This is a story about surrendering from a woman who has found surrender impossible. This is a story about stopping the war, my war, the one I have fought all my life, the one I have not been able to give up despite the fact that I have lost every battle and sincerely declared myself out of action over and over again. It's a story about stopping the war with what is within and around me because I have simply had enough of fighting, because I love my life and the world and have come to realize that in order to find the rest I ache for and the peace I want us to create together, I must give up the war I fight every time I allow my desire to create change, inner or outer, pull me into doing. Change will happen, change does happen, often as a result of our choices and our actions. But every time I let my actions be dictated solely or primarily by the desire to create change, every time I am attached to achieving a desired result, no matter how lofty or "spiritual" that hoped-for result may be, I am rejecting what is and so causing suffering in myself and in the world.
I thought that to heed the call, to know and embody the meaning of my life, I had to learn to do it differently. But what I had to learn, what I am still learning, was to stop doing altogether. I had to learn not-doing, something I had heard about years ago but dismissed as being at best an ideal beyond my humanness or at worst empty spiritual jargon. I remember the first time I heard a teacher, a Native American elder, tell a group of students that they had to learn the art of not-doing. I was a single mother with two small sons living on very little income, and I wondered just how not-doing would work when there are children to get up and dressed, breakfast to prepare, lunches to pack, laundry to do, and a wage to be earned. I misunderstood. I assumed not-doing meant doing nothing - staring at a wall or sleeping - and there was precious little time for this in my life. Of course, even when we sit and stare at a wall or lie in bed sleeping we are usually doing something. We are thinking and feeling and sensing, if only in our dreams.
Each of us needs to experience the truth for ourselves, each of us needs to follow our own path to self-realization even though the self we realise is in essence identical to and not truly separate from all others. There is simply no way to get there except by going through the process yourself.
Your story will be different because the particulars of your history and your personality - the things that have shaped how and why you fight your war with reality and therefore how you stop the war - will be different from mine. But if you suffer at all for the world or yourself, if you spend one moment resenting, resisting, trying to hang onto, or deeply desiring to change what is within yourself or in the world right now, you are fighting with reality. And, fighting reality is a losing battle.
excert from the book The Call by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
excert from the book The Call by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
