When I was recovering from breast cancer, I went to a wonderful healing retreat center in Washington called Harmony Hill. It was an amazing, sacred space and turned out to be exactly what I needed at that time.

There was powerful and healing giant cedar tree in the middle of one of the labyrinths there called “She Who Knows.” After lunch one day, I decided to walk the labyrinth and have a little chat with “She Who Knows”. As I walked the labyrinth that day, I was feeling particularly agitated and uncomfortable. There was a lot going on in my life, and I had a lot of conflicting feelings at that time.

When I finally got to the center of the labyrinth, I leaned my head and body into “She Who Knows.” I spread my arms wide to embrace this magnificent cedar tree. I knew I needed help. I had also learned from my time in Brazil meeting John Of God,* that no one, not even a tree spirit, could intervene in my life without my actually asking for help. I had also been told that help always comes.

So as I had my eyes closed, my forehead resting on the bark of the tree and my arms wide hugging this giant tree, I mentally said to the tree,

“I don’t know what to do. I can’t see clearly. Please help me.”

Almost immediately, I had these words flash into my head:

“Be at peace with change.”

During that time, there certainly had been a lot of change in my life. And I was getting better at handling it, but I certainly wasn’t at my best at this particular moment.

“Be at peace with change.” I heard again in my head.

I wondered, as I often have since then, what does it mean to be at peace with change? How exactly does a person become at peace with change?

“Be at peace with change,” I heard a third time. At just that moment, the dinner bell also rang, as if punctuating the message.

As I left the labyrinth and was walking toward the Harmony Hill lodge, I thought more about what being at peace with change really meant. The only constant in the world is change. So if any of us fight that flow of change, then we are fighting the flow of life itself.

*For more on this story please go to my first book, Words To Thrive By: Powerful Stories Of Courage and Hope.”

From Me To You

To fight change causes a lot of distress in our lives. To let the changes flow, allowing everything to be exactly what and how it is brings peace. This idea of allowing, or non resistance, includes people as much as it does our circumstances.

This practice of non-resistance is at the core of what allows us to be and remain at peace. Staying fully in the present moment, as much as possible, also gets better with practice. When we are fully in the present moment, we don’t worry about the next moment, which we can’t control anyway. Spending our time imagining negative future consequences, or reflecting on past failures, wastes the very valuable now of the present. Our only point of power is now.