Change is good. This is one of my favorite mottos. Change is good. Back in the days before I had done a shamanic recapitulation I had another, similar, motto that went like this: Always change. Back then I was suffering from PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), though I didn’t know this. But even so I knew that change was good, I just didn’t really know why, not on a deeper level anyway. Now I know that it was something at a deeper level that was stirring me to always change, PTSD acting as a catalyst that eventually led to self-discovery and real change. The form that change takes under the auspices of PTSD, however, is very different from change that takes place once freed of PTSD.

Back in the PTSD days, change came knocking in uncomfortable stirrings to move, to always change, to change my environment in some way, whether it be changing the furniture in every room of the house every few weeks or uprooting and moving to another apartment, another house, another city, another state, another country, another relationship. I did all of these things, under the auspices of always change, restlessness my constant companion. But something at a deeper level was always asking me: Why do I do this? Why do I have to keep moving and changing? Why can’t I just settle down?

I felt like I was running from something, that if I stopped in one place long enough whatever it was would catch up with me and that would be the death of me. For at some deeper level, I knew that death was what was chasing me—death in one form or another.

Now, on one level, this is true, for death is pursuing us all the time, reminding us that in the end it will get us. In my case, I sensed death differently, the stench of it deep inside me already. Although I didn’t know it, that smell of death—that I could never run far enough away from—was trying to alert me to what I carried inside me: a dying spirit, a dying innocence, a dying sense of hope, for these are some of the things that PTSD robs us of. Until we stop and face what the stench of death is trying to alert us to, we will constantly seek change in our outer world, to find just the right place where we will feel comfortable, safe, and at ease. I went into my late forties always changing before I stopped and faced what was pursuing me, the past that was embodied in that diagnosis of PTSD, a past I had no memory of.

When I first met Chuck, he presented me with those four little letters—PTSD. Oh, so that’s what’s wrong with me! At last I had a name for all that had driven me in so many unsettling ways, a name that felt right. “Yes, I get it, I suffer from PTSD,” I said to myself, “I just never knew it.” Now I had a home, a slot to fit into in the world, I had PTSD. But I would not stay there. I could not settle for long. I refused to be categorized, tagged and diagnosed, for always change was still my motto after all. And so I told myself to change, that change was good, that it was what I needed in order to heal. And so I began a changing, healing journey out of PTSD and into new life. Long and painful though that journey was I would not, in a million years, wish to live the way I used to live.

Now when I say that change is good, I’m talking about the deepest kind of change, change of the self at the deepest level, from the inside out. This involves letting go of everything that has upheld the world we’ve lived in—everything we’ve been taught and taught ourselves, everything we’ve believed and couldn’t bear to believe, everything we’ve created and controlled in order to be safe. This involves learning to let go of our judgments, resentments, fears, and regrets, opening instead to the truth of our infallibilities, our frailties, our imperfections, and our inflations. It involves discovering what it really means to be humble, to live simply, in balance with all of nature, taking only what is necessary. It involves learning to love ourselves so we can one day be available to love another, so we can understand what it means to be loved, and how to give and receive love on a far more expansive, interconnected level of consciousness, far beyond the needs of the self. It involves letting go of our ego selves, detaching from that which has held us in our defended states for so long, making way in the process for a new self. It involves allowing this new self to emerge out of the stench and fear of death that has encapsulated us in all of its forms and fully acknowledge that yes, death is the ultimate catalyst to evolutionary change. It involves discovering for the self what it means to be an evolving being, here in this lifetime to discover and resolve an evolutionary challenge, given another opportunity to get it right.

Opportunities abound, coming at many times throughout our lives. Our challenge is, indeed, to always change, to go with the flow of our lives, accepting full responsibility for where we are at all times, accepting that we are not perfect, that we are human beings, but also that we are evolutionary beings as well, spiritual beings seeking something higher, something far beyond our PTSD, our boredom, our fear, our self-pity and our hopelessness.

The deepest kind of change means facing who we’ve become and daring ourselves to become someone far more evolved, far more connected to life on this planet while striving always to become far more aware of the spiritual possibilities of all things, and far more aware of all life as sacred.

The creative, urging us on one level to do something about ourselves or our environment, stirs in us at all times. Perhaps we project it outwardly as I did, as an artist constantly creating something new, some new picture, sculpture, dance, play, music. But after a while a deeper creativity comes knocking, asking us to channel the ultimate creation: a new self. And you know what, it’s really okay to do that, to totally change and become someone new, for after all, in the end, it’s the evolution of the self that we’re all here to spur on to a new level. This is why, I believe, we’re all here—to always change—and such change is always good.

I am a changing being and so are you,
Jan