Surrender

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I did not simply pursue my spirtual growth willingly. I said that I went into this "kicking and screaming" and despite the healing miracles I have seen over the course of my growth in recent years, it's not like my mind just gave up and has floated merrily down the stream ever since.

I know that there are many teachers who seem to have just embraced the "Flow" and I admire them for it. From what I've read in "The Power of Now," Eckhart Tolle is a being that had a massive shift in perception from one day to the next...immediately turning over control of his life from his ego mind...to his spirit.

I think though that my mind/spirit connection and the process of mastering my ego is more common than the example Tolle provides. I do believe his experience and teachings are necessary to show us a present day example of what we are all capable of.
But I also believe that for many of us who grew up in somewhat dysfuctional households, that many of your paths will be similar to mine. I believe that I had to heal the pain that my mind had repressed in order for me to feel safe enough to allow my Spirit to shine forth from me.
And this process is not complete. It is an ongoing process, but one to which I am now consciously committed.

To get to that point though, many of us have to have a "dark night of the soul" that so many books now reference. I know that I had to get there...not once, but many times.
I had to get there initially with the threat of not being able to live unless I started moving upwards out of the darkness. And each time I hit a plateau, I was able to enjoy it briefly before I could feel my soul reaching upwards for more.
Of course, it didn't really feel like that.
It felt like hell because what was happening was that I was continuing to create different aspects of my reality that did not match what I wanted to experience in my life.
Unconsciously, I continued to attract the experiences into my life showing me what I need to heal and from this, I still occasionally have a "little darkness."
The way down isn't as far any more and neither is the climb up, but for a brief span of time, there is darkness. There is a brief span of being lost in the fearful imaginings of the ego mind.
Today, I know how to bring myself out of that darkness and just as it did for the first time, it requires me to surrender.

I was brought up to be independent and self-sufficient. There is a certain amount of strength and security in that. But within that also can lie a weakness for believing that I must do everything for myself..that I am not safe to be vulnerable and that I cannot ask for help.
As I've written, I learned to ask for help. But I also had to learn how to surrender. I had to learn to surrender my ego to my Spirit. I had to learn to allow my connection to who and what I really am to take hold in my life.
I will not tell you that this is easy...especially for people like me who created walls in their life in order to feel safe.

I will tell you that it is possible to let go and be emotionally vulnerable. I will tell you that it is possible to trust beyond anything you have ever allowed yourself to do.

It doesn't take me as long to recognize any more that the reality I am seeing in my life is not a problem outside of me...but inside of me. My mind doesn't always like that answer though.
For years, I blamed others for my life not being the way I wanted it to be...and I was able to get enough concessions from people who did change their behavior for me...to fool my ego mind into thinking that was the answer.
But it wasn't.

I have come to understand how my reality is created...that nothing that comes into my experience is not related to me...and how I unconsciously have projected my inner world out onto the movie screen of my outer world. I have believed that Life was happening to me...not that I was happening...to my life.

Surrender is something my mind has fought all along. My mind still wants to rationalize why surrender should not be necessary.

We live in such a "thinking" world. From the perspective of Spirit, the world most of us live in is "insane" and we are mired in the insanity of it. Even so much that when we encounter someone who "gets it" we label them as the crazy ones.

The problem is that our world...our "thinking world" is "the devil we know."

Just like our Parental Idealization, we hold onto that which we are uncomfortable with...because we are comfortable with our uncomfortableness and we do not know what life outside of that is like.

And so we avoid surrender. We deny that it is necessary. We distract ourselves with an infinite number of other things to focus on.
We decide that someone else is the problem. We make it the fault of our friends, colleagues, lovers, spouses, managers, companies, governments and we change the moving parts of these to avoid facing the problem.
And with each move or distraction, the problem subsides for a period of time...allowing ourselves to be fooled that it was THIS change that solved our problem...and that our problem is fixed.
But it is not.

I received a message this morning that told me that while all of us are unlimited beings, we all have a limit on how much life force energy we have. We are free however to choose how to "spend" that energy.
We are free to use most of it holding onto thoughts, beliefs and feelings that do not serve us. In doing so, we limit ourselves as to how much energy we have to create that which we desire in life.
However, as we heal ourselves and let go of more of these repressed feelings and memories, it automatically frees up more of this energy.
If we have been experiencing dis-ease, we do not have to try to heal the dis-ease. it will heal on its own because that is what the body is designed to do...it is designed to heal itself.

I have witnessed this for myself.

If we have dysfunctional relationships in our life and we heal the beliefs and feelings which hold this relationship in our current reality, the relationship either heals or drifts out of our lives effortlessly because it is not a reflection of who we are anymore.

If we have been intending to create something for many years, but have not been able to...it is because we have life force energy tied up...repressed...relating to what we desire.

We have to stop blaming God or others for us not having what we desire. We have to realize that God is always giving, always providing whatever we desire and if we are not receving that which we desire...WE are the ones who have blocked it.

We must also forgive ourselves though because we cannot blame ourselves for what we have not known how to do. It is NOT our fault.

It is...however...our responsibility to heal it.

Healing starts the moment we surrender.

I will admit that because I had been lost for so many years of my life, I didn't even know how to surrender.

I had to ask for help...and then I had to trust the path that was provided to me.

It gets easier to surrender each time I do it. And each time, I realize that I'm not as alone as I thought I was.

Neither are you.