Shift it or Surrender to it.
Yesterday, in our Divine Connections class, my students (also teachers) talked about the Spiritual journey as a human being.
Emotions come and go, and part of the experience is to learn whether to simply shift to another emotion or to surrender to the experience.
I suppose, for me, I always shift first. It’s the easiest thing. I notice the emotion and decide that I don’t want to feel that, so I switch to another. This may mean that I simply notice a negative thought and replace it with a positive one. It may mean that I change my physicality. I may go outside and put my bare feet in the ground. I may choose a favorite distraction…I may make myself busy in order to outrun it.
But there comes a time…when I notice that the feeling has been plaguing me and is showing up in spite of my best efforts. I notice when I’m “acting out”. I become angry, I get triggered, or my favorite…I swear at people in the Walmart parking lot from the safety of my car.
Then it becomes necessary to surrender to it.
Surrendering is a much more difficult path…. because it requires you to feel the emotion and that can be really, really uncomfortable.
It’s in those moments that you must be conscious of the “let it be” process. There are two components of letting it be…
1 Allow the emotion to exist
2 Don’t do anything about it
This is the process of leaning into the emotion. It’s uncomfortable as shit cuz you have to allow yourself to feel. You can journal through it in order to understand, you must be gentle with yourself but ultimately it’s an acknowledgement that you feel it, you have every right to feel it and you just don’t judge yourself. You let it be.
Eventually…you feel better. Eventually, you understand.
It may take a day or two. It may take longer. The length of time is entirely dependent upon how much you truly surrender.
There’s an alchemy that takes place in surrender. By allowing your negative feelings to exist without judgement, without taking action…light seeps, healing occurs and understanding takes place.
This is the process of building spiritual muscle.