"You must change your life." Rilke

I don't know why I'm just realizing this but transformation doesn't only happen in the dark inner recesses of our psychic introspection. Transformation happens when we are in acute interaction with the world.

One of my clients brought in a poem by Rilke as he muses about the "Archaic Torso of Apollo." Rilke completes the poem with the words, "You must change your life." My client, like so many of us, feels stuck and caught by the patterns of her life.

I know that place as I'm sure you do to. Those of us who are psychologically oriented turn to therapy to help us sort out the stuck points and free us up to move forward. There are periods in life where that kind of introspection is essential.

Then there are those other periods where yes, we do need to change inside, we do need to alter our patterns, but sometimes we need an active engagement with our external world to help take those right (or left) hand turns.

If I listen to those words "you must change your life" I know I have to do something but the cobwebs of my old patterns keep me entrenched and bound.

Life tends to come round at times like these, not always when we're "ready" and offer us an invitation to change. Hopefully we're open enough to engage with these events or have done enough work to be with these events with some grace. Then there are those times when we're not, when we push away the offering or we don't like the packaging it comes in.

I feel an urgency as I write this after having been initiated many times into these moments of life. I watch myself, my clients, my friends and those I read about in the news. I watch us caught in the sticky patterns unable to trust that this ruckus we're in will be for our good.

Perhaps my urgency is to find a collective conversation where we encourage the risks it takes to be fully alive, where we answer the call to more. Where the response to life is a full hearted trust that it's leading us to meet our own magnificence.