The last time I traveled to India was different from earlier times. For the first time, I was having doubts. After having planned this journey and looked forward to it for months, suddenly I was completely uncertain I even wanted to go. I was having a great time where I was, with friends and fulfilling activities which I knew would be abandoned and probably never really returned to when I left for India.
It came down to a kind of struggle between a feeling that I should go - after all the ticket had already been booked, and a feeling that there was no reason to go. Basically, I was feeling afraid of loosing the things I felt I already had and which I liked very much.
In my confusion, a friend told me what he had learned from the teachings of Carlos Castaneda: moving to a different place in this world is not going to change your internal makeup and the resulting external circumstances you live in. If you have many friends and a satisfying spiritual practice here, my friend told me, you are sure to have them wherever it is you choose to go.
Part of the reason I felt hesitant to embark on another voyage to India was because having such a satisfying and joyful spiritual practice to share with friends was something I had wanted for a long time, but only recently had kind of 'lucked into .'
Luck has nothing to do with it, my friend explained. This is what you are experiencing because you are ripe for it, and you will be just as ripe anywhere else.
And So I Go...
Arriving in India it took a while before I started meeting people and making friends. Through this time, I kept remembering (and questioning) my friend's wisdom. As time went by, my friend's prophecy proved true, and i found myself surrounded by new friends sharing a joyful spiritual practice with me. While the external circumstances were very different, my basic experience turned out to be similar, if not deeper.
The same can be said about relationships. Looking back at past relationships can reveal an interesting pattern - while each relationship may be different in many ways from the others, usually if we reduce the basic emotions we experienced to single sentence statements, we can see how the same basic emotions were experienced and have evolved through past relationships leading up to the present.
Happiness Has An Internal Barometer
Academic research shows that most of us have a certain level of happiness that we feel, and that this does not change after fulfilling some deep desire, like becoming rich, achieving success, fame, etc. After an ecstatic peak which dwindles away quite quickly, we go back to the same average happiness level we had before our achievement, almost always within three months.
If something really bad happens to us, the same rule applies. It may take longer, but we do wind up with the same average level of happiness as we had before.
This is not saying that external circumstances have no effect on life, they most certainly add a lot of color and flavor (sometimes quite spicy) to it, but our basic experience usually stays about the same.
Change
So what's the point of change at all? Is there any reason to follow a heart's desire for change - like quitting a job, breaking up, traveling?
When a deep internal change has taken place (or is just ripe to occur), many times an external change is soon to follow. If the existing circumstances are not right for this new mode of being that is evolving in us, then change will occur. Sometimes existing circumstances or relationships can evolve along with you, changing as you change. But sometimes a more complete break with the old ways is required for the new to be able to take hold.
When this happens, it can be scary as a lot of uncertainty is sure to come. But this uncertainty is the real freedom to manifest something new. For something really new, creative, to happen, it has to come out of uncertainty.
The best part is, the whole thing can happen as if on its own. Whether your tendency is to oppose change, hanging on to your circumstances by your fingernails, or to rush head-on into change abandoning things that may not yet need abandoning, the currents of change will really be the ones navigating your ship.
You can fight it, you can fear it, but when change wants to happen, nothing is going to stop it, and if you manage to relax for a bit, you may just find yourself enjoying it.