Material Change
Revisiting your notebook of exercises on conscious and unconscious lists of habits is good to assess where you are in your movement towards reaching your goal. Hopefully you have started working on your most important habits. The issue is starting.
What you will observe is that external and material changes in your life forces you to rethink the way you do things; your self-relationship, how you relate to your material world and how you wish to adjust your thinking.
Superficial change is not as superficial as you think. What you want to do is start with the simple and easy areas of your life where you can easily make changes, and experience positive results. The worse thing is to have big schemes of grandeur and none of what you planned can be achieved in the foreseeable future. Time plays a huge part of the changes you are proposing to yourself. Take a step back, observe, and assess what change is more doable. If you are still trying to figure out what you need to work on, then ask yourself what you need to do to get to that start.
Okay, for example, let’s take finance which is clearly a material area in everyone’s lives; it is a tangible example and because it is a material part of life it is easier to cut and contrive, or even expand. For instance, If you are having issues with finance per say then you obviously will be making adjustments to your spending habits, such as cutting costs in areas which will create rethinking and even learning to do things differently. Cutting costs and budgeting may need to expand into different areas of gain as opposed to loss. You may resist cutting out certain areas of waste costs in your life at first because that might entail a change of a reliable service, etc. In fact you may not even care or like a particular service but it has become easy and the hassle of change is too much or you don’t have the time. The fact is that most of us usually are forced to make changes when our pocket book cannot take anymore or we have no other choice. We wait until we have to make an adjustment or when the best opportunity comes along (which may never come along).
We all like stability in our private and personal state of life. It is okay if the change is occurring outside our sphere: As long as we seem immune to adversity and obvious change outside of us creeping into our comfort space, we are able to survive. Alternately, we unconsciously start becoming complacent and it is only out of necessity or from a forced need of survival that we start consciously making material changes.
Material change may be superficial in that it is a surface change and it may not seem to correlate to the classic thought of what most people think of as deep change in the spiritual sense. Well, the material and the spiritual are intertwined when it involves change. Whichever happens first, one area does have an effect on the other whether or not we care or not. The average person usually credits most of their changes through some tragic circumstance that mainly affected their lives in very material way that opened their eyes to their personal and individual states that require body, mind and spirit change, even to the extent of transformation.
I would tell you that abstract change still needs a material basis before anything happens. If you feel that changing the way you think in a particular way is easy, then try it. You will always go back to the pattern of thinking and behaving in a habitual way if there is no instance of a material need. Material needs can be based on a myriad of causes for change, such as health, finances, relationships, education, and career, to name a few popular areas of life. Societal, structural, systemic changes and even wars and violence may seem extreme but that count for a major part of human upheaval and change. Change in any which way, positive or negative can be daunting and can cause a lot of fear.
Consciously, you can balance your change when you are in control of what changes you want to make, but when change comes from external forces; almost from nowhere and bulldozes your present and future plans, then you have to approach change with an internal understanding, and from a grounded state of mind.
Working towards balancing how you approach change in your life is important. If you have the opportunity to start with yourself, consciously, then use the moment towards your personal efficiency. (I do not mean this in the corporate sense, here.) Starting with yourself and enhancing your flexibility to make changes comes when we are able to master ourselves consciously. So, when change comes from nowhere and bulldozes your plans and life, then the discipline of understanding how you approach change from a micro level is priceless.