Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition) by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Author:Jon Kabat-Zinn [Kabat-Zinn, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-53972-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

18

Change:

The One Thing You Can Be Sure Of

The concept of stress suggests that, in one way or another, we are continually faced with the necessity of adapting to all the various pressures we experience in life. Basically this means adapting to change. If we can learn to see change as an integral part of life and not as a threat to our well-being, we will be in a much better position to cope effectively with stress. The meditation practice itself brings us face-to-face with the undeniable experience of continual change within our own minds and bodies, as we watch our constantly changing thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, and impulses, as well as continual change in the outer realm of everything and everybody with whom we are in relationship. The former alone should be enough to demonstrate to us that we live immersed in a sea of change, that whatever we choose to focus on changes from one moment to the next.

Even inanimate material is subject to continual change: continents, mountains, rocks, beaches, the oceans, the atmosphere, the earth itself, even stars and galaxies all change over time, all evolve, and are spoken of as being born and dying. We humans live for such a brief time, relatively speaking, that we tend to think of these things as permanent and unchanging. But they are not. Nothing is.

If we consider the major forces that impinge on our lives, the first thing we will have to acknowledge is that nothing is absolutely stable, even when our lives seem to be on an even keel. Just being alive means being in a continual state of flux. We too evolve. We go through a series of changes and transformations to which it is difficult to affix an exact beginning or an exact end. We emerge as discrete individuals out of a stream of preceding beings of whom our parents are only the most recent representatives. And at a certain point, usually unknown to us in advance, our life as a discrete individual comes to an end. But unlike inanimate matter and most living things, we know the inevitability of change and of our own death. We are able to think about the changes we experience, wonder about them, and even fear them.

Consider just the physical changes we go through. During our lives, the body is constantly changing. A discrete human life begins its journey as a single cell, the fertilized human egg. This microscopic entity contains all the information necessary to become a new human being. As it descends through a fallopian tube and becomes implanted in the wall of the uterus, it begins dividing: from this one cell come two, then those two divide to make four, then those four divide to make eight, and so on. As the cells continue to divide, they gradually develop from a clump into a hollow sphere. The cells at the top differentiate slightly from those at the bottom of this tiny sphere that is to become the body. The sphere grows as the cells continue to divide.

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