I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about The Ring of Fire, mindfulness and letting go lately. My thoughts keep coming back to one central theme that seems to encompass everything.
Surrender.
This word is often misunderstood. I used to think of it as a white flag type of giving up. A form of admitting defeat.
Until 1999, when I experienced a transformative surrender that changed my life. After a 4 year journey trying to get pregnant and eleven infertility procedures, I experienced the death of the baby girl I was finally carrying in my 27th week at age 40.
As a person who had spent my life figuring things out and using my mind to find solutions and make things happen, I was stopped in my tracks. For the first time, I fully surrendered to the pain and loss. To accept that it happened and couldn’t be changed. I did not allow myself to move into “fixing it’ and plan my next strategy to become a parent. I knew I wasn’t ready. So I surrendered. But that NEVER meant giving up on becoming a mother. It meant surrender knowing HOW it will happen.
Fast forward for a moment to our current circumstances. As I write this, over 370,000 people have died of COVID-19. The National Guard are in the streets of my town (Cleveland, Ohio) and 20 other cities in response to outrage and violence that began as peaceful protestors with a message against racial injustice and inequality. A week ago, we witnessed a black man being brutally killed by a white police officer while he begged for his life on the ground.
I’m not going to get political on you; I’m here to teach you and learn myself how we can cope when things we cannot control feel big enough to tear us apart.
Surrender is the only answer.
We are not accepting racial injustice. We are feeling the pain of its existence. We are not giving up on changing what we can.
We are accepting the very painful reality of what we cannot change.
The mantra that I have been using since March, when I found myself constantly anxious about being exposed to the virus is:
Do my best and surrender the rest
I had to accept that I cannot control every conceivable outcome (did I touch the pizza box, the mail…), so when I went to the grocery store, I did my best and surrendered the rest. That meant letting go of constant worry or obsessive news checking.
Many of my clients (and myself) are scared right now about civil unrest and how to heal the horrific injustices committed by other human beings. For me, knowing that I will do my best and surrender the rest brings me some peace. I hope it does for you too.
Rewind back to 1999. My surrender led me to follow a path that unfolded for my family during the following year. On January 31, 2000, I became the mother of Kyle Samuel Alexy Hartson in Novosirisk, Russia.
