Surrender. I recognize it as a deep longing for letting go and feeling safe enough while doing it. Isn’t that difficult? How many of us can let go when what we continuously learn is to fight and be alert to protect ourselves?
By doing so we send ourselves the message that we are frail creatures in need of a shield which, time and time again, doesn’t work. It’s either blocking out too much or it is full of holes, leaking on all sides, like mine.
As I sat with surrender in my meditations, especially in one where I lay down rather than being in an upright position, I realized how much I wanted to protect my womb, and how vulnerable it felt to expose it.
I saw this sensation being rooted in fear of betrayal and being hurt. The fear that, when I relax, something harmful may happen to me. I am afraid of being “dropped” as soon as I trust something or someone with the safety of my being.
My system is trained to be alert. “It is not safe to let go”. “You may be taken advantage of”. So, guided by the meditation, and the words of a very skilled teacher, I forgave myself for being scared. I still am, and I still feel that message very much alive inside me, and I choose to love myself nonetheless. Fear and all, wounds and all. It will take time to be able to truly relax and realize how safe I already am. My spirit knows it but my body does not yet.
What I am doing, I understand, is that I am building a strong body and a strong spirit, to be able to let go. I am “accumulating personal power” – in the words of Don Juan – in order to surrender.
I realized how, driven by this pull to release, I had hemorrhages throughout the years — energetical, emotional, and physical ones. Hemorrhages of love, power, water, and blood. Of life force. I understood that when I recently discovered that my body was dehydrated, even if I was continuously drinking water. I didn’t know that I was washing away my minerals instead of moistening my tissues. My body wasn’t retaining water, it would just go through me.
It was fascinating, literally and symbolically, to discover that I needed minerals (metals, rocks, and crystals) to retain water. Solid to keep the liquid. I interpret it as needing boundaries and personal power to surrender into Love.
In yoga, you need strong back muscles and a strong backbone to open up your chest and expose your heart through backbends. Spiritually, you need a strong healthy ego before letting that go by transcending and including it.
I tried to skip this passage, trying to transcend too soon, bypassing my humanness, and I had to come back and pay attention, work on creating a strong, healthy ego, a sense of self.
Now, I am strengthening my core by unconditionally trusting myself, allowing less and less space for toxic self-doubt, paralyzing fear and spiraling worry so that, in time, I’ll be able to surrender into the Unknown and encounter boundless Freedom.