The Storm You Wished For: A Meditation on Change

bertarajayogini
Jun 6
3 min read

Updated: Jun 7

When I was young, I used to pray for hurricanes to blow my house away!

Not out of cruelty. Not because I wanted anyone to suffer. I just wanted my world to be rearranged. I wanted the walls to come down, the sky to split open, the rules to dissolve. I wanted my life to change—but I didn’t know how to do it gently, or deliberately. So I wished for disasters. Earthquakes. Tornadoes. Floods. Anything big enough to swallow the smallness I felt inside.

I didn’t understand it then, but what I was really praying for was liberation. Freedom from the monotony of unchosen routines, from the gray ache of living a life that didn’t feel like mine. I didn’t yet know that change didn’t need to come in the form of collapse. I didn’t know that change could come as softly as a breath, or as forcefully as a flood—and that both are holy.

Change often arrives with destruction. That is not a flaw in the system—it is the system. The seed must crack open for the sprout to rise. The skin must shed for the snake to grow. The cocoon must dissolve entirely for the butterfly to be born.

But when it’s our turn to change, we forget. We pray for a new job, a new love, a new life, and when the old one begins to crumble, we wail like children whose toys have been taken. We think we are being punished. We think we are cursed. But…. we are being answered.

Imagine this: You sit in meditation and whisper your Sankalpa—a deep heart vow—for something greater. You long for a love that sees you, a career that fills you with purpose. You admit, maybe for the first time, that you are not happy. You are ready.

Then… the relationship ends. Maybe not gently. Maybe they cheat. Maybe they leave you without goodbye. You cry, you rage. You fight for something you had only days ago been praying would end.

Or the job—the one that has been draining your life force for years—suddenly evaporates. You are called into an office and handed a pink slip. You feel the floor drop. You call it failure, maybe even betrayal.

But what if this is the very answer to your prayer?

What if the very life you asked for is beginning, and like Arjuna on the battlefield, you’re just too stunned to see it?

In Hindu cosmology, Shiva is not just the destroyer—he is the transformer. He dances the world into ruin only so it may rise again in more truthful form. His dance, the Tandava, is not an act of vengeance, but of liberation. He topples what no longer serves. He crumbles the temples we’ve outgrown.

When we cling to what’s crumbling, we suffer. We fall ill. We shrink. Depression takes hold, not because life is cruel, but because we’re resisting the current meant to carry us home.

The Bhagavad Gita tells us plainly. In the heat of war, with the world trembling around him, Arjuna collapses in fear. Krishna—his charioteer, his God—looks at him with compassion and says, “Why are you afraid, when I am the one who breathed life into you? When I am behind you, how can you retreat?”

He was telling Arjuna the same thing change tells us: You were made for this.

When your life begins to fall apart, consider the possibility that it is falling together. That the old life you were only half-living is giving way to something whole. That your discomfort is not punishment, but birth pangs. That your suffering may be optional, if you can just—just—stop fighting the tide.

I don’t pray for hurricanes anymore. I don’t need to. I’ve seen enough storms to know that I don’t have to destroy the world to change it. I can hold fast to my wish for joy, my vow to stop suffering, and let the shifting winds do their work. I can whisper to the Divine, “I’m ready,” and brace myself not for chaos, but for transformation.

So what are you afraid of?

Is it the loneliness? The uncertainty? The blank page of your new life?

Let it be. Let it all be. And walk anyway.

Step into the change you begged for. Welcome it like the oldest part of you—the part that remembers that the unknown is sacred. That growth always begins with discomfort. That endings are not the opposite of beginnings, but their necessary prelude.