Here is a blog on accepting the moment and surrender:
This is such a key place of transformation for those who suffer. It sure was for me.
My experience of chronic pain – anything that I did not accept in the moment – was that I pushed up against it. I didn’t want the moment to be here in the way that it was. I didn’t like it. My subconscious reaction was to resist. The problem was not only that I was resisting, but that the very act of resisting brought more to resist.
Imagine that you are walking along and a wall presents itself to you. You do not like the wall. You do not accept that it is here. The wall is in your way and you want it to change. You can’t make the wall go away. You want to get past the wall. You cannot go around the wall. There is only you and the wall. You try to push against the wall, but it meets your resistance with at least an equal amount of resistance. You cannot move forward. You continue to push on the wall, but it is futile. The wall does not move. The solution to the whole situation between you and the wall is to surrender to the wall. As soon as you stop pushing against the wall, it disappears and you can once again move forward. This is a perfect metaphor for what happens when we feel sensation in the body, label it as ‘bad’, try and change it, and then finally surrender to the sensation that we feel. We accept it as it is. We accept what we are experiencing in the moment.
Here is an experience I had which brought this lesson home to me. I was feeling overwhelmed. The overwhelm seemed to rise up in front of me like a great black wall. I felt afraid of this feeling and the wall that it represented to me. In my fear, I chose to resist the sensations of tension and excitement that I was feeling. I tried to resist the wall as it seemed to close in on me. The more I resisted, the bigger the wall grew and the heavier it became. I felt even more overwhelm. Finally, I realized that the only place for me to go was to stop resisting what I was feeling. It felt like a desperate and brave move on my part. I just let go of trying to control the situation. As soon as I dropped my fight, I felt the sense of overwhelm dissolve into thin air. By accepting the moment with all its intense sensation, I found a place of tranquility in surrendering to it.
Suffering transforms into a place of contentment when we learn to accept what is here in the moment. When we feel intense sensation, we can practice noticing that it is a lot of energy. We can remove the spin the mind wants to add in by calling all that energy “bad” and trying to change it somehow. We shift suffering into a neutral experience. The sensations we feel may be intense, yet when witnessed without judgment, they feel like a lot of flowing energy.
Imagine that you are trying to fit all the river at the bottom of the Grand Canyon into a hose. There is a lot of resistance to all that water flowing through such an enclosed space. Now remove the hose and watch the water flow freely. This is what we do when we try and control the sensations that we feel. We try and contain it, like the river in the hose. Yet, when we remove our trying to contain what we feel, we notice that energy changes and becomes free flowing, like the river once the hose it removed. The body’s intelligence will direct that energy into healing energy.
