Transitions
Agnihotra (Healing Fire Ritual) on the beach.
It is customary in Australia to acknowledge country before any public talk. We honour the Gundungurra and Dharug Aboriginal people of the Blue Mountains and the Yuin people of the NSW south Coast where Michael Menager lives. Their songlines, stories and spirits continue to animate the sacred landscape here.
This topic arose from discussions with sangha friends, from what we are experiencing in our own lives, and from the mystery of what is yet to come in our world. At the heart of transition we are navigating liminal space, from the Greek word of threshold, referring to the space between. We are raising the possibility of using this in-between space as a chamber of practice, as a crucible, an offering and entry point into Reality—a portal into a deeper relationship with oneself, with the world, with the Divine. This is the sweet heart of transition. Here we find ourselves inside change, inside a crossing-over place, where there may be alchemical possibility for us to allow and embody a different way of being in the world.
Sydney Opera House.
A couple weeks ago I was at the Sydney Opera House to see a performance by the Bangarra Dance Theatre, Australia’s premier indigenous dance theatre, for a show called “Illume,” a beautiful show about Light as an expression of Aboriginal spiritual and cultural life in the Kimberly. Before the show I was in the theatre foyer with a group of friends who were discussing Bertie, the massive seal who had taken up residence on the VIP north steps of the House right on the harbour. A tourist seeking Insta fame jumped a barricade, which did not please Bertie. The tourist then had to dive into the cold water of the harbour to escape the wrath of a sun-drunk seal!
Just then the theatre bells or chimes were sounding, loudly and repeatedly, announcing five minutes to the start of the show. While Bertie captivated everyone’s attention, my inner agitation rose quickly and transformed into irritability and impatience. We made it to our seats just in time, but I felt quietly shocked and embarrassed by how I had lost my composure in this most simple of transitions. Later I learned that everyone else was cool with it all, assured that we would arrive exactly on time.
My teacher Lee Lozowick recommended, as a condition of practice, to always arrive ten minutes early to any appointment—to transition into the next space relaxed and awake. Not like how I arrived at the show! There are important reasons for this recommendation. By expressing discipline around our time and space commitments, we serve the other. We express respect and sensitivity to the environment and can bring our best selves into the new/next space. I learnt from many years of community work that it’s important to turn up for appointments when I say I will. To be reliable. This creates integrity and trust. To use the language of the Forum, if who I am is what I say—my word—then showing up on time, when I say I will, means I am a trustworthy person. A man of integrity. Showing up ten minutes early, I can walk across that threshold feeling ready to fully meet what lies beyond.
We are embodied beings moving through time and space. Our fleeting lives revolve around the passage of transitions and the continual change they bring to us. These transition spaces may be physical, psychological, or spiritual. Daily we experience sunrise and sunset, sleeping and waking, seasons and passages, doors opening and closing. On this continuum of course there are ever-larger moments of transition, change and transformation. Moving to a new job, departing on a journey, beginning a new relationship, meeting a new life taking birth or bearing witness to a beloved one’s death.
Each transition is an invitation to remember, to bring attention into the space, to awaken to possibility, to navigate change with a softness and presence of mind. A surrendered self is open to receive the blessings these moments offer us. We can all recount moments of failed transitions, when all elegance and attention was lost to the dictates of ego, the machinery of mind.
When I first approached Lee as my teacher, a senior student described him to me as a master of space. I wondered what that meant. Then over a few years I observed him being so utterly fluid and relaxed that he could respond so authentically, and often so outrageously, to what was required in the moment, without the usual filters of ego or neurosis. I loved this conception of field attention, a relational field attention that brings awareness into each space or chamber we enter, always looking to bring gentleness into any space. I remember this every day. To bring gentleness into every space.
In the Vedic tradition there is Sanskrit term, tirtha, which means a place of transition or crossing over from ordinary space to sacred space. Tirthas are felt at energetic crossing over points. In India a tirtha is known as a passage, a ford, a way, a crossing over place, often related to a body of water or a place of pilgrimage. It is a place of transition that evokes sacred space—a place where the mystery, the naked, wild radiance and beauty of life takes hold of us. In this space between the known and the unknown, we might see through the worlds.
Consider hospitals, airports, temples, churches… I have encountered tirthas in unlikely places, like inside a police station cell, in the back of an ambulance, at a retreat centre, a beach, or a garden. Every door we walk through has sacred possibility.
What if these transitions represent sacred frontiers where we may be reconfigured by bringing awareness to this passage, and in doing so are remade and bring Light into the word. What if we turned towards transitions rather away, to meet them as lawful expressions of being human?
In the tantric tradition of the Bauls, as Lee said, everything in the universe is food, you just have to figure out how to use it. Who would think that moving through transitional space was a matter of life and death?!
So how to bring presence and awareness to these moments, which sometimes are so painfully marked in space and time. To surrender our rigidity and contraction. In her poem “If You Knew,” Ellen Bass writes,
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people have to look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
How do we transition through a collapsing world? Interviewed on the Wild podcast, Margaret (Meg) Wheatley talked about the metacrisis, or the global multi-system collapse we are experiencing now in the world. She said, “When people ask what’s going to happen, I say they’re asking the wrong question. The question is ‘Who do we choose to be?’ ”
Who do we choose to be in moments of great transition? As the atmosphere fills with water or fire and intense change and chaos becomes normalised, is there a price to this? Is there a sacrifice to be made, to surrender the drama of unceasing transition shock that we experience in our personal life and now increasingly collectively?
G.I. Gurdjieff of the Fourth Way system of work says it clearly….
It is difficult to accept the idea of having both an objective life and at the same time, a personal life, that is to be subjective, to let oneself live a personal life. It is even more difficult to accept that we have to pay with our personal life. Everything I wish for has to be paid for. If I wish to have a new state, I must sacrifice the old. We never get more than what we give up. What we receive is proportional to what we sacrifice.
To use a metaphor that is both musical and from the Fourth Way, what moves us into a new octave? How does a spiritual practice build our personal capacity to yield, to open and accept, to be with what is, as it is, here and now. The Zen monk Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481) says,
The vast flood rolls onward
But yield yourself
and it floats you upon it.
In the yoga tradition savasana or corpse pose is the final pose of a yoga class, where we lie on our back and relax, and practice dying for ten minutes. Pattabhi Jois, a renowned Indian yoga master, described savasana—the transition from doing to being—as the most difficult yoga pose. My yoga teacher encourages us to surrender our vigilance during savasana, to surrender the effort we have made and let go of the breath and body. To rest. There’s a deep letting go in this space of openness. If you have trauma in your body, you will notice there’s a lot of holding in the breath. Resistance causes the breath to be shorter, tighter…. We must remember to breathe. Remembering to breathe is key to anchoring during transitions.
And so, I remember to take long deep breaths like golden wheat slowly waving in the breeze. Once my breath and body settles, this pose loosens my molecules, for a few moments at least. Sometimes it’s a sweet peek into allowing the energy of transition to move over and into my bones, into groundlessness. Practicing this transition after asana is helpful. When I get back up again there’s a little less clinging.
If you can look at it every day, it’s not a practice of dying, it’s a practice of living. There’s just moment-to moment experience. I’ve found that it’s in the giving up, or in the sacrifice, where the joyfulness emerges. So breaking it down into slow motion, it’s a transition moving from contraction and suffering, grief and loss, to letting go into freedom.
Changing, changing, changing.
Chögyam Trungpa’s words from the Vajrayana world take me here directly, the tantric expression of Just This, inspires me to enter practice ever more deeply, which is none other than being in my life as authentically as possible. Trungpa Rinpoche says,
Since all things are clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realise. The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations, emotions, and all people, experiencing everything without reservations or blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralises onto oneself.
The space between. Transition speaks to change, transformative states, the liquid spaces of meltdown, the opening of a flower, the setting of the sun. Then of course the capital “T” transition that we are all approaching. At the moment of death, what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen to the movie of me? In the wonderful Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the sage Yudhishthira is asked, “Of all things in life, what is most amazing?” Yudhishthira answers, “That a man, [or woman] seeing others die all around him, never thinks that he will die.”
Papaji [HWL Poonja] loved to speak to us of the “transit lounge.” He would giggle and chuckle about how we are all waiting for our planes to take off, and yet we become so attached, holding on, resisting and struggling every breath. Kalu Rinpoche said, “Before we know it, our life is finished and it is time to die. If we lack the foundation of a stable practice, we go to death helplessly, in fear and anguish.” Paramahamsa Yogananda said, “Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die.” And from Zen master Dogen,
Four and fifty years
I’ve hung the sky with stars
Now I leap through —
What shattering.
Tonight I had a fire in my backyard as the white cockatoos screeched and soared between the trees overhead, joyfully returning to nest in the valley which they do every day at sunset here., the sky blazed pink and gold. The fire sang and popped while a Shiva moon sparkled through the eucalypts. Suddenly the intensity and beauty of the day faded into night, and a late storm swept heavy rain roaring across the mountains.
So, consider this… There is only the ongoing process of life…changing transitions moment-to-moment, day-to-day. The world of perpetual change is one of suffering and sorrow, but also it is one of radiant joy and freedom. With the certainty of transitions, there is only the light of awareness and love that we inhabit through this form, this mystery of embodiment. There’s only being present to an unceasing flow of transformation. While the personal identity is inherently unstable, and must wrestle with transition, the impersonal transcendental Self lives outside of time in silence.
As David Bowie says, “Time may change you, but you can’t change time.” I’m very appreciative for my relationship to practice and sangha that has supported me to move through the inevitable changes and sufferings of this life. In the Western Baul tradition, Lee celebrated enlightened duality, which is an embrace of Reality as it is, where through embodiment and integration we discover an embrace of change arising to reveal the ceaseless revelation of divine Grace. Jai guru.
Mic Clarke, July 20, 2025
[This talk was originally given on the Western Baul Podcast Series. A recording will be available soon on westernbaul.org or wherever you listen to podcasts.]
