400 Days of Surrender — Day 17: Drop the drama
New to this series? You can find Day 1 and why I’m writing this here.
As I was meditating this morning, thoughts were buzzing through my head: Where is this surrender journey gonna lead me to? Where am I going to be in 10 years? Is this the right journey? How will my finances develop? etc. etc.
Then a conversation with a client yesterday came to mind: He’s going through a lot of changes in his life and it’s a very difficult period. It’s all dark in his perception. We had a long conversation and one of the things that stuck with him was to be in the moment rather than in his stories of what has happened, of beating himself up and letting go of the need to figure out what will be in a couple of weeks.
The moment he dropped the drama and became fully present to whatever he was doing or whoever he was interacting with the pain subsided (because there is no pain in the moment but when you are worried about the future) and he felt more lightness and ease and started to enjoy the presence. If you focus on the presence and add acceptance to that whatever is (because that is what reality is right now anyway, you can’t change that moment only the next one) then there’s little standing in the way of you being happy. It really is that simple. The difficulty is in understanding and then reminding ourselves of that (because it is counter of most of us function).
As I was sitting in my meditation that realisation made me smile, the buzzing thoughts stopped, a feeling of comfort and confidence returned that it will all work out fine and I felt excited again about the many discoveries and explorations that I will encounter in the months to come.
Next I jumped into the shower. It was 10 degrees in London this morning and the water is freezing cold (I shower only cold). I was apprehensive, my head was anticipating this is going to hurt. I was again creating drama and unnecessary “pain.” And then I just opened the faucet. It was freezing cold and it stayed so for the minutes I was underneath it but the moment I dropped the drama, it was ok. It wasn’t that bad despite me feeling cold even before the shower because of a lack of sleep.
All of the drama we create in our head and that makes life full of suffering. The moment we drop the stories that we create around reality, the future and the past, we instead come back to the present moment and we surrender/accept whatever is right now, the clouds and noise disappear and beauty and sun enters our life.
If you only take away one thing from this series of posts so far then let it be this one. It’s an absolute game/life changer. We spend so much time trying to make life and our circumstances fit to what we want them to be, hoping to arrive in a certain place and both life and that place keep constantly moving, we are never arriving and hence we feel we are never where we want to be. But you are actually already “there.” There is no arriving. The journey is the destination, literally.
The moment you learn to appreciate moment to moment you start living blissfully. And until then you will suffer every time things are not the way you want them to be and that will be most days. There will always be something that you don’t like no matter how much you change try to change, whether you have all the money in the world, the right person next to you, whatever.
Change your perspective and and your life will change without you having to change anything around you. It’s beautifully simple and yet most of us fight with life every day. And it’s a painful fight. You don’t have to and the moment you realise that, you become free.
Continue to Day 18: Freedom of mind.
