SURRENDER, ACCEPT, EMBRACE

  A small breakthrough this morning. For the past few weeks, I’ve had a pain inside, as if there’s something nasty and mean - nasty to me, mean to me - at the core. I recognize it as part of the depression that’s been on me for a while but this isn’t one of its usual hallmarks, not the usual intensified self-loathing and a constant going over failures and humiliations. This was a sharper physical pain and it’s been very disturbing.

     This morning, I was feeling it and this time I closed my eyes and tried to focus on it, instead of trying to get away from it. I looked for it in my body, in my chest and belly, and slowly something shifted, the sharpness of the pain began to dissolve and I found myself saying, “surrender, accept, embrace” over and over again like a mantra, and slowly I began to feel the surrender, the unclenching, and acceptance of where I am now with all my faults and failures, and then beyond acceptance to a full embrace of all that is now and all that I am now.

    I’ve been here before, going through this process, these steps: surrender, accept, embrace. And I’ll be there again because full and complete surrender doesn’t exist, only the surrenders that go along with specific circumstances and those circumstances keep coming up and changing; we live on a case by case basis. In the same way, there isn’t full and final acceptance or final embrace. We never come to the end of what we have to learn. There will always be something more to do.