Hello and welcome to this talk on the relationship between suffering and surrender.
These are big words,
Right?
So my name is Julie Elah Grace and I teach yoga and offer meditations through Insight Timer and I'm honored to be part of your practice right now.
So thank you.
I hope that you can find this helpful.
So at the end of 2018,
I felt like I was completely in flow with my life,
With my work,
With my relationships and with my home.
I felt as if I was in flow with the universe itself.
And then,
As can happen,
Everything crashed down around me.
And I spent more than a year trying to pick pieces of my previous life from out of the rubble.
The fact that 2020 now,
The year of a global pandemic,
Is still a better year for me than 2019,
Pretty much tells you everything that you need to know.
There were moments in the past year and a half that I wondered how it was even possible that I was still breathing.
There is something in the nature of loss,
In the nature of grief,
That cracks us wide open to this gloaming sky full of the colors of ourselves that we never even knew existed.
In these moments of deep suffering,
We have the opportunity to meet ourselves and to really meet ourselves,
Raw and vulnerable,
And to dive into the depths of our own humanity.
What we do with suffering informs so much of our daily existence and experience.
When we stuff down our suffering,
When we hide it away and pretend it's not there,
It often locks itself within the body and it blocks our vital life energy centers.
We can experience these blockages in a myriad of ways,
From breathing difficulties to pain in the hips to chronic inflammation of the lower back and so much more of course.
Yet,
When we embrace our pain,
When we dive into it and explore it,
When we give it a name and bring it to the light,
We can start to heal.
We can start to recenter and to find balance again.
After all,
Pain exists to alert us to problems.
If we touch a hot stove,
We do not simply ignore the pain and leave our fingers to smolder,
We remove them,
We wash them,
We clean the wounds,
And we give them time to heal.
Why should our emotional pain be any different?
Our emotional pain deserves just as much care,
Patience,
And tenderness as our physical pain.
And anyway,
The two are often linked,
With emotional pain commonly manifesting as physical pain.
And of course,
There is no time limit on our healing processes.
In the same way that a cut on the body is going to heal much more quickly than say,
Open heart surgery.
We accept and honor this about the physical body and yet when it comes to our emotional pain,
Again it's almost like we just want to quickly get rid of it.
Of course we do.
No one wants to suffer.
But in the same way that we need to exercise care with our physical healing,
We also need to exercise care with our emotional healing.
So while suffering can arrive to us in many forms,
At the root of most suffering is resistance or non-acceptance.
We resist our difficult experiences.
We wish and hope for a different reality.
And it is through this resistance that suffering is born.
But this wishing,
Hoping is incredibly human.
It's incredibly normal.
Yet what is also incredibly human is evolution.
Evolution of ourselves and our understanding of our lives and our relationships and our world.
I recently listened to a podcast in which the host interviewed his dying mother.
It was a deeply raw and vulnerable episode of a sometimes vulgar show.
It was so raw that I had to pull my car over while driving through southern Italy as my tears started blocking my view of the road.
In the episode,
The mother said to her son that we only need to look to the earth for most of our lessons.
She noted that the earth is constantly evolving,
Constantly changing,
As are we.
She offered the following example.
If we look outside and we see a little leaf trembling in the wind and we desire for that leaf to stop trembling,
To stop changing or moving,
That is when we suffer.
However,
If we accept the leaf as it is,
There is only a still presence within.
Yet this idea of acceptance can be tremendously painful because it effectively means accepting that pain.
It means surrendering to whatever exists in the present moment,
No matter how uncomfortable it might be.
Growing up in America,
I struggled immensely with the idea of surrender.
So much of my Midwestern upbringing was about overcoming,
Dominating,
And making things happen.
I grew up with the go big or go home mentality.
Every time someone spoke to me about surrender,
My mind effectively asked,
What do you mean I cannot control everything?
What do you mean I cannot change anything if I want to as long as I just work hard enough?
There is a paradox in this though,
Because of course I can change anything if I work hard enough.
But that change comes through my perception and my responses to life.
The hard work is the inner work,
Not in the changing of the outside world.
The hard work is getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has a famous phrase,
Abandon hope.
Let me say it again.
Abandon hope.
One more time.
Abandon hope.
It sounds awful and devastating at first impression.
And yet it isn't.
Abandoning hope is a call to presence.
It is a call to acceptance,
To being here now with whatever is here now.
Of course,
No one wants to hear this because this isn't pleasant or easy.
But these notions of surrender and acceptance ultimately offer profound forms of grace.
When we ignore our suffering,
When we wish it away,
We effectively begin to wish our lives away.
Cliche as it is,
Life is full of suffering.
We know this.
Yet it is suffering that gives us the opportunity to connect more deeply with ourselves and with others.
These experiences allow us to move through our lives with our hands wide open.
When we embrace our pain,
We say,
Give me everything.
Give me every experience.
I am here and I am alive.
And this is what being here and alive means right now in this moment.
In this way,
We then live fully.
Because when we disallow ourselves from experiencing the lows,
We also effectively disallow ourselves from fully experiencing the highs.
Genuinely,
There is no light without dark.
By plumbing our depths,
We create fertile ground for experiencing everything life has to offer us.
We pave paths for future highs of which we haven't yet even envisaged.
Grief and loss have the ability to make us hard or they have the ability to bring us deeper into gratitude.
We can look to that trembling leaf outside and we can burst with love for it,
For the fact that it is there at all,
For the fact that we are here to see it.
We drop our current narratives and just tap into the beauty of this moment.
Ah,
Here we are.
Then we might fall back into our narratives and that is okay.
That is also normal.
That is part of a process.
Like nature,
Everything comes in cycles and in waves.
Now possibly more than ever,
Humans are having to dive inward.
We were literally forced to go inside for much of 2020 because of a global pandemic.
This pandemic is ripe for creating inner dialogue with ourselves.
Yet going inside ourselves,
Journeying through our mental landscapes can sometimes feel treacherous.
However,
It is usually the only way forward.
For me,
Yoga and meditation practices offer a map to that inner landscape.
These practices offer me a different way to approach myself,
My life,
And my suffering.
Recently I was at a retreat in which I was a participant and during an emotional group sharing I talked briefly about what was a rather traumatic and haunting childhood.
Afterwards one of the other participants came to me and said,
I would never have guessed this about you.
You seem so calm and joyful and put together.
When she said this to me,
I felt as if the cells in my body started dancing.
This was a huge compliment and speaks mainly to the practices that have completely revolutionized my life.
Not every practice or every teacher will resonate for everyone.
That's normal,
That's okay.
But I am certain that everyone has practices that will resonate for them.
And these practices,
They do not have to be yoga or meditation related.
They can be anything from dancing to playing with dogs to sitting in nature.
There is something that resonates for you.
I'm sure of it.
Whatever it is,
Make sure you take time for it to give yourself that space,
Which is one of the spaces that can cultivate healing through the periods of suffering.
So here is my final offering to you right now.
Speak to your pain.
Speak to your fears.
Speak to yourself and do so kindly.
Imagine that you are engaging with your most cherished friend when you are engaging with yourself.
So listen.
Listen to yourself,
Embrace yourself,
Show up and be patient and loving and present.
And while to some this can sound woo-woo,
This is the work.
This is the inner work.
And this is what yoga is all about,
Which is union within the self and with all that is.
So thank you so much for listening to this talk today.
I am wishing you much peace,
Love and healing on all of your journeys.
Namaste.
