds. Being open to our experience allows experience to unfold naturally.
What we discover is that being open to our experience of our experience in the present is the path – the spiritual journey.
This is the invitation: to be open to our experience in the present moment. If there is rejection, we’re open to that. If there is peace, we’re open to that. We don’t choose sides – we are open to the experience of our experience.
This doesn’t mean we act out, letting our compulsions run the show, or allow the ego to discharge the energy building in us for change and transformation because it is uncomfortable, inconvenient, or fear-provoking.
Openness means we are open to forces outside ourselves (the bounded, limited, known world of the familiar and comfortable). We are open to seeing, feeling, experiencing, and being moved inwardly by our experience to deeper, more subtle awareness and understanding.
Openness moves our experience from the dull to a unimaginable treasure of richness.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development, whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.