Sometimes the stress of living is overwhelming, like a hailstorm with no end in sight. It hurts, it's chaotic, it just won't let up. You want to make it stop, and you can't. At the same time, your spiritual teacher, your 12-Step group, or your therapist is telling you to let it be, to roll with it, not to take it personally, to appreciate the moment. What?!?!? They're kidding, right?
What's to appreciate about being pummelled? How do you roll with it when you have too many responsibilities and too few hands to tackle them? How is it not "personal" when your boyfriend says good-bye forever or you're fired from your job?
To reckon with this sort of spiritual guidance means to take a different perspective altogether, and this is always hardest to do when the vicissitudes of the outside world seem to have control of you. When you feel controlled by circumstances, your defenses go up, and when your defenses are up, you lose contact with your inner being.
Whatever the circumstances, your inner being is steady, calm, perceptive, and wise. It waits for you to find it, and when you do, it will guide you to the extent that you stay open to it. Your inner being knows that a more flexible you negotiates storms effectively, "rolls with" them. It knows that when you are centered in yourself (not "self-centered," but centered in the depths of your inner being), you can let the outer world "be" and draw strength and courage from within. It allows you to discern truth from falsehood, right action from re-action, and your responsibility from that of others. In being with your deepest self, you are living in the moment.
As I write this, the First of the Twelve Steps comes to mind. It is openness to my inner being which allows me to admit that my egoic self, made up of all the defenses I have learned over a lifetime, is powerless and that manageability can come about only when I let my defenses loosen their hold.
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