Cold Comfort for Change
Recent circumstances have led me down the path of trying to understand the nature of change. Not just because some dear old lady has died up in London but on a much more real, personal and experiential level. One minute our family was settled nicely in a four bedroomed detached house in a cosy village and then all of a sudden, at the whim of a landlord seeking to cash in, we found ourselves sleeping on the floor of a caravan in someone’s garden. How the hell did that happen? – I find myself asking, and to what purpose?
Obviously I could wax lyrical about the state of the housing market and the vast inequalities of wealth in this country but that would be somehow missing the point. As a firm believer in the notion that we somehow co-create this thing called reality, then this new situation I find myself in, must in part at least be some of my own doing. ‘As within, so without’, says Hermes Trismegistus as well as pretty much every other mystic you can think of. So some aspect of my consciousness has helped to bring about the change which has led to this seemingly ‘not ideal’ situation.
What was it that caused me, in the words of Pink Floyd, to exchange ‘cold comfort for change?’ It has been said that comfort kills ambition. Maybe I was becoming soft. Maybe I needed to be shaken up a bit, to be taken out of the old routine, so that something else could spring forth in to being. I’m not entirely sure what that it is yet but sometimes if you don’t seek to change, perhaps change will find you. After all, stagnation in one’s life, will eventually lead to stagnation in the body and that way leads to difficulties and disease.
Change happens. That is the one thing that you can be certain of in life. What is important is how we respond to it. Being over six foot two, I responded to life in the caravan with an acute sense of claustrophobia. This feeling however has in turn forced me to get up off of my previously comfortable and fattening arse and get out for a run every morning. The location of the caravan (slap bang in the middle of a ley line) means that my run takes me through the stone circle on the festival site. This it turns out is not just a great place to trip out with a thousand other people, but also a good one to stop, stretch, meditate and practice. Therefore on the whole, caravan life has probably been good for my health – though this may not be the case if I am still there in the depths of winter. And herein lies the heart of the matter. Good health occurs essentially when the body is able to adapt to change. Whether that change happens on a cellular level, such as an invasion of the body by a virus, or on a much larger scale, such as the changing of the seasons, maintaining equilibrium is vital for our well-being.
Chinese medicine is essentially that, helping the body adapt to ever-changing environments both internal and external. But of course the ancient Chinese didn’t just stop there. They studied the nature of change to such a depth that it permeated in to every aspect of their philosophy, culminating in the ‘I Ching’, or the ‘Book of Changes’. This is the oldest known text in existence and describes the various permutations of yin and yang and the subsequent changes that they bring about on the physical, energetic and spiritual levels.
‘The ancient Chinese clearly understood more about the wider cosmos than we do now. Through the creation of the I Ching they recorded a way to fathom the various vibrational frequencies that make up the fabric of existence and then divine exactly how these different frequencies interplay to create our experience of the passage of time.’ Damo Mitchell
Something we could all ponder with all the changes that are surely yet to come.