The longer I live, the more convinced I am that we have certain paths to walk through life, certain lessons to learn and certain people to meet. I can’t say at the moment whether wealth, relationships, places we live etc. are part of this path or whether they are down to the choices we make and the work we put in. I could only theorise about factors such as karma and destiny. The bottom line is most of us like to believe that we are in control of our lives. It’s a bit scary to think otherwise because if we’re not in control, who is?
That’s a big question and I don’t mean to make your brain work over time to come up with an answer, Indeed I believe it’s “One for the ages”.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t feel we have that much control overall. If I look back at my life so far, I have made certain decisions that have led to events that eventually led to my life being so intolerable that I was forced into taking a healing path.
See “The Crumbling”.
Some may say, and I have certainly questioned it myself, that maybe I just made poor decisions. It’s a maybe, I couldn't say because that would be a judgement!!
What I never did was “Surrender”. It was a firm stance of the monster/ego that I was in control and I could just push through, make some new decisions and get what I wanted… As I write I notice much use of “I”. It really was all about me and what I expected from life.
My teacher has often encouraged me to “Surrender”, and I never really quite understood what this meant before. You see, I have caused myself a lot of suffering over the years. The monster tells me “This is not how life should be!” and then comes the judgements… “You should be working harder, you should own a house, you should have a career you like.” These all cause immense suffering and what it isn’t is surrendering.
Life's situations and lessons are just flat out hard sometimes. When we can see this, surrender to it, acknowledge the emotions it causes, only then we can come back to balance and flow with the objective “what is”. That’s where we find our power.
It’s tough though, the monster/ego, skews our view on reality and passes judgement, maybe on ourselves or maybe on others.
Maybe we blame our partners or colleagues for where we’re at in life, maybe it was that unpleasant maths teacher we had at school. Really, all this ever does is take us away from the objective reality of what we are facing right NOW. And what we are facing right now is challenging emotions arising from situations outside our control. The monster will do whatever it can to distract us from the here and now. It still tries to with me.
While we are in monster mode, what we will not do is say “You know I’m just feeling really frustrated and angry at the moment” and therein is the key. When we disengage from the monster and acknowledge fully how we are feeling, then and only then can we come into the present and find our power and balance.
For this to happen we really need to learn about how to express our emotions.
I will cover this subject more thoroughly in my "members only" pages of this blog
We do it so naturally when we are children but are somehow all strongly discouraged from it by the time we become adults. Also, let’s face it adult life is busy and there are an awful lot of distractions. We get lost in planning our futures, our careers, we have commitments to family and partners. When the undesirable or difficult emotions kick in we are so much more likely to distract ourselves or take it out on other people.
Again I say this is NOT surrendering. Surrendering is acknowledging the situation you are in and expressing the emotions that it brings up within you. If you do not do this then you may get embroiled in a constant fight between what actually is happening and what you would prefer to be happening.
Indeed, this is a monster classic move. The monster has plenty of ideas of what you SHOULD be, what you SHOULD be experiencing, of what other people SHOULD do. Guess what? If this is the outlook you have on all aspects of life then your monster is control and the ultimate outcome is the vanishing of your presence and your peace… ie suffering.
I certainly experienced this during what I would call my awakening or ego death. It was hideous, the monster judged me terribly and I totally let it. It was so horrible that it drove me to the edge of despair. Until I learned that:
a) the monster IS NOT ME and I don't have to listen to it
b) when I express my emotions I can rapidly return to a more peaceful balanced state.
Being in this objective and balanced state assists us greatly; it puts us back into flow with the universe… We have surrendered to it’s will and we will likely reach our destination with a lot less suffering. When those temporary emotions have been felt in their fullest they are far less likely to become someone else's problem or cause us to suffer further.
This is surrendering…. An acknowledgement that we aren’t always in control, that life can sometimes be unfair and unjust, that sometimes we just want to scream and cry.
Once surrender happens we can move from that point forward because we let go of the need to fight it all for a moment. Only then can we feel into our emotional selves, express and come back into balance. Instant relief, I urge you strongly to try it.
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