Transitions

Transitions can throw us off balance, in life and on the mat. In yoga, transitions help us move from one posture to the next, and in life, transitions do the same, moving us from one place to another but not without some pain along the way.

As our teacher Natalie said in class a few weeks ago, transitions can hurt, but just when we feel like we’re breaking, that’s when the light starts coming in, right through the cracks, to fill us up and make us whole.

Nothing illustrates this idea more beautifully than Kintsugi, the centuries-old Japanese art of ceramics repair. The shards of a broken ceramic piece are sealed back together with a gold lacquer filament that emphasizes the cracks.

The Kintsugi artists don’t try to hide the flaws or pretend the piece was never broken, instead they celebrate the beauty of the imperfections and create something new and more beautiful and unique than before.

We are all like those Kintsugi works of art. We crack, we break, we go through transitions. But if we pause to let the light in, and accept that uncertainty and change are the one constant in life, we can more easily transition into something new.

As Pema Chodron wrote in one of my favorite books, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change,

“When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic qualities, that’s called enlightenment.”

Embrace the groundlessness. Accept change. Breathe through the transitions and know that it’s when we start to crack, that we are also healing. It’s because of the breaks, not despite them, that we’re becoming something more beautiful than before.

Namaste.