To paint an analogy, you might wake up from sleep one morning with a physical wound on your arm. However, for the last eight hours you have been asleep in your bed, so there’s no explanation for the wound.
After applying a Band-Aid and cleaning up the wound, you contemplate what could have caused it. You ask your partner and regrettably they cannot offer an explanation. After some consideration, you have a hunch the wound was caused whilst you were tossing about during a nightmare and accidentally hit your arm on the bedpost.
Had you not examined the situation, you may have continued to wake up with a wound on your arm the following morning. Nevertheless, we tend to stow away our emotional wounds within our psyche because we don’t want to face the pain. When the pain resurfaces, we wonder where it came from. Is this beginning to make sense?
Are you getting the sense that trying to manipulate life often backfires because life is not something to be manipulated but to be experienced?
Therefore, the art of surrender does not imply resignation but requires co-creating your life’s experience with a greater intelligence. It is accepting that everything will come to you at the right time and not a moment sooner.
Personally, when I contemplate surrender, I imagine myself floating on my back in beautiful coloured water looking to the sky with a beautiful sun warming my body. The water carries me effortlessly to where I need to go and I trust everything will unfold exactly as it should.
This doesn’t mean I don’t make plans for the future, rather I am less invested in the outcome, since I trust the universe to lead me to a better direction. I learn to trust this benevolent force responsible for the trillions of stars in the sky and every cosmic event, knowing it has a good handle on the process called life.
It is with this understanding I invite you to go back to the earlier problem affecting you. Journal in your diary or notebook five ways in which you can stop trying to control the situation. What could you do differently to create a better outcome?
What steps can you take immediately? How can you see the situation differently? Journal your answers and revisit them over the coming days. It is only when we stop trying to control life through the art of surrender that everything will show up in an easy and effortless way.
