The Promise of Transformation

When I search Google images using the word transformation, a lot of business logos show up along with images of body builders. With meditation transformation, I get more unidentifiable businesses along with some life coaching sites that incorporate meditation techniques of some kind. And then there's yoga transformation.  With that one, there are before and after pictures of bodies that start obese and end shredded and shiny.

Transformation holds a promise of freedom, of complete change, of realizing a dream. And there is freedom in transformation and complete change. Realizing a dream, however, may or may not happen the way we imagine. Making something real means that it comes into the world of conditions and the dream has to be altered somehow. That's the condition of making something so. The body sheds weight but the heart is still tight and now the gut is clenched too. You moved into a new house, leaving some old problems behind only to meet new problems. This is how it goes.

It's not realistic to expect problems to fall away with the fulfillment of a desire or the shedding of something we cannot accept in ourselves. But transformation still happens. The process of meditation and yoga is a process of the mind reflecting awareness, which is always clear and free from doubts, confusion, fear, sadness, and all the rest. Yoga postures teach us how to live in embodied awareness, yoga breathing teaches us how to ride waves of change that are always swelling and cresting, meditation teaches us that awareness is something inherent within us that is somehow untouched by all the comings and going of the mind and the world.

We cannot expect transformation to be immediate, easy, and full of relief.  A caterpillar when it goes into the pupae stage liquefies. All but the very basic physiology that pulses life melts inside the pupae. From this gel, the butterfly body forms. Transformation is like this. You know that things will be different on the other side, and you have desires that draw you like a beacon through the transformation. But the process itself, changes everything and is fraught with chaos and uncertainty.

As we dedicate ourselves to finding peace in a practice, the mind changes from reflecting on itself like a hall of mirrors to reflecting the awareness, the mindfulness, that is in the backdrop at all times in everything. The mind transforms from being highly reactive and reflective of its own thoughts and everything else to becoming still like a pool of water that reflects the sky. Even as this happens, new conditions arise. Compassion is no longer some obligatory maxim to follow, it's embodied. And the call to action for the sake of compassion cannot be denied.