Are you in the middle of a life transition? It seems most of us are.

Life keeps changing. Like it or not, some things are meant to fall away from our lives as new friends, new ideas and new ways of living emerge.

Most of us, of course, like stability rather than change. Stability can be comforting, even when it is not satisfying. Stability gives us consistency.

Yet our inner hearts often yearn for more. We want to break out of our limitations and rise to higher ground. We want to live closer to our dreams.

Change has a way of sneaking up on us and catching us off guard with surprise. For example, some time ago, our yoga teacher suddenly decided to stop teaching her classes – and on short notice. We were presented with an immediate end to the stability of the yoga classes we had attended for four years.

That’s the nature of change. It doesn’t seem to float slowly into our lives. It often comes unexpectedly and quickly.

Such swift change also has a silver lining. It forces us to grow. Rather than looking for a new yoga teacher, we found ourselves strengthening our home yoga practice and enjoying doing this together. A rather surprising outcome was that our progress in yoga continued at an even accelerated pace.

We sometimes look back on our lives in almost joyous disbelief when we think of the changes we have been through. In Shannon’s prior marriage, her husband abruptly left her after 18 years of marriage. It had been a difficult marriage, but had forced her to become a much stronger spiritual healer. She would not have left the marriage on her own.

At the same time, Scott had weathered two unsuccessful marriages, but because of those marriages, his career had dramatically shifted from being a reporter to being an educator and counselor.

So when the two of us finally found each other and began to experience, finally, the wonderful love we truly deserved, we discovered something else as well. All the changes along our past paths had brilliantly prepared us for our careers together as teachers of love and healing. Who would have known that all those changes would have led to this? We sure didn’t.

All these changes taught us big lessons about transitions. We learned that trying to hold on to something just for stability is often not supportive of what will bring the greatest fulfillment to our lives. When we let go, as hard as it may seem, we create a vacuum, an opportunity for something higher to flow into our lives.

What in your life is your intuition telling you to let go of? It could be a relationship that is no longer fulfilling. It could be a quality that you no longer want to express. For example, perhaps you want to let go of sadness and replace it with joy. Or perhaps you are being called to let go of a past hurt that keeps haunting you.

You have a choice. You can view this as a process of letting go, which can seem sticky and pull at your heart. Or you can view this as an opportunity to rise higher and focus on what “higher” is and looks like. It is a lot more comforting to the heart to be growing towards something than to be distancing away from something.

We see this principle sometimes with people dating or in relationships where there is lots of struggle and unhappiness despite many attempts to work things out. Rather than letting go and creating a new opening for a better relationship, they often stick with a sinking ship until it breaks apart. There is great suffering at the failure or loss of the relationship, when what is really happening is a vast opening into the possibilities of expanded love.

It can be helpful to look at change as part of our ascending in life. Rather than viewing change as causing us turmoil and agitation and upset, we can see that the changes that are occurring in our lives, even those that seem disruptive, are all pushing us to higher ground. They are part of our ascending. Change causes us to learn how to love ourselves more. It causes us to put a stronger premium on quality relationships. It causes us to face up to the bad habits we have and actually replace them with good habits. Change causes us to develop wisdom, greater compassion and more genuine love in our relationships.

Whatever transitions you are facing in your life right now, we stand with you in compassion. You may not yet see the blessing of this change, but it will appear. Welcome to the heart of love.

© 2005 Scott & Shannon Peck

Dr. Scott Peck & Shannon Peck are co-founders of TheLoveCenter, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to enabling everyone to create more love. They are authors of The Love You Deserve, Liberating Your Magnificence and All the Love You Could Ever Want! (audio set). Shannon is also the author of Love Heals: How to Heal Everything with Love and the Love Heals Study Guide. For lots of love, visit www.TheLoveCenter.com, email TheLoveCenter@aol.com or call (800) 266-1525.