“Due to various spiritual misunderstandings, I think the word surrender has become so distorted that it’s now aligned more with settling than actual surrender.”
This is from a 2016 fb post, and yup, still true. Settling is a trauma response, surrender is a whole other thing.
This all has on my mind the last week, as I have been journeying through the feels of the grief, anger and pain that can come with loss, acceptance and growth. Something un-named was lingering under those emotions: I could feel the pull, as if I was dancing uncomfortably close to an emotional state that I worked hard to avoid my entire childhood… despair.
Journeying with unmet energies of our young years is trippy as fuck because we can easily perceive that we, as our current self, are not safe to feel what we were really not safe to feel back then. Despair was something I felt often as a child, but it was not safe to feel or surrender to that intense energy. My young self knew nothing about surrender or being loved through emotions, so I turned to strategy instead- settling, adjusting, denying, feigning, avoiding, pretending… you get the point.
It is so counterintuitive to get closer to, and then surrender- to stop resisting- what we are afraid of. And yet, we all know what happens when we resist something- it persists. And if we fight it, it will just find another door. We can only be cleverly sidestep what we have aversions to for so long.
Despair made it though the door the other day. Naming it was a huge step forward. I felt the invitation to pause and surrender with her… to stop all the strategizing and fighting and to lean back into that unmet muck that I was not safe to feel as a kid. I’m not going to pretend it was rainbows and unicorns. Nope, it was scary as fuck. I sat sown in my ancestor chair with my chai, sent a message to my teacher, and called forth Love. I felt the anchor of those I’d called forth, and I married my attention to that anchor so that the scary stories that nightmares are made of wouldn’t take off with me. I married my attention to that anchor like my life depended on it, because it actually did.
Those stories are fantastical liars, and would have taken me to all sorts of places. No, thank you. I choose to be Here. And so to be Here required me to get really serious with where my attention was going. A life time of practicing discipline can be an amazing gift in such moments.
With my attention tethered to Life, Love, and all things Here, that tsunami of despair came, and phew, that rocking chair stayed steadfast. What I scared the most came, and then sure enough it left. As all states do. And it took so much with it. Today— life looks really different than it did this time last week. My heart and mind feel spacious. I am so grateful.
I was not safe to feel states of despair when I was younger. They were too scary. I didn’t have support. I didn’t have agency. I didn’t have practices. I didn’t have people. But things are different for me now. Life is so different for me now.
We will be learning how to hold space for ourselves and others to journey through difficult territory in the upcoming Matrix Integration 2022. Join us.
We will be learning how to hold space for ourselves and others to journey through difficult territory in the upcoming Matrix Integration 2022. Join us.
