Episode 401 - Why We Resist Change

Living Myth

Michael Meade

Transformation, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Genius, Education, Myth, Soul, Culture

4.9 • 944 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode, Michael Meade explores how life is change and to be truly alive means to be repeatedly transforming ourselves. There's an old statement that says, "The soul is here for us to transform". Yet at the same time, something within us resists changing, even when the time for transforming our lives has come. In the mysterious way of the world, the metamorphosis of the butterfly offers ways to understand why we resist the exact changes we most need in order to transform ourselves and help change the world.

Along with this potent image of the butterfly, Meade also looks at transformation through the core practice of ritual. Creative rituals can help release the burdens of our lives while connecting our minds and hearts in ways that reduce fear and anxiety and ease the grief of isolation. Ritual gives a place for constricting attitudes to loosen, for emotions to flow and for the reservoir of genuine hope to renew. On the ground of ritual, undiscovered parts of ourselves can awaken and strengthen our sense of meaning and purpose in life.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade live by joining his new online series “The Soul of Change” beginning on Thursday, October 17. Register and learn more at mosaicvoices.org/events.

You can save 30% on this new series and further support this podcast by becoming a member of Living Myth Premium. Members receive bonus episodes each month, access to the full archives of over 680 episodes and a 30% discount on all events, courses and book and audio titles.

Learn more and join this community of listeners at patreon.com/livingmyth.

If you enjoy this podcast, we appreciate you leaving a review wherever you listen and sharing it with your friends. On behalf of Michael Meade and the whole Mosaic staff, we wish you well and thank you for your support of our work.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Living Myth Podcast with Michael, where this shifting changing world is looked at from a
0:16.5	mythic perspective. On this episode, Mead explores how life has changed and to be truly alive means to be repeatedly transforming ourselves.
0:27.0	There's an old statement that says,
0:29.5	The soul is here for us to transform, yet at the same time something within us resists changing, even when the time for transforming our lives has come.
0:40.0	In the mysterious way of the world, the metamorphosis of the butterfly offers ways to understand
0:47.6	why we resist the exact changes we most need in order to transform ourselves and help change the world.
0:55.0	Along with this potent image of the butterfly, Mead also looks at transformation
1:01.0	through the core practice of ritual. Creative rituals can help us release
1:05.4	the burdens of our lives while connecting our minds and hearts in ways that reduce fear and anxiety and ease the grief of isolation.
1:16.0	On the ground of ritual, undiscovered parts of ourselves can awaken and strengthen our sense of meaning and purpose in life. So this is a poem from Rumi goes like this. I have lived on the lip of insanity wanting to know all the
1:47.7	reasons knocking constantly on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.
1:54.6	Listen, why stay in this prison when the door is so wide open?
1:59.7	Move outside the tangle of current fear thinking live in the silence of the deep self
2:05.9	flow down and down in ever widening rings of being. So that's roomy in a sense, first of all revealing that the big prison
2:17.0	is something that's inside and the door is really open. The ego is so fearful, really, of the world that's usually trying to keep the door closed.
2:29.0	And then Rumi, as many ancient poets and many modern poets would do be turning to the flow that goes down and down and widening rings of being.
2:39.0	In other words, as we go down deeper, we become a bigger being ourselves, bigger and deeper, and that makes
2:45.1	us less liable to the simple sense of overwhelm, of being overly anxious or overly fearful.
2:54.3	When the world gets trouble,
2:56.2	we have to go into those things we fear.
3:00.4	Sometimes safety is going the places we fear the most.
3:05.0	So I want to add something I've been intrigued with and working on.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Meade, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Michael Meade and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.