31 May Surrender

Healing does not begin with being cured. Healing begins with recognition and acknowledgement. The recognition of ourselves as creator beings, and the acknowledgement that it falls to us to develop a conscious relationship — with ourselves, with one another, and with everything around us that lives.

That recognition is not something the mind can devise. It can only come from the part of us that still abides, untouched, in oneness: your heart-soul essence. That is the part that looks upon this earthly life, experiences it fully, and realises: I am this. Not as a thought or a concept, but as living knowing.

For as long as you are in conflict — with yourself, with another, or with a situation — you are trapped within the constraints of the mind. In duality, in polarisation, and thus in the tension between the opposites that we experience in the body as the toxic burden of stress.

And whoever tries to manoeuvre their way out of such a dilemma only digs the proverbial trench deeper. Every attempt to resolve it throws up a higher barricade; every strategy calls forth a new counter-strategy. For the dilemma simply cannot be solved by the mind. The mind, after all, cannot reach the one place where it does dissolve: the place of surrender.

Surrender means that the struggle against what is, at last, comes to an end. That there is a radical acceptance that this is it. Not as capitulation, not as giving up out of despair, but as the conscious laying down of the fight with reality itself. You cannot argue with life.

A striking example can be seen in people with a fatal illness who, after a ‘long fight against’ it, finally give up. Body and mind are battle-weary — both literally and figuratively. There is nothing left in the tank. Every option has been explored, there are no shortcuts left. There is nothing for it but to accept that this is how things now are. And what then often happens is nothing short of a miracle: the illness goes into remission.

What appears to be happening is that, precisely because the struggle stops, a person is able to arrive at a different place within themselves — the compassionate heart. Here we have stepped, both literally and figuratively, out of the fight against and beyond the conflict. And from that place we no longer experience merely the symptoms of the imbalance. We see — through the wider perspective that becomes possible there — that this is our own co-creation. We see the constellation and the interconnection of all the factors at play within it, and we become aware of our previously unconscious relationship with life.

And yet surrender does not automatically mean that a person always gets better. That is the logic and the paradox of the compassionate heart. For from this place life is experienced as the source experiences it, and within that the compassionate heart is willing to experience and embrace every possible outcome of life with equanimity. Which means this too: that a person in complete surrender may die of a terminal illness.

The mind then thinks that the surrender has not worked. That it has failed. But the heart knows better. The heart knows that the suffering has ceased — not because the terminal illness is no longer there, but because that which suffered the illness within the person is no longer there. There is no longer any resistance to what life, in all its richness and intensity, is.

And that is the true freedom and healing that we are, at the deepest level, seeking and longing for. Not necessarily the removal of the circumstance, but the end of the struggle against it. This vantage point, this overview, this realisation — herein lies the potential for healing.

For the moment oneness is restored within us, life can flow back into its natural order. The struggle was choking off the stream of vital life energy; surrender gives it room to move once more. And because we are creator beings, it cannot be otherwise than that we manifest this renewed harmony and balance both within ourselves and all around us.

That is the paradox the compassionate heart sets before us, again and again. It is not by pushing harder that anything changes, but by ceasing to push. By letting this, exactly as it now is, first of all simply be. Surrender is not the end; it is, rather, the very place where life can begin again.