how to change your life, part 1: l.a. paul's transformative experience

You ache for an opportunity to slip away to something new. Sometimes the great and wonderful goodness that is the invisible universe around us helps us by delivering a sudden change, one that marks a special turning point in our lives. In the film business they call it a plot point, when suddenly 20 minutes into the film something different happens

two key features define it: The first is a sense of vastness – whether vastness of space, time, beauty, understanding or connection – that makes us feel smaller and experience a dissolution of the self. The other is the need to adjust our understanding of the world, in order to accommodate the experience, or at least try to.

I will be processing my Caminos for years to come. They helped me understand much of the change and turbulence in my own life and positioned me for a vanaprastha that is fruitful. Despite my best efforts here to describe them, they are fundamentally an ineffable experience, and a highly personal one as well. “It’s your road and yours alone,” wrote

Working with this process, I see a certain amount of defiance and giddiness in the first few weeks. This entry stage is followed closely by explosive anger in the course’s midsection. The anger is followed by grief, then alternating waves of resistance and hope. This peaks-and-valleys phase of growth becomes a series of expansions and contractions,