Excerpt talking about finding those 'shoulds' that cause so much suffering and learning to trust life, trust your Self rather than acting from old conditioning. Taken from a Satsang during the December 2020 Diving Deep 7 day retreat.
What is your capacity to be with loss, to be with grief and sadness and loneliness, to be with fear? What is your capacity to embody all aspects of the human experience, not just the ‘good’ stuff? It’s not that we need to go looking for this stuff, court it, wallow in it, seek it out. But it will inevitably find you, one way or another. If you spend your life running from this, finding safe ground away from the mud and melee of life, when it does show up it will feel overwhelming and scary, it will feel like it could break you, even worse, it could kill you. This safe space, this gilded cage that you have created from life will be shaken to the core. Your fragility will become apparent. Freedom is the ability to encompass and embrace it all, it’s the antifragility of life. It’s the allowance of the full expression of life to move through you unimpeded. Root out where you are feeling fragile with life. Become aware of it and the tendency to avoid it at all cost. The seeing of this tendency, the noticing of what it FEELS like, how the body responds…
I invite you into the fire of life where the light burns so brightly on all that is. The uncomfortable and unfathomable truth and rawness of this moment is inescapable and unyielding leaving no choice but to surrender. The fire burns bright tonight and with this the ground shifts beneath your feet. The stability that felt hard won is gone in an instant taking with it all sense of knowing all sense of certainty. Your heart burns bright cracking open with aliveness with all possibilities All that is all that was all that can be held in the infinite fiery embrace of this moment. Resistance is futile here for there is space for it all. Yes even resistance itself. The heart surrenders the fever breaks and with it rushes in a sense of awe and wonder that even this yes even this can be included in your story of life.
If resistance shows up, then let that resistance in too. Let it wash over you and into you without any sense of wrongness. Even resistance in all its glory is held tenderly in the depths of Being. So fall, fall darling one into the heart of surrender and let life all the way in. Even if only for a moment, this moment is all it takes.