April Newsletter

Dear Beloveds,

I feel as though all I’ve been writing and talking about of late, is Surrender. So much so that I couldn’t bring myself to write my March newsletter because I didn’t want to bore you all again with my ongoing diatribe of the topic. Lol. Not to mention I’ve been introverting and hermitting hard.

But here I am again. It became clear to me that is what is here to write about, and that most of us need a lot of practice in Surrender, because everything in our DNA tells us to go against it. 

My entire 2022, in fact, last 10 months, have been massive and milestone-like lessons in Surrender. Surrender of career, relationships, home, identity, all of it. My entire life has been on the chopping block, and my grief and heartbreak of so much loss (my ego’s interpretation) has held me in chains, resisting the need to let go.

Don’t get me wrong, we cannot bypass the feelings of grief and heartbreak, those need to be felt and fully expressed and loved on, and then we need to let them go and move on. I’ve been getting a lot of great opportunities to practice letting go.

The thing with this process is that it often takes time to process the heavy feelings before we actually feel like we can surrender. There’s typically an internal struggle as our ego hangs on to things being a certain way. After rolling around in that chaos awhile, we typically tire, and then finally, without having energy to do much else, let go and surrender. Then more waves of emotion typically come on, requiring us to surrender more deeply into feeling our feelings. One minute we’re okay, the next minute we’re sore and hurting and back in the turmoil. Depending how big the original blow was, we may fight some more, get into the old habit of conflict, remember how painful it is to hold on, exhaust from the fight again, surrender again, get wrapped up in a lot of emotion, process that layer of grief, come out, see that we’re okay, and it clicks that we can trust ourselves to handle painful emotions and that we’ll live through them. 

Trust and Surrender go hand in hand. We must trust in our own essence to take on what God gives us, and even bigger, we must trust that a Higher Power has us and that we’ll be taken care of no matter what is happening. Most of us do not trust that we’re taken care of by the Universe. Many people say they do and feel they do when times are good and the energy is high vibe’in. But once Spirit throws us a challenge (an opportunity to practice love) most fall into scare-city and lack consciousness. And to be fair, this is hard not to do. We’re not taught how to deal with our feelings and we’re sure as Heaven not taught how to not fight. Learning to trust in God is not just a one time or one tier thing. It is an every day thing that is attained in tiers of experience and integrated Spiritual wisdom. 

To Surrender, somewhere within us, we must trust that we’ll be okay and that Spirit has our back. To Trust we must know that we aren’t in control of this Life game anyways and that the path of least resistance is to let go and flow. 

Practicing Surrender can be applied in all of life’s daily activities and happenings. When someone wants to cut in front of you in traffic. When your spouse leaves you no hot water for your shower. When the waiter brings you the wrong order. When a relationship fades and takes a turn. When you get de-promoted from your job. When catch covid, etc. What I’ve been learning from so much “loss” is that the rejection my ego has been perceiving is really just redirection and re-configuration. Redirecting me to other people, places and opportunities, and reconfiguration of my values, commitments and relationships. 

Another requirement of the Trust and Surrender process is Patience. We must not rush our Spiritual evolution. Meaning, we must bathe in all the emotions that an experience brings up before it is integrated and we are ready to move on to the next step. When we are patient with our painful experiences, Spirit will guide us through the healing process and eventually create a clearing. When we reach the clearing, the energies start to reorganize and harmonize themselves and we begin to feel wiser, more at peace, and clear to move forward. 

Before reaching the clearing it is common to feel bored and impatient and asking what’s next. Often wondering, “is it always going to be this way?” We’ll think we’ve reached a plateau and that we’re done. The energy is never going to change and we may feel stuck. These are all normal feelings. This is the void and you can often feel numb and distant. Being in the void is likened to moving through a dark tunnel or the birth canal. You are literally going through a process of Spiritual rebirth. I had been in the void for many months and I’ll tell you the energies of hiding, playing small, cocooning, fear, nervousness, anxiety, withdrawn, disassociated, and needing lots of rest, relaxation, lots of alone and quiet time and solitude had all been very present in my field. But Spirit kept telling me, “yes this is what’s needed in order to come back out.” I would check in daily to see if it was time to “come out yet” and for a long and grueling time she would tell me no, not yet.

As much as I feared that my wild, courageous, brave and creative Spirit was gone, I had to learn to Trust that I was being taken care of and Surrender to where she was taking me next. The butterfly always emerges from the cocoon.

In Deep Devotion to the Spirit Path,
Lisa