Here we examine how humans like to have predicitability and suggest how we can help deal with the inevitable changes in our lives. Find me at https://www.eqyoga.co.uk/TranscriptVicky (00:00:03) - Hi, welcome to All Things Yoga with Vicky, a podcast about all things yoga. Hello. So today we're going to talk about change, the ever constant change. Now there's a saying that says one thing is certain in life and that is that things are going to change. And this is very true. So even when we feel that we're on an even keel, everything's swimming along nicely, then everything can take a nosedive or vice versa. So what we need to think about really, is the fact that we need to really not expect things to remain constant. The sense of constant change can be quite uncomfortable, and this is something that humans don't tend to sit well with, or it doesn't sit well with us humans. We like to have predictability. We like routine. We like to know what is happening, when it's happening, how it's going to happen. It's that same thing as kids coming home from school and saying, oh, what's for dinner? They want to know when's dinner? What is dinner? And it's that sense of being able to have predictability.Vicky (00:01:25) - When we stop having that sense of predictability in our lives, what happens is our brains start to want to cling on to things that are predictable, the things that can actually remain a constant. Now. It's really interesting because I think during Covid there was a lot of uncertainty. We didn't know when we will be able to leave our houses, all of those different things. And that uncertainty really didn't sit well with a lot of people. However, on the flip side, the certainty of knowing that you were going to be in your house and what your routine was going to be, and maybe when your food was going to be delivered if you didn't venture out to the shops. That was actually something that some people did get on board with. So the sense of being able to predict our lives and predict what is going to happen really does make us mostly comfortable. However, if we stay in that same place, if we stay in the place where we know exactly what is going to happen, we will stay in that place and we will never try anything different.Vicky (00:02:37) - We will never change things up in some sense, is we may never, as some people refer to it, grow. Um, the growth zone. Now, when I was a psychology teacher, we looked at quite a lot of learning theories, and a lot of the learning theories say more or less, you have to take yourself outside your comfort zone to learn new things, to learn skills, to advance. Now, okay, I take it that, um, not everyone wants to advance and learn new skills, and that is absolutely fine. Some people are quite happy where they are and there is nothing wrong with that at all. However, what I'm going to say is we need to start to be able to get comfortable with change. Change is a constant in our lives, and one of the things that we can maybe use to help us deal with change different situations, things not remain in the same is to maybe have something else that is a constant. Now, one of the constants in life you can have is something like meditation.Vicky (00:03:45) - You can have a five minute meditation practice, maybe at the beginning of the day, the end of the day, maybe in lunch time. That doesn't matter when. But if we have that one thing that is constant, it allows us to possibly cope better with the other things that are constantly changing. Now, quite often I speak about meditation, and my preferred meditation is a breath guided meditation. Just watching the inhales and the exhales. Just simply observe in the breath and the thing that attracts me really about this, apart from the fact that it was the first kind of meditation I learned at the Buddhist Centre, was the fact that we always have our breath with us. We don't need anything in particular. We don't need any sounds. We don't need a cushion. We don't need anything special. Our constant is our breath. And if we want to, we can allow ourselves to just take a few breaths, observe in those breaths in a meditation to allow us to deal with that sense of everything changing.Vicky (00:04:58) - Now. Some changes in life are bigger than others sometimes. Changes happen when we least expect it. But if we have a regular meditation practice, this is something that can allow us to deal better with that change. Also, the other thing is to expect change and sometimes changes for the better, not for the worse. So this is something we need to bear in mind. Let's not dread things shifting. Sometimes the sand dunes shift on the beach to make an even more beautiful pattern. So this is something that we can bear in mind when something happens. Maybe we can say, okay, there's this. Not all negative. I guess it depends on what it is, but that sense of being able to actually perhaps make room for growth, make room for different activities, make room ...
