Everything turned out as it was meant to

Lately I am choosing to surrender more to acceptance. Lately I am choosing to feel the sadness or grief that normally comes when I chose to let go of that I cannot change, and as I do this I realise I find peace. There is a softening that happens under the circumstances. I can feel the pain or powerlessness I sometimes cover over by trying harder and harder. I am also realising at times the power of words spoken between people is not always adequate to reach or address the full truth of things as well as all the deeper underlying emotions which can be unsayable.

I have also been thinking a fair bit about the Chinese spiritual text The Tao Te Ching. I have the translation by Stephen Mitchell and I love the sense of calm that comes over me when I read some of the passages. One of the opening paragraphs in this book says the tao that is spoken of is not the true tao. I guess another way of saying this is also that the map is not the territory, it is only a representation of it. Never the less we should not stop from trying to find words for life and to express teh power of our deepest most transformative experiences. I was listening yesterday to a talk by writers at the Sydney Writer’s Festival on the power of poetry to speak to deeper truths of life and loss. I know that I could not live without poetry in my life as it so often provides a way of working through past traumas, expressing emotion why providing also a way of finding meaning and bringing comfort at those times when life is painful or uncertain or things all around have undermined my comprehension of reality as workable and solid. 

Sadly at times I think we can equate surrender only with defeat. And yes, there are times we can feel defeated by the circumstance of our lives, there are painful realities and truths we are forced to accept that we cannot change and grief comes as the letting go feeling that enables us to fall into something deeper. Bearing with this process is a lot like being with decay which is nothing less than a process of transformation which proceeds new birth and new growth. If we do not surrender to it then we cannot really be changed by that experience or loss and perhaps enlarged or transformed by it. Also if we don’t let go in some way and allow the emptying process we don’t make room for something new to grow in the empty place.

Lately I am thinking of the many ways I have feared and resisted change. I am thinking of the many ways new changes evoked great anxiety and fear because so much trauma occurring in my own life and bringing sudden loss would be retriggered every time I faced new changes. The Buddhists say that perhaps the most essential truth about life rests in its impermanence or changeability. I think of the many painful things that went down in my family and of how I looked for the cause and in some way tried to attribute blame when really the truth of the matter lay much deeper. At times now my whole being can resonate with the power of memories which cascade and many of them are painful, but not all. And I think of the moments of connection with loved ones when we touched each others souls for a moment and how those were really the most precious moments that I treasure now. When we lose someone through death or separation though the relationship does go on, it just changes form.

I was also thinking today, prompted by a novel I am reading how fear of change can be a huge part of our anxiety, along with fear of loss, but I was also thinking about the quality of resilience and capacity to cope. I was remembering that even when really bad things went down in my own life I did find the capacity to survive them and move through and often that happening depended upon letting go, acceptance and surrender. I was prepared for my mother to leave us when she did and have had only moments of peace following her death in late 2017 though I did struggle with an argument we had in the week leading up. Curiously my Dad and I argued too a few weeks before he passed and on the night before he went into hospital and entered a coma he would not wake up from, dying in early January 1985. Those memories didn’t haunt me with Mum as much as we had a precious time of connecting deeply forgiving and saying goodbye on the second night before she passed away.

When I think of my own life, I feel that change and death and losses that were out of control formed such a huge part of it. I often feel like a failure that due to my developmental injuries and wounds I at times feel I never individuated fully and found a successful path out into the world. My career trajectory got sidetracked and then when I entered recovery for addiction the following years have involved so much interior soul searching as well as a deep exploration of the role multi-generational trauma has played in my own life. But then I think of the naysayer/critic in me I have had to fight. I think of the massive griefs I carried and repressed, I think of the relationships in which I was not allowed to fully blossom because I unconsciously chose people who would limit me and I them and I see that all along EACH AND EVERY THING HAS BEEN EXACTLY AS IT WAS MEANT TO ME. And I grew through processing each experience and giving the love back to the scoured out places in me that were previously filled with resistance, pain, hurt, frustration, anger, loss or confusion.

I also see that it is only this point of view that actually brings me acceptance and then I cry, but its a good good crying, it is a soft crying and it is a kind of crying that makes my soul moist and pliable just as the Tao Te Ching says we need to be when we learn how to go with the flow and allow life’s river to carry us forward. At times we get snagged or our flow gets blocked up and then at other times a storm comes about to try to dislodge things. But all along if we work to surrender, to open, to deepen, to soften we will be changed. If we explore the places of our resistance we can come to see where we are our own worst enemies when we fight change or fail to surrender to or accept what had to be as it was all along in order that we could grow through and become who life and our soul always wished for us to be.