There is an old proverb about letting things go in order to receive them. This is usually referenced to relationships, how we have to release people in order to have them truly come to us. The hard part being that if we expect them to come back then we have not really let them go, have we?
Its not just relationships for which this may be said. In some manifestation processes the last step, after working on the vision of what we want in various ways, is to cast it out to the universe to come back to us. We have to surrender at some point in order to receive.
Surrendering is a state of neutrality, in which receiving or not receiving are both options. It is not that when we surrender, the universe will do everything the way we want it to. If we still have expectations, we still have attachment.
Perhaps it is that if we are full of need and want, expectation and attachment there is no space for the things we think we want to show up. Perhaps it is about the level of our being that we are experiencing? Is it the egoic level of judgment, need, and attachment? or the spiritual level of knowing that we are held and supported Spiritually through everything?
In healing work the opposite is also true. Until you can allow something to be, it cannot change. Until you can have it, you can not release it. Until we move through resistance to a place of neutrality the deep healing can’t happen.
This doesn’t mean we have to like it, or approve of something, but we have to accept that it is there. How can you change something that is not there?
Several years ago I started some deep body work because I had some lower back issues. One of the first things that came up was pain associated with an old scar in my belly. A hernia operation when I was 3 months old, that I had been carrying for nearly 50 years. It never particularly bothered me, but it sure was painful when worked on.
I had to find it and allow it to be, before I could clear and release it. This is true on many levels and there are ways of safely working with deeper things. But when I stopped holding onto that pain, space was made for something else to be present. Knowing it was there I was able to make a choice to let it go.
To adapt the poet:
True havingness is a place beyond giving and receiving, in which Life is: flowing and changing. In that place were we can allow things to be or not be, anything is possible. Allowing something to not be we can create it, allowing something to be we can release it.
Join me on the journey to that place of havingness, in which process we may discover what we really need.
(© 4/2009)
