Today I’m starting with a bit of hard medicine: We are the common denominator, no matter where we are.
In every country, state, city, and partner’s home that we move to.
And yet, and here’s the paradox I want to explore more deeply today: Sometimes changing your circumstances really is the most compassionate, wise, and liberating choice.
And sometimes it’s just our suffering changing what it looks like on a superficial level.
So let’s talk about how to tell the difference.
Let me start with the truth. Moving from Alaska to Spain has been one of the most healing choices of my adult life. Not because Spain is “magical” (even though it is;), but because my body needed this change.
My seasonal affective disorder in Alaska wasn’t just “feeling down in the winter.” It was my whole nervous system bracing for six months of darkness like a prisoner preparing for solitary confinement in a cold dark room.
But here’s the key: Spain didn’t fix me. It supported me.
I still brought all my patterns, right? My overwork tendencies. My perfectionism. My “I will do everything alone, thank you” independence trauma. My capacity to catastrophize every bureaucratic form as evidence of my unworthiness.
Spain didn’t take those from me at customs y’all.
The environment helped… but emotional freedom? Liberation? That part’s on me.
When I first got here, I sat at a café listening to a woman I’d recently met talk about how disappointed she was.
“I thought moving here would make me happy,” she said, “But I’m still… me.”
And I felt for her. There was such heartbreak in her voice. like she’d been betrayed by the promise of a fresh start.
I have to admit I have hopes that with my working less, I’ll be able to have more time with my husband. But the reality is he still travels to paraglide JUST as much as before! But we do have time for more hikes together on a daily basis and whatnot.
So I get it. I’ve lived those delusions in my own way too.
This is what psychologists call the “arrival fallacy.” Basically, we chronically overestimate how much happier we’ll be once we reach a specific milestone, like move abroad, get a new job, fall in love, lose weight, buy a van and live by the ocean like an Instagram monk, or whatever.
But the human nervous system is Universal, no matter where we are. So we can’t just shake off decades of patterns and start with a blank slate.
We bring our trauma patterns, our attachment styles, our inner critics, our cultural conditioning, our privilege, our wounds, our gifts, our hormones, our coping mechanisms, our spiritual bypassing tendencies – all of it and all the bullhit they have attached to them – with us.
Changing location doesn’t delete our conditioning. Our default mode. It just changes the scenery.
Now, for sure, there are absolutely times when changing context is the most skillful, compassionate choice, and maybe even necessary for survival.
My move from Alaska was one example. But some others I’ve witnessed and supported are when people leave an abusive relationship. I mean, no amount of mindful presence or positive psychology will spiritually MacGyver you out of a violent or manipulative dynamic. You must get safe.
Or when people leave a racist workplace, because the harm is systemic and chronic, quitting isn’t avoidance, it’s self-preservation.
What these examples have in common is this: The environment itself is generating suffering and the suffering is not exclusively coming from our mind.
I know. The environment itself isn’t what creates suffering. In a strictly Buddhist sense, suffering arises because of our relationship to what’s happening, not the thing itself.
And yet…there are environments that overwhelm a nervous system, regardless of perception!
This is where Buddhism and trauma science intersect.
Even if the “suffering” is technically created by perception, there are conditions that push a nervous system into states that make resilience nearly impossible: violent or abusive homes, ongoing racism, poverty and food insecurity, chronic illness, lack of sunlight…
Suffering is created by perception, but perception is shaped by the nervous system, and the nervous system is shaped by the environment.
That’s the interdependence Buddha was talking about.
So when is it right to change our environment?
We change environments when the cost of managing and reframing our perception exceeds what our nervous system can sustainably hold. When the level of activation becomes traumatizing, dysregulating, oppressive, exhausting, identity threatening, or fundamentally survival-based.
In other words, when reframing becomes an act of violence against ourselves.
It’s more about how we manage the reality of these systems and whether we want to keep tolerating it or self-coaching ourselves to get through it.
And we get to choose. Sometimes we can keep tolerating it. And sometimes tolerating it is soul-crushing and life-shortening in a very real way.
The wisdom is knowing the difference.
So Spain didn’t “fix” my suffering per se. But Alaska was literally dysregulating my physiology.
And whether I like it or not, that matters.
While changing environments doesn’t fix our mind, refusing to change environments when it’s necessary can break our mind.
Moving doesn’t guarantee freedom. But staying in the wrong place guarantees contraction.
Buddhist psychology supports this, right? Emptiness (śūnyatā) teaches us that nothing exists independently. Suffering arises from causes and conditions, including environmental ones.
Sometimes the condition we need to change is the environment itself. This isn’t bypassing. It’s wisdom.
So when is it NOT helpful to change circumstances?
This is where most people get it mixed up. Because discomfort isn’t always a sign that we need to escape. More often, it’s a sign that we need to turn toward something inside of us that we’ve been avoiding.
So changing our circumstances won’t help when we’re trying to escape our own nervous system. Our anxiety, our hypervigilance, our attachment wounds… these aren’t problems created by our zip code, ok? They live in the body.
And those patterns are incredibly loyal and they will follow us into a new country, a new job, a new relationship, and set up shop like, “Surprise! We live here now too!”
So if the discomfort we’re trying to escape is actually coming from unresolved trauma or chronic stress, no external environment can outrun that.
It also won’t help when you imagine that a new city will magically motivate you into a completely different personality. The truth is, if we’ve struggled to establish certain habits in our home country, simply relocating won’t infuse us with new discipline.
There’s also the common trap of thinking a move will help when you’re avoiding conversations or conflicts that need to happen. Or if we believe external change will fix internal belief patterns around worthiness or safety.
Changing circumstances rarely helps when our suffering is primarily created by our mind’s interpretations, not the environment itself. Our mind will create the same suffering in a new landscape.
In the end, we can move to the most picturesque town, with mountains in the distance and cobblestone streets beneath our feet, and still wake up feeling like the same scared, exhausted, overwhelmed person we were before.
The scenery changes, but the inner experience does not. Until we are willing to sit with the storms inside us, to understand them, heal them, and hold them with compassion, we will continue to recreate the same patterns in every new setting.
This is where Buddhist practice and the concept of emptiness teaches us with fierce clarity: We don’t suffer because of circumstances alone. We suffer because of the stories we attach to them.
Remember, emptiness doesn’t mean “nothing matters.” It means circumstances have no fixed meaning; we give them meaning with our minds.
Moving won’t fix the way we relate to ourselves (or others for that matter). Only presence, practice, and right relationship with our people and the land can do that.
In this episode, you will learn:
// The myth of the “geographical cure,” and why moving abroad rarely delivers the fresh start people imagine
// Why the mind always travels with us.
// How to tell the difference between suffering created by our environment and suffering created by our internal patterns.
// When changing circumstances is a wise, life-supporting choice, and when it becomes avoidance in disguise.
// What Buddhist teachings on emptiness and perception show us about our relationship to place.
// How trauma science and positive psychology explain the limits of “starting over.”
// A simple reflection practice to help you discern whether you need an internal shift, an external shift, or both.
Resources:
// Episode 28: Practical Emptiness
// Episode 29: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
// Episode 202: The Healing Power of Emptiness
// If you’re new to the squad, grab the Rebel Buddhist Toolkit I created at RebelBuddhist.com. It has all you need to start creating a life of more freedom, adventure, and purpose. You’ll also get access to the Rebel Buddhist private group, and tune in every Wednesday as I go live with new inspiration and topics.
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