When Everything Is Changing: What Really Keeps You Stable

Whenever I browse through my kriya collections lately, looking for the next set I want to teach, I almost automatically end up at the same two themes: transformation, and strengthening the nervous system that carries us through exactly that transformation. That's no coincidence. These are the themes I'm most engaged with anyway, both personally and professionally. And they're themes that seem to be playing a particularly important role right now.

Transformation Is Everywhere

You don't have to look far to find change. Within just a few years, artificial intelligence is transforming how we work, learn, and communicate. Political landscapes are shifting in places where we assumed stability for decades. War and the longing for peace stand closer together than they have in a long time. Economic and social upheaval is reshaping job profiles, organizations, and entire industries. Media is changing faster than we can keep up with, and with it, the way information reaches us. A new generation is growing up with a completely different understanding of work, meaning, and belonging. Change is no longer the exception that eventually gives way to calmer waters. It has become the permanent state.

To navigate this permanent state well, we need something that carries us when the ground beneath our feet is shifting. There's a fitting saying for this: you need strong nerves. What that really means becomes clear above all when our nervous system isn't permanently stuck in stress mode. And unfortunately, that's far too often the case today.

The Legacy of the Saber-Toothed Tiger

To understand why this is the case, it's worth looking back. These reflexes secured our survival as mammals over thousands of years. The moment a predator — in our case, the saber-toothed tiger — stood before us, three options remained: fight, freeze, or flee. In that moment, there was no time to think or decide consciously. The reaction had to happen instantly, bypassing the thinking, weighing part of our brain.

Today, we rarely meet a real tiger. But almost all of us know the “saber-toothed email” that makes our neck veins bulge. Or the manager's decision that feels unfair and occupies our mind day and night. The overflowing calendar, the missing balance, and the constant stream of information that never quite lets up.

Just how much this stream has changed over the past decades can even be captured in numbers. The widely cited research by Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, published in the journal Science, calculated how strongly the world's communication and storage capacity grew between 1986 and 2007: global computing power increased by roughly 58 percent per year over that period, and telecommunications capacity by about 28 percent per year. For 2007, the researchers calculated that broadcast technologies alone spread an amount of information per person per day equivalent to reading around 174 newspapers, with two-way communication such as phone and internet adding another six newspapers' worth per day. And that was the state of things nearly twenty years ago — before smartphones in every pocket, before social media as a constant companion, before artificial intelligence that generates content in seconds.

Researcher Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, has studied what this does to our attention over many years. Her measurements show that the average time people spend on a single task at a screen before switching to something else was still around two and a half minutes in 2004. In her more recent studies, that figure had dropped to about 47 seconds. Under these conditions, our nervous system is supposed to find calm while staying alert, clear, and capable of action at the same time. No wonder that rarely succeeds.

Why Chips on the Couch Aren't Enough

We're constantly on alert, never really finding rest. Lying on the couch eating chips might calm the body. But as long as worries and stressful thoughts keep circling in our heads, our glands keep releasing adrenaline and other stress hormones. The body lies still, but the nervous system remains in a state of emergency.

The problem with this: as long as we remain stuck in fight-or-flight mode, we barely act consciously anymore, but impulsively — steered by a nervous system programmed for survival, not reflection. Decisions that actually require foresight and clarity then get made from an inner state of alarm. That applies to individual leaders just as much as to entire teams and organizations in the middle of change processes.

The Path Inward

To preserve our physical and emotional health, and to stay mentally and physically strong and flexible in this hectic, uncertain time rather than despairing, there's no way around looking inward and listening to ourselves with complete honesty.

Which thoughts occupy me most right now? Which emotions keep surfacing without my knowing exactly why? Who did I treat unfairly today? How did I treat myself today? Where was I too hard on myself, or where did my inner resistance decide for me today, instead of me deciding for myself?

These questions are uncomfortable. They're also rarely the first ones we ask ourselves when the day is full and the next appointment is waiting. That's exactly why they're so effective.

Mindfulness and Yoga Are Technologies

Mindfulness and yoga are often dismissed as a nice extra, a wellness add-on for calmer times. In truth, they are technologies in the truest sense of the word: proven tools, refined over thousands of years, that address exactly where modern strain originates. They help us move through life upright, healthy, and honestly content — especially in a time that rarely stands still.

With my work, I want to bring these teachings and technologies closer to you, and invite you to do something good for your mind, body, and soul. For yourself. So you can stay stable when it gets stormy around you. So you can lead a life that's truly in tune with you, not steered by other people's expectations, by conditioning, beliefs, and old patterns.

I want to support you in finding your own truth. What's right for you, what's wrong? Who are you when all these expectations, beliefs, and patterns step aside for once? To me, that is true freedom — liberation in its truest sense. You simply notice the thoughts that arise, without immediately judging them, without blindly believing them, without letting them steer you. Chitta vritti nirodaha, as the Yoga Sutras describe it: yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

More Than Asanas

That's exactly why yoga, with all its facets that go far beyond physical work and movement, is always part of this work. The eight limbs of yoga, of which asanas are just one, show us how we can relate to ourselves, how we act toward the people and the world around us, how we keep our breath rather than losing it, how we stay focused even when things get shaky, and how we bring clarity to our thoughts and emotions.

All of this and more is offered to us by texts thousands of years old — texts that are probably more useful to us today than ever before. Not because the world is different today than it used to be, but because what has always kept people stable is needed more urgently than ever in an age of constant acceleration.

Sources:

Hilbert, M. & López, P. (2011): The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information, Science, Vol. 332. Summary: ScienceDaily – How much information is there in the world?

Mark, G. (University of California, Irvine): Research on the development of screen attention span. Overview: Gloria Mark – Attention Span, APA – Why our attention spans are shrinking