image from Jamie’s post

I spent all day yesterday resisting Jamie’s wishcasting prompt: What do you wish to change? Change = to make or become different. It’s a risky, slippery concept for me, can quickly take me from good intention to judgement and criticism, to focusing on everything that’s wrong, practicing rejection and denial rather than working with what is from a place of curiosity and openness, understanding and acceptance.

For example, if I say I wish to change how I care for and relate to my body, it’s not long before I’m making a list of rules, shoulds, and restrictions, which leads to self-loathing, beating myself up, regret and depression, focusing on all the ways I’ve let myself down, rejecting the body I have now, denying it love and acceptance because it’s not good enough, because I want it to be different, because I wish to change it.

Wishing for change is also risky for me because it can so easily shift my focus to the future, pull me out of the present moment into planning and strategizing, doing, doing, pushing and pulling. In this state, there is no ease, no rest, no balance, no kindness.

Of course, I wish for change in all sorts of ways, specifically in the ways that the current state of things might be causing suffering. Alexandra Franzen always says she wants to leave the world a better place than she found it, to leave the people she encounters better than she found them, so I suppose this is a good, simple way to frame this wish: I wish to change things for the better, and in so doing may I release my agenda, avoid judgement and attachment, and ease suffering, in myself and in the world.