Coming undone...

"For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction."

I've had more than one experience in my life where what was happening to me "now" seemed terrible but ended up being a blessing far beyond my ability to orchestrate, control, project, or even imagine. If you have this happen to you a couple of times, others of you may be faster on the uptake than I am, you start to notice the pattern and surrender comes a little easier. If you have much practice with surrender, then you know the better you are at it the more ease?you have in your life.

I'd like to acknowledge an aspect of my experience that has been helpful for me to name. The experience of resistance or just plain old freaking out is still on the ready as the mind's response to change. I like the approach that there is no sense in denying the moment and helpful to identify what's coming up for you. It's also important to realize that the brain and its function as categorizer, judger and "protector" are autonomic functions. You would have more success stopping your heart than you would stopping the mind from offering its projective feedback whenever you encounter a stimulus from the world.

A friend of mine is a visual media professional and works with other folks in the arts arena to get his projects done. He told me about a photographer he works with that mounts his camera to a drone for taking aerial shots and recently traveled to a vacation resort for an event photo shoot.

Now, for those of you interested in the technical aspect of the story, if you travel through an airport with your drone, the x-ray scanner will botch its orienting compass instruments which then have to be re-configured once out of the airport. Our unsuspecting photographer launches his high-end professional drone and $5000 camera into the air without knowing this and it immediately takes off at top speed out of control.

He attempts to get the drone back into control, but it quickly gets far enough out that it is no longer responding to any commands at all. Our pilot frantically searches through the manual for some guidance and finds this advice “if you experience complete loss of control, turn off controller and drone will automatically return to base unit”. He turns off his controller and waits. The drone appears on the horizon, flies back safely to its base and lands on the exact same spot from which it was launched.

If you experience complete loss of control, surrender control. Control is ultimately an illusion and maintaining it keeps you from solutions just out of perception. Now, if you’re like me, you’re better on some days at this than others. Some days it takes being frantic to realize you may need to breathe and center. Surrender is a state of mind, an inner guide revealing that there are more solutions than you may know.

The practice of surrender involves the practice of observing your reactions to change, staying present and realizing that reactions come and go. In the seed analogy, coming apart still feels disorienting and the dark can still be scary and it's ok to feel afraid and out of place. When we use these feelings as ways to calculate what our future will become you train your mind to prepare for the worst which means asking it to start looking of evidence in your environment where the worst is happening to validate the belief system. I was at a recent presentation where the researcher on cognition said that pathology is forward feeding. I would argue that everything is; you get what you focus on. Honor and validate feelings that come up but always remember to breathe deeply and set your focus on the present, so you have your head up and eyes open when the sunrise crests over the horizon. You may feel like you're coming undone, but just remember that you're just growing.