Acknowledging And Releasing Struggle Lecture

In this lecture we discuss the idea that acknowledging struggle and doing the work of stepping fully into that struggle is an essential part of our spiritual growth, even though we sometimes feel and/or receive messages that being spiritual is all about light and positivity. This is a great set up to the meditation in which we allow ourselves to explore some inner struggle and anger in order to release it.

Transcript

We're going to talk about struggle tonight and if you've been watching the last few weeks,

We've been talking about some things that deal with our darkness or our shadow side and I think that's really important.

I think it's really important to talk about.

I think it's really important to acknowledge.

I think that sometimes we tend to think that If we're struggling we're not being spiritual or we're not evolving or we're moving backwards,

We're not making any progress and you are no less spiritual if you are struggling and in fact if you recognize that you're struggling and you're willing to look at that and kind of go within it,

That's a huge sign of growth because it's easy to be in denial.

It's easy to pretend that that darkness doesn't exist but part of true growth is really acknowledging that.

It's really looking at it and and I think it's important that we start admitting to each other when we're struggling.

I've been struggling.

I've been struggling with my eating issues.

I've been struggling with some depression.

I've talked about that in the past few weeks and that's okay.

That doesn't make me less spiritual.

It doesn't make me less of anything.

It just makes me honest and I think that's important.

I think it's important for us to be honest with each other and it's hard to get support if you're not being forthcoming,

If you're not being truthful about what you're really going through,

If you're just kind of putting on a brave face and pretending that everything's okay.

So I've gotten pretty emotional in the last couple weeks and I actually got emotional while I was writing my notes tonight so I was like,

Oh no,

It's starting already.

So I've got my beautiful Selenite.

I've got my grid on the floor like I always do but I added an extra little oomph here for support and clarity so that I could stay focused and not end up unable to speak.

I don't care so much about crime,

But I like to be able to be understood.

Okay,

So we're gonna talk a little bit about the difference between struggle and releasing struggle and the idea of offering surrender.

So a couple months ago I did a show about offering surrender and that's always our first choice.

That's something that's done in love when we're letting go of something and we offer surrender.

I talked about giving it as a gift and when we're in a space to do that,

Then that's what we want to do.

But sometimes we're not in that space.

Sometimes we're in this space of struggle and the idea of offering surrender might just make you want to slap somebody in the face if they say,

Oh just offer surrender and you're really struggling.

It's not going to connect with you in that moment and that's okay.

So we're gonna talk a little bit about struggle and the idea of releasing struggle and I've got a great story for that tonight.

This is a story from the show The Simpsons,

Which I think everybody,

Even if you don't watch that show,

Everyone's probably familiar with Homer Simpson at this point.

So in this episode I went back and watched a little clip of it because I wanted to make sure I got the details right and it was even better than I remembered when I started thinking about using this as an example.

So Homer and Bart go to the hardware store and Homer sees this do-it-yourself barbecue pit.

It's a kit to make your own barbecue pit and he's like,

Oh we're gonna do this.

Let's do this.

So he takes it home and then of course he makes Lisa do the actual concrete because that's the hardest part.

So it shows her and she's kind of sweating and like,

Oh dad my back hurts.

So she gets all the concrete laid and then he gets ready to make his beautiful barbecue kit that's in this box and he picks the box up and all the pieces fall into the concrete just in a heap.

So he realizes the concrete is gonna dry and so he's trying to put this stuff together as fast as he can.

He's struggling.

It's making me laugh because I just watched it and it was so funny.

And at one point he actually says,

Why is life so hard?

And he's struggling and he's struggling and he's trying to get it put together and then and then it shows him,

Oh my beautiful barbecue pit.

And you see this picture of what looked like exactly what was on the box and then it turns out it is the box and he lowers the box and it's just a hot mess.

It's just a bunch of stuff piled in a concrete thing.

So then he gets really angry about it and he just starts hitting it with this pipe and he's just going crazy on this thing and at the very end of the scene Marge is asking,

Oh,

How did the barbecue go for dad?

And then you look out the window and he's running with a lawn umbrella at it and just hit.

He just throws this lawn umbrella and then the umbrella pops open and knocks him on the ground.

He's laying on his back and I just love that so much because it's kind of the perfect image of struggle.

Somebody who wrote that was like on my wavelength right now because when you're struggling it feels like nothing's going your way.

It feels like everything you do is just making a mess.

But here's the next thing that happens in that episode.

An art critic discovers this sculpture that Homer has made and he ends up kind of getting into art and in the art scene.

And I love that too because even in our darkest time,

Even in the nastiest,

Ugliest barbecue pit that we're making in our lives,

There is so much beauty.

We are beautiful.

We are spiritual beings and that struggle and that darkness and that crap,

That's part of our human journey.

That's part of our spiritual journey.

So recognizing that there's beauty even in the angriest moment in your life,

Even in the point at your life where you're looking at your barbecue pit and wondering where it all went wrong,

There's so much beauty there.

And it led me to think of a personal story.

I usually give a personal example.

And back when I was in therapy,

When I was in my late teens,

I worked with this amazing therapist.

I've mentioned she's the person who introduced me to chakras and energy work.

And so she had a sand tray.

And if you're unfamiliar with that,

It's basically,

Literally,

It's a tray of sand.

And she had all these figurines.

And sometimes when you're having a hard time talking,

It's kind of a form of art therapy.

She would say,

Show me in the sand tray.

And then you pick what you want and you put it in the sand tray.

And then you talk about what you've made.

So I was talking one day about how I felt like I couldn't be my authentic self.

I felt like in all these different situations,

I had to be one person for this person,

One person here,

And a different person here.

And how I felt like I didn't even know who the real me was because there was all these faces that I was showing people.

And she said,

Oh,

Make it in the sand tray.

And she left me alone for about 10 minutes.

And so I started picking all these little people.

And I was kind of arranging them in a semi-circle from kind of outward,

Inward.

So like the things that I showed,

The most surface part of myself,

And then the faces of myself that maybe I showed to people I knew a little bit better.

And so these semi-circles kind of got smaller as they went in.

And right as my time was up,

She came back in the room and without thinking,

Just totally intuitively,

I picked up this beautiful seashell.

It was a comp shell.

And I put it right in the center at the deepest part of these semi-circles.

And she came in and she said to me,

What's that?

And I said,

Well,

I don't know.

So then we started talking about it.

And I don't know that I had the words for it,

Or maybe we kind of figured it out over the course of that session.

But that beautiful seashell,

That is our connection to the divine.

That is the part of us that is divine.

That essence of ourselves that underneath all of the layers of everything else is always beautiful and is always perfect and is always connected to the divine,

Even if we can't feel it in the moment.

And what I wrote down about this was that we have so many layers.

In that example,

I was talking about kind of different aspects of my personality,

But we have layers of trauma.

We have layers of hurt.

We have layers of programming that came from our family of origin and from society.

We have layers of societal pressure,

Things that we feel like we have to show,

Layers that come from the job we do.

I mean,

We could be buried under these layers.

There's so many layers of stuff on top of that.

But underneath that is your beautiful seashell.

No matter how many layers build up,

No matter how low you get,

No matter how much you're struggling and you want to give up,

That seashell is still there.

That part of yourself that is perfect is always within us.

And the work that we're doing in the spiritual world a lot of times is shedding some of those layers so that we can recognize that that beauty is there,

That that connection is there,

That that art is there,

That underneath our terribly destroyed horrible barbecue pit is this beautiful seashell that is that is perfect.

Whew!

Well,

That went better than I thought it was going to.

Maybe I got it all out ahead of time.

So we're going to do something a little bit different in the meditation tonight and I'm going to describe it a little bit because there's going to be a few different options.

And I want to say something briefly about if you're not in struggle right now,

Chances are there's something you're in struggle about.

If you're really honest with yourself,

Even if things are going great,

There's like a little part that's like,

Oh that could be better,

Oh I don't like this,

Or whatever.

But if you really feel like you're expanded and you're just having the best time,

Then you might not connect with some of what I'm talking about with struggle and that's okay.

You'll be there at some point.

If you're not there now,

That's okay.

And we tend to kind of think,

Oh I'll never get back there.

You know,

We get on a high and we think,

Oh yeah this is great,

Everything's up from now on,

Everything's going to be wonderful.

But that's not how life works.

I mean there's ups and downs in life,

There's obstacles.

Being on a spiritual path and being spiritually evolved doesn't mean that we don't still have those obstacles.

It means that we look at them honestly,

It means that we're not afraid to go into those,

We're not afraid to admit that we have obstacles,

And we're not afraid to do some work around that so that we can get back to that beautiful kind of up,

Soaring space.

So we are going to end the meditation with an option to offer surrender,

With some beautiful relaxation.

And so if you're not in struggle,

I encourage you to stick with us.

Again,

You might just have fun with this.

If you're not connecting with something on a deep level,

You can still do this exercise and remember a time when you had struggle or imagine what it's like to be in struggle and it'll still be useful to you.

So what we're going to do is I'm going to give you a couple of scenarios and we're going to work a little bit on letting out some anger because that's part of what struggle is and that's part of releasing struggle.

So sometimes I talked about offering surrender and that's something that we do with love and we may get there and we may be able to offer a little bit of surrender by the end of this meditation.

But sometimes struggle looks a lot like Homer just beating the crap out of his barbecue pit and then running into it and falling in love with it.

Running into it and falling on the ground and laying there.

Sometimes releasing struggle is just tiring yourself out to the point where you don't have anything left.

And I think so many of us,

Especially women,

Have a hard time connecting with anger.

We're taught from a young age not to express anger.

It's not okay and so we kind of bury it.

We swallow it.

A lot of times it gets turned inward and that can cause depression for sure.

So we're going to work with anger a little bit in this meditation.

I went to a workshop many years ago at the same place where I was seeing my therapist and it was an anger,

Grief,

And shame workshop.

And part of it was we had a whiffle bat and you were supposed to kind of yell at someone or something you were mad at and hit this chair with the bat.

And I remember I just couldn't connect to that.

I was so separated from my anger at that point.

It was buried so deeply that I couldn't even summon it up.

But that's changed a lot in these years and we're not going to physically do anything.

We're going to do it in our energetic sanctuary,

In our space.

We're going to be in a very safe space.

I'm going to let you choose your scenario.

I'm going to throw a couple out now just to kind of help you.

But whatever comes to you in this situation,

You can absolutely use the barbecue in a Homer Simpson.

I feel like I described that pretty well in the video.

I'm going to show you how to do that.

So if you can visualize it or maybe you saw that episode,

You can imagine that you've built up this big castle of Legos or Tinker Toys or whatever kind of building toy you might have played with as a kid and you can kick it down.

We're going to let out some steam.

We're going to let out some anger.

So let yourself think about or let it come to you.

Just something you can picture,

Something you can visualize or describe if you're not a visual person that allows you to have that feeling of Homer Simpson beating his barbecue.

And essentially we're going to get that out of us,

Tire ourselves out a little bit,

Huh,

And then just let it go.

And then we'll maybe step into a little bit of that idea of surrender and offering love,

But if you don't get there,

That's totally fine.

You might spend the entire meditation wailing on something and miss the end of it and that's completely fine too.

As always,

Be gentle with yourself and let yourself feel this stuff.

I say that every week and this week's a little different.

We've never really done any work with anger.

We've talked about trauma which can absolutely bring up anger.

We have talked about grief.

We've talked about a lot of different emotions and every week I tell you to let the emotion come up if it comes up,

To breathe through it.

And this is no different.

If you're in a place where you can vocalize and you want to start yelling,

You can absolutely do that.

You can take this as far as you can in a safe way,

In a healthy way,

And only you know what that limit is.

Don't get the cops call on you because you're screaming.

Nobody wants that.

But you know where your limit is so let this go as far as you feel comfortable or slightly uncomfortable doing.

It's always good to be a little uncomfortable,

But bring it back in when you're ready and join us for at least a few minutes if you can in letting that go.

And when you're really in struggle,

Again,

Like if somebody had said to me three days ago,

Oh offer was surrender,

I would have like had some choice words and fingers to show them.

So let go of as much as you can.

If you can't let go of anything,

That's fine.

But chances are you'll feel better after this even if it's just from getting this kind of bleh out of you.

And we'll probably do some toning.

Again,

I'll bring it in so that because I don't want to leave you in a state of rage.

That's not our goal here.

The goal is to kind of get there,

Let go of as much as we can,

And then come back into that neutral state.

So we're going to get a little out of that neutral state in our meditation.

Or you can do it from that state.

You can almost look as though you're looking in on a scene.

You can watch Homer Simpson do it as long as you feel like you can connect to that.

Because the important part of this is letting yourself feel your struggle.

Letting yourself acknowledge that there's struggle there,

However insignificant it might be or seem,

Or however huge and overwhelming and scary it is,

Wherever you are on that spectrum,

Connecting with that is scary.

And that's why we're doing it in a safe space.

That's why I'm here to guide you.

That's why we're all holding space for each other.

That's why I've got other tools here that hold space and that clear space.

I realized earlier this week that this little bowl that I've had forever is great for clearing.

I've been using it to clear some of my crystals.

So we're going to use that a little bit at the end to kind of clear all this out.

Because again,

We want to let this happen and then we want to let it go as much as we can.