Where Change Begins

Change is often spoken of as something we initiate or pursue. Yet much of the time we find ourselves already inside it.

This essay explores how meaningful change unfolds, not only through intention or intervention but through the conditions and relationships that make transformation possible.

I return to a foundational question: how does meaningful change actually occur? Not as an abstract concept, but in lived experience, in the subtle shifts that allow a person to feel more congruent, more present, more fully themselves.

I have been rereading Carl Rogers’ work in On Becoming a Person, sitting with his descriptions of the therapeutic process and the conditions that allow genuine change to occur. Rogers spent decades studying what facilitates transformation. What he found was both carefully observed and remarkably simple: when a person experiences genuine presence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding, something begins to reorganize from within. The organism moves toward congruence.

The word itself is revealing. Congruence points to agreement, harmony, and correspondence, a coming together of what has been held apart. In Rogers’ sense, change is not about becoming someone new. It is about coming into relationship with what is already present and allowing different parts of experience to move toward coherence.

He describes a process of change rooted in listening: the experience of being received without judgment, without correction, without pressure to become something other than what one already is. Through the experience of being listened to in this way, a person gradually becomes able to listen to themselves. The movement toward congruence begins in reception rather than effort.

The word accept carries its own quiet insight. To accept is to receive what is offered rather than to evaluate or fix it. Embedded in the word is a sense of willing reception, an allowing of what is already present. What is received does not need to be forced into being. It is already here, awaiting recognition.

As I sit with Rogers’ description of change, I recognize that this kind of accepting presence is not limited to human therapeutic relationship. It is present in the natural world itself.

Nature does not speak in language.
It does not interpret or diagnose.
It allows what is unsayable to be present.

Sensory and emotional experience can exist without needing to be named. Symbols and metaphors arise through imagination and intuition rather than through explanation. A person sitting beside water, walking through trees, or working with soil may feel grief, relief, longing, or clarity without needing to articulate these states immediately. The environment receives them without evaluation. Nothing in the landscape demands that experience be translated into coherent story.

In this way, nature functions as a kind of accepting presence, not through verbal empathy but through receptive coexistence. It allows experience to unfold without requiring it to be resolved into language.

Yet humans are language-making beings. Over time we often feel compelled to translate what we have sensed into words we can understand intellectually so that these experiences can become part of our biography, part of the story we carry about who we are and how we are changing.

There is a rhythm here:
first the unsayable,
then the sensed,
then the gradually speakable.

Nature allows experience to exist before it is named.
Language allows experience to be integrated into memory and meaning.

Between what is felt and what can be spoken, many people need a way to express change before they can describe it. The unsayable often seeks form before it finds language.

For some, this expression emerges through writing or image. For others it takes shape through movement, gardening, building, or time spent walking through a landscape. These forms of expression do not translate experience into words immediately. Instead they give it tangible, embodied presence. Something sensed internally begins to exist outside the self, where it can be seen, touched, or revisited.

We often borrow language from others to understand what we have lived. Nature writers, poets, and artists frequently serve as bridges to inner experience, offering words or images that resonate with what we have not yet been able to name. Through these encounters, a person may recognize their own experience reflected back to them and gradually develop language for what has been unfolding.

In this way, the movement from unsayable to speakable is rarely direct. It often passes through image, gesture, material, and place. Expression becomes part of the change process itself, allowing experience to take form before it can be fully understood.

This inquiry is not only theoretical for me. It emerges from lived experience. I am someone who has moved through significant and ongoing periods of change, often more continuously than those around me. That inner fluidity, sometimes chosen, sometimes not, has required me to learn how to live within change rather than simply move through it toward resolution.

Over time I began to notice that what I was experiencing was not random instability but patterned movement. Periods of disruption were followed by phases of uncertainty, then by subtle emergence and eventual re-forming. Rather than asking how to return to a stable state, I found myself asking how to orient within a process that appeared to be ongoing. This led me to study change not as an event but as a condition of living.

When people seek help from a therapist, educator, guide, or facilitator, they rarely arrive at the beginning of change. More often they are already somewhere within it. Understanding change as cyclical rather than linear allows practitioners to meet people where they are rather than attempting to initiate growth prematurely.

Over time I have come to understand change less as a linear progression and more as a cycle with distinct phases. This understanding first took shape for me through Martha Beck’s writing on change and the creative process, where she describes movement through periods of disruption, uncertainty, emergence, and eventual integration. The framework stayed with me and gradually became part of my own reflective and writing practice.

Working with place and seasonal rhythms deepened this recognition. Rather than asking whether I was “making progress,” I began to ask where I was within a cycle. At times there was a catalyst, a disruption or longing that made the current way of living untenable. At other times there was wintering, a period of uncertainty, withdrawal, or apparent stillness that did not feel productive but proved necessary. Slowly, often imperceptibly, possibility would begin to re-emerge, followed by phases of forming and growth in which new patterns took shape. Occasionally there were moments of harvest, when life felt briefly coherent and aligned.

Catalysts for change rarely arise in isolation. While they are often experienced personally, they emerge within the wider relational and environmental systems in which a person lives. A catalyst may be deeply personal: a health crisis, a shift in identity, a longing for a different way of living. It may arise within family or relational contexts, or be shaped by broader social and ecological conditions that alter one’s sense of future and responsibility.

Understanding catalysts in this way allows us to see change as part of living rather than as an interruption to it. When disruption is understood solely as personal failure or resistance, the natural processes of development can feel threatening or unwelcome. Yet when we recognize that catalysts arise within relational and ecological systems, change begins to appear less as an anomaly and more as an intrinsic movement within living systems.

Martha Beck often describes this through the metaphor of a butterfly becoming itself. The caterpillar does not resist transformation out of failure. It reaches a point at which its current form can no longer sustain the life unfolding within it. The dissolution that follows is not pathology but necessary reorganization. Something new becomes possible not through force but through participation in a process already underway.

Seen in this light, change is not something imposed from outside or initiated solely through effort. It is a condition of being alive. Periods of disruption, uncertainty, or re-forming are not deviations from life’s course but expressions of it. When practitioners and individuals understand change as an ecological and developmental process rather than a problem to be solved, resistance often softens.

This recognition does not remove the difficulty of change, but it can restore a sense of orientation. Instead of asking how to avoid or control change, we begin to ask how to move with it and how to recognize the phase already unfolding.

Where change begins is not always at the moment we decide to transform. It often begins with the recognition and acceptance of what is already present. From there, change unfolds as a gradual movement into relationship with our own experience, with the environments we inhabit, and with the living systems that hold us. What shifts is not who we are, but how we learn to live in relationship with what is already here.