Real change, lasting transformation, is something human beings long for, deep in their hearts. It’s the reason we go to workshops, look for teachers, take courses, repeat affirmations. And it’s something that doesn’t come easy.

I remember many years ago, watching a woman on T.V. who was facing the death sentence in America. She and her boyfriend had been on a drug spree when they were much younger, and had killed someone. During the ensuing years in prison, she had undergone a radical transformation. She described it as opening up to God, discovering who she really was.  When I saw her speak I recognized her as one of the most radiant beings I had ever seen. She wanted so much to live and be able to share the deep love and joy in her heart. They executed her a short time later, and I was very sad about it.

What is it about us humans that makes real transformation such a rare and precious thing? Why do our efforts at self-improvement and moving forward so often come back to where we started? Why is the road to hell paved with good intentions?

We need to understand what it is that stands between us and real change. It is our beliefs, fixed attitudes and self-images, our deepest sense of who we are and what life is. These beliefs and attitudes are so fundamental to who we are that we are usually unconscious of them. They are like the air we breathe, the ground we stand upon. They motivate our actions, give rise to our emotions, and create our lives. And the reason they are so hard to see through is that they make up our survival system. We picked them up at a very early age in order to survive the challenges of our early life. Our deep and visceral need to survive can express itself as the need for security, the need for approval and the need for control. The one who has these needs is experiencing him/herself as a conditioned being, separate and alone, trying to get by in an unfriendly universe.

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Tomorrow is the Equinox, a time of movement, clarity, and breakthroughs—a time to allow what you really value to manifest in the world. It’s also the time of the harvest, of gratitude.

In a coaching session this morning, a client of mine spoke about her ‘glass ceilings,’ those places of inner limitation and constriction that have been with us so long they are mostly invisible.  In order to meet the immense challenges and complexities in our personal and collective lives right now, we need a real willingness to become aware of these glass ceilings, and then to move right through them.

I said to my client:
“I see that one of my key roles as your coach is to keep reflecting back to you the gifts you hold, so that you can fully recognize them, nurture them, and offer them into the world, knowing their full value. I think this is one of the keys to busting through our glass ceilings. It’s also one of my deepest knowings that our most powerful gifts are what come so naturally to us that it takes a long time to fully appreciate them. It’s like a fish trying to taste the ocean.”

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I spent five days in August at a retreat in the mountains. Our theme was Everything Changes. We engaged in a number of different contemplations, meditations and inquiries. One of my favorite questions was, “Do I really know that I will not die today?” As you can imagine, to sit alone and really open to such questions can be deeply challenging.

One night I was sitting beside a young man about 30 years old. I was right in the middle of a very difficult experience, when I heard him softly say ‘Help’. Immediately a strong sense rose up in me that I was in no position to help anyone. It was one of those moments that you’d like to wriggle right out of, if you could. I sat there, wishing that I was in a more balanced and grounded state, and hoping that I had not really heard what I had heard.

It was very quiet. And then it came again, just a soft voice, out of the darkness: “Help.” I realized there was no getting out of this one. My mind was telling me that I could not do anything for this person beside me. I was not feeling well at all. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat there and allowed myself not to know. It was not easy to allow that, even though it was the plain and simple truth of my experience. And then, right in the same moment that my mind was saying, “I can’t do this,” I felt another kind of energy move me toward him, quite effortlessly.

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