Avalokitesvara. Do you know who that is?
This is a photo I took in Tokyo in February. Avelokitesvara is connected to the path that started it all for me many, many years ago: Vajrayana. I treasure all my experiences. Even....maybe especially....the insanely hard ones. I can say that now. Because it is in the fire and discomfort of the challenges that we have the opportunity to grow stronger and learn how to overcome the things that seem "unovercomeable".
Many moons ago, before I had even heard about this thing called the Modern Mystery School, in my haste to arrive at something more for my life, I had once said "fast is OK!" I didn't understand at the time what I was okaying! I would not recommend making that request to the Universe/God/Angels/Powers that Be. It's not for the faint of heart!
A lot of deconstructing happened after that. A lot of breaking down. Breaking down of the crystalized limiting parts of my ego (you can call that "negative ego"), of everything I thought I knew about myself and the world, of my attachment to trying to control my life by trying to "convince other people", of wanting to control others, of being confronted with my greatest fears and experiencing them in all their technicolor glory!
When I was well past the breaking point, I finally surrendered.
And that's when I let the Magick and Mystery in full force.
I literally remember sending a prayer up that said "I have done everything I know how to do and it hasn't helped get me where I want to go. I'm open to whatever it is that will help me the most and I will receive it without trying to understand it or judge it or rationalize it." The next day, the help I needed arrived and I kept my promise. I emptied my cup and was willing to just receive.
It was a day that changed my life.
What I experience that day, and in the years following, had no "logical" explanation by the standards of the world. It was beyond "normal physical world" explanations. And I was ok with that.
I don't recommend a complete breakdown to get to that point. I don't believe it is necessary. But it is fast. And for some, especially those like me with a strong mind and powerful drive of will, it can be the experience that finally gets us to let go of our ideas and open to possibility in a way we were not capable of before.
Not because I "wanted to" but because I had done everything I knew to "get back in control" and nothing was working. So I decided I had to accept where I was. I had to accept my ignorance and get over myself, and be willing to learn to be OK with that. Once I accepted where I was and all that had "happened to me", that's when healing came.
Not because I stopped trying to move forward, but because I let go of what I thought I wanted and was willing to be open to forging a new path that was very outside everything I knew existed.
That doesn't happen overnight. It is a process.
It is a process for which I am grateful.
Surrender is an interesting word.
One of my past mentors once asked me what surrender meant. I had an answer at the time. But, from the place I am now, over 12 years later, I am aware I had NO IDEA what that really meant. I'm not sure we can know until we have lived it.
We often think of surrender as relinquishing our power to something outside of us.
Our dictionary definitions lead us to that conclusion even:
"the act of stopping fighting and officially admitting defeat" (Cambridge Dictionary)
"to yield to the power, control, or possession of another upon compulsion or demand." (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
It doesn't, actually, mean giving up your authority and your higher inner power to something outside of you.
I would offer, for consideration, this idea:
What if "surrender", in the context of our spiritual growth, personal alchemy, and consciousness evolution, meant giving authority to your Higher Spiritual nature rather than to the world?
Surrendering your attachment to your stories of the Lower Self.
What if it meant letting go of (surrendering), all the ideas of who you are that limit your positive growth and letting go of the ideas you have about how you think you control things...letting go of everything that is actually NOT serving you, that is keeping you small, that is confining you to a limited life of drama and suffering, even if it is just a low level background "normal" suffering.
What if it meant surrendering to your Higher Self and the divine inner power that has your highest Good at heart and which is often antithetical to the programming you have accepted from the world and which places limits on what is possible.
Our "logical" mind does a good job of limiting us. And it does a good tricky job of weaving stories, justifications, blame and powerlessness under the guise of keeping us safe. In other words, keeping us in our comfort zone and settled in the stories that are familiar and are accepted through group consensus.
In order to grow we do need to break out of our current situation and the foundations of the belief systems that are holding us in patterns that are limiting us, keeping us small and cycling in the human drama.
That is definitely uncomfortable.
And, it is the greatest gift we have in this human life....that is, if we have the tools and support and have cultivated the inner strength and willpower to break through!
AND sometimes we can all use a little help!
So, for those who don't know, Avalokitesvara is an Ascended Master, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. AKA Chenrezig. Quan Yin.
Compassion, in the Buddhist definition, is the wish for all beings to be free of suffering and its causes.
What I understand so far: the main cause of our suffering is our ignorance...our misunderstanding of how the world REALLY works.
Can we surrender our wrong ideas?
How do we know what our wrong ideas really are?
Those are answers we can be guided toward by others, but we only really know when we explore the depths of our own inner consciousness and subconscious to uncover those answers for ourselves.
Doing that in an effective way is something that can be learned. And the process can be significantly supported and enhanced by elevating your Spiritual Power, your frequency.
That does't take away the effort required to climb over. But it does make the amplitude of the obstacle considerably less in comparison to your capacity.
This blog post comes courtesy of my quite morning in Tokyo back in February, as I prepared to explore the Mysteries of Life and Myself more deeply through the ancient path of Initiation in the lineage of King Salomon through the auspices (read "kindly guidance") of the Modern Mystery School International.
This adventure I am currently engaged with came also as a result of a hard-won surrender and another prayer sent up when I was ready to grow past the threshold I had reached "doing it on my own".
Another life changing decision in the best ways!
Life is Amazing, and magickal, if we allow it to be.
Magick is just what we call things we can't fully explain yet.
Magick is what we call things our human physical sciences don't yet know how to measure or explain.
Life is Magick.
We are Magick.
You are Magick.
Open to Magick.
Live it.
Ask me if you want to know more. I could talk about this stuff forever (if you can't tell ). It lights me up!
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