Inevitable Change

Dan Harris has a new meditation app and it’s great. After a falling out with his partners on the original Ten% Happier app, the details of which I care not, he’s taken some time to pause and pivot to a great podcast and now, a new app called Ten% with Dan Harris. It’s pretty good I must say. One of the few American purchases I’m making regularly these days. (Sorry America.)

The app offers guided meditations, led by different monthly teachers, which are largely quite awesome. The guest teacher this month, January 2026, is Bart van Melik. Originally from the Netherlands, he now lives in New York City, where he teaches Insight Meditation and works with youth in detention and veterans suffering from PTSD.

“His primary teachers are Joseph Goldstein and Carol Wilson, who introduced him to the power of a relaxed awareness that allows us to meet life with kindness—especially in times of difficulty.”

This is all background folks, because what I actually want to talk about is a particularly wonderful meditation Bart led on the app this week.

It was about the inevitability of change and it focused on breathwork. Nothing radical here. “Follow your breath” almost always marks the beginning of sitting practices and guided meditations. I use it a lot because I struggle to maintain focus on anything that is not bringing me back to the physical sensations in my body. I need to feel my body to stay focused there and be present. Otherwise, I’m off in mental spirals, often planning my day or dreaming of things I need to do for work etc etc.

What Bart brought me to was a layer deeper. We all think we know about the inevitability of change. From moment to moment, we are different. When we observe ourselves clearly, we can see that clinging, holding on to how I think things should be simply doesn’t make sense.

When we pay attention, we remember that everything is of a nature to arise and pass away… to change. We learn this from nature; the lesson is all around us. “This is simply what life does,” he says. We’re born, we live, we die.

Bart pointed out that breathing too is a visceral cycle of change. Try this: take a deep breath in through your nose. Now, try not to let it go. Impossible, right? Hold it as long as you like and you will always need to let it go and take another.

Each breath is different; each inhale feels the way it feels; each exhale, the same. Each one is different from the next. Like our breath, change is a part of who we be, a simple fact of living life. Clinging to what we want things to be like is a fool’s errand when the reality of life’s impermanence drops into awareness.

I felt this fall into place inside me as I meditated the other day, in the warmth of my hot tub buried in the deep snow of my backyard. It’s cold this winter in Ottawa. The mornings are often grey and the wind can be bitter. And I love my hot tub meditations for this very reason: they bring me to myself, and I get the chance to sit with wise teachers and understand more about life.

As world events unfold and the world order shifts to something much less stable but maybe more honest than before, this reminder that clinging to the way I think things are doesn’t serve me well. Embracing the inevitability of change prepares me to begin again, to name things as they are rather than as I’d like them to be, and then make appropriate decisions in my life in alignment with reality and with what I value.

This is yet another way my meditation practice helps me in real life to be here, now. As Bart says in this meditation: “Keep calmly knowing change.”*

The hot tub, basically a large cedar pail that holds 8 people, sits here so I can witness the beginning of each day.

PS... I should also say that I get no benefit from Dan for this post, I'm simply offering it as my experience with an invitation that you find your way into some kind of mindfulness or meditation process. It will serve you well in life. Change is inevitable and we need tools to help us ride it out, to quell the natural fear that comes with changes we often cannot control. Meditation is one practice I use, and one I invite many clients into trying. I hope you'll consider it too.

*Bart told us that this phrase, "Keep calmly knowing change" came to him from Buddhist scholar and monk Bhikkhu Anālayo.