Art by Nicole Mizoguchi

Robert Wilkinson has a beautiful article up today on mastering the changes that life brings on the road to personal evolution. Here’s an excerpt:

Each of the parts of our lives, inner and outer, has a rhythm of its own. Our bodies, feelings, mind and higher Self all have their rhythms of appearance and disappearance, increasing and decreasing, ebbing and flowing. Our relationships have their own rhythms of coming and going, merging and doing one’s own thing. There is no part of our lives that doesn’t have fluxuation, except for our Inner Flame. Astrology is the art and science of examining these changes, and noting what is happening and when, one is able to estimate the next time we will be in major change and what factors are involved. This helps us evolve our response-abilities, and lead to a more natural and perfect self-expression.

Every major change we confront in our life is showing us what is ending, and what is beginning. Even in the middle of a larger process, every significant change in any area of our life affects other areas. These changes show us how we must change to restore harmony in our life. Ultimately every part of our being is seeking to be in harmony with every other part of our life. That’s what we call “happiness.” When everything works in harmony in our lives, when our inner self is in harmony with our world and our relationships, we feel that harmony and want it to continue. Our heart’s deaire for our lower self is for it to have abundance, love, and perfect self-expression. Major changes show us the way to these things, but our lower self has habits and opinions and fears that often obstruct our heppiness. Then the points of change are more difficult, but we can still learn a lot from it all.

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We may not be able to end the eternal changes in our world, but we can become more adept at mastering the changes, and find relative peace, harmony, and effectiveness in the midst of the changes we and others are going through. Our higher life is always a demonstration of our capacity to learn and give forms of love to ourselves and others. We each have a personality that is in eternal process of change. The point of the entire exercise of having a higher consciousness occupying a human form is the perfection of function of that form. There are lots of ways to become your higher Self, and our life changes give opportunities to fulfill old karmas while embracing higher possibilities of self-expression. As we practice these positive responses to life’s challenges, we transmute our future karmas into opportunities of service to self and others promoting a greater “altruistic intention,” or goodwill. We no longer fear the changes, and become our greater potential.