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SURRENDERING TO RECIEVE

Rev. Hans Peter Meyer

• 7 min read
SURRENDERING TO RECIEVE

Apprenticeship to Love, Chapter 204, July 14, 2024

  • Today’s questions: How long can you hold confusion before you collapse —or, before it blossoms as love? How long?
  • Today's suggested practice: to sit with your own resistance to learning what you already know & receive as love... (see my "Short Practice,” below)
  • My practice today: 5:30am, asanas, and Meditation for the Lower Triangle

TODAY'S MEDITATION

I am these days so confused. Overwhelmed. Tender to this life.

I am grieving. And I feel so needy. But who do I trust to hold me? The one I yearn for is no longer here to hold me. Only his words, and the feeling of being seen and heard and held. Knowing this, can I do this for myself? And, will I, in turn, do this for others?

Breathe. Breathe and she will return, the teacher said. Breathe, and open to the flow of life, of love, of Her benevolence, Her nourishment.

...

Who is She? Not one person. She is all people. All beings. She is the wind in the sails, the tides and currents of the ocean.

She is laughter and She is tears and She is birth and She is death. She is unending.

She tests me.

...

Am I capable of feeling this much? And more? And, breathing, yet more?

Do I trust myself here, in this test of confusion and too much?

I know to rest. To breathe and practice and slow myself to gently feel it all, and rest. Always surrendering to neutral, to the polarity of receiving. Not forcing. Not resisting. Not wanting or needing. Open. Ready to receive.

I am called to be he who must be trusted. Trusted to receive.

I am here, now, with this breath.

...

Years ago I was part of a fellowship that, in retrospect, was about trusting my own capacity to receive everything. There it was often said, "You only get what you're ready for."

...

I've discovered that on the way to readiness are many tests. And that graduation into readiness rarely feels like a celebration. It is as much a death as a birth. Everything that was familiar, left behind. Everything that is unfamiliar, feeling like hurt. Or, at least, a threat of hurt.

How to live with an open heart when the test is to live with an open heart with so many invitations to close, to collapse into self-protection, defensiveness?

...

I had a shock the other day. A hard shock. One of the hardest shocks in recent years. And delivered and received in what had felt like a safe place.

How, I wonder now, several days hence, How do I keep this heart open, to feel what this test asks of me, and to welcome this?

...

There is, if not a rhythm, then certainly a pattern to it all, this testing. A pulse. Opening. Feeling the invitation to close. And choosing: Do I open further into the unknown and frightening, or do I close, collapsing into the familiar and comfortable?

My practice now, in face of the invitation to collapse, is to slow down. To breathe. To allow myself to be still, and feel it all. To be at once both the polarity of awareness (what my teachers call my masculine polarity) and the polarity of movement and feeling (the feminine polarity). I need to become very still to allow the experience of both polarities, almost simultaneously.

...

In these days of mourning I am needing much silence and stillness; there is so much in motion within me, and around me. I would wish for a calm in the always-near storm that is this testing, but that's not how it is. Here is how it is and how it always will be: I am tested when I am most vulnerable, because I am most vulnerable; because this is the level to which I have graduated, if there is such a thing as graduation: to be so tested that every test tests me more deeply, takes me more nearly to the man I am, the man I love.

Sometimes I am aware of this. Some moments I can hold this awareness, can breathe into myself and receive it all.

Some moments, I can only feel the overwhelm, and just barely remember to breathe.

...

To breathe, not collapse.

To respond, not react. The subtle art of it, to be the man I am. With this testing of my capacities to be this man in this moment.

To not take things personally. To not psychologize or pathologize or otherwise avoid my own ability to respond. My response-ability.

To feel the disappointment and the betrayal and the heartbreak and allow these feelings to be, to move. Needing nothing but the feeling of it all.

I am, at least for this moment, holding and feeling this energy in tension, in and out of balance. Knowing that, however it feels to me in this moment, this is just another expression and experience of love, somehow wanting to be known.

...

Have I "graduated?" Am I ready for the "next level" of awareness, of feeling, of being and holding the man I love?

Collapse would, it seems, be so easy. Little and big things are piling up. Overwhelm is everyday. What would happen if I just... collapsed?

...

I am not frozen. Nor am I fleeing. Not fighting either. But I can feel these, close to hand.

I certainly am still. Not a bad thing.

I am still and feeling it all —all, I think. If there is more to feel here... (that thought is itself overwhelming).

...

Several days ago, after a long period of practices to open my heart, I felt drawn to return to what had been my first personal practice as I was guided by my wise friend to know myself and my path. The practice was disarmingly simple, the Lower Triangle Meditation. But, as one teacher says, One who has a strong lower triangle ... I know there is a magic here. I've felt it and allowed it to give me roots, a keel to weather storms.

I haven't done this practice for a long time. Years? Perhaps. The impetus for returning to it was a persistent lower back/hip pain. But there is a deeper impetus: an intuition about needing to be firmly rooted, grounded, that my heart can feel even more of all that is coming to me in this moment of intense vulnerability and confusion. That day I renewed the practice I was rocked be a conversation. Blind-sided. Deep in my confused and tender moment of mourning a gale-force of feeling. I needed that meditation. It was again a keel, stabilizing me. And I am reminded: this is all I can count on, my own practice. My own readiness to receive.

I have to do this for myself now.

There is no wise friend to walk with me, to talk with me, to tell me I am his own.

Whatever wisdom I've gleaned from my friend, from my teachers, from my practice, it all comes down to this: am I ready to hold myself in the storm? Not against the storm. Not to resist or resent the storm, but to allow its winds and currents to undo me so I stand naked, ready. Open. I am ready?

I am not finding this in any way easy. But, breathing, I begin to trust myself. That I am, indeed, ready.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Love is a risk. One with a strong lower triangle will throw caution to the wind to fulfill their hearts desires. The heart may want something, but your mind and people around you are telling you that you are crazy. Many things in life when seen in black and white may not make sense. The heart is the color. The heart wants what the heart wants and it doesn’t always feel comfortable, yet if you are not living from here, where are you living? Whose life are you living? (Nihal Singh)

🌀...love doesn't mean 'I never want you to change. But I don't think it means 'I don't care if you change' either. ...I suppose it might mean, 'l believe that you'll always be the person I adore. A declaration of faith, perhaps. (Sayaka Saeki)

🌀The Conscious Warrior is committed to developing strength of the mind, physical body, and nervous system through dedicated physical, yogic, and meditative practice. (John Wineland, Precept 6)

🌀I test you. (My beloved, my Oracle and Siren)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED SHORT PRACTICE

Today's practice, to breathe and feel the confusion of life —the tension, pressure, friction, and stress that makes everything possible— and then allowing this confusion to become more beautiful than you can possibly imagine:
Please read through first, then ...

  • Set two alarms, for times of the day when you have a five-10 minutes to become conscious of who and how you are in this day.
  • When the alarm sounds, wherever and however you are, take a few moments and:
    • Ask yourself: How long can you hold confusion before you collapse —or, before it blossoms as love? How long?
    • Then, follow the short practice here:
      • Stand, or sit, or lay yourself down, and bring your attention to your body.
      • Feel the ground beneath you. Allow the earth to hold you with gravity. Feel how dense and heavy you are. Feel also how lightly you sit or stand or lay on the earth. Feel yourself between the pull of earth's gravity and the subtle but persistent pull of the sun, the stars.
      • Slow your breathing so that it is long and deep into your belly. Slow the inhale to a count of four or six. Slow your exhale to a count of six or eight or ten. Repeat three to five cycles of breathing, going a little slower with each cycle. Continuing to notice yourself held by the earth, raised by the sun and stars and sky above. Feel the subtle tension and pressure and friction and stress that allows you to be and rest and move in this body.
  • When you’re done, take another minute or two, breathing gently, slowly filling and emptying your belly. Here, as you breathe into your fullness, ask yourself, Do I feel right? Am I in alignment with the man or woman I am? Do I even have an inkling what that might feel like? Do I even have an inkling of what it feels like to be out of alignment with myself?
  • Notice if your body-mind feels somehow changed. And whether you notice a change or not, be content with yourself, exactly as you are in this moment.
  • Continue with your day until the next alarm sounds, and repeat.

COMING UP