There’s a paradox to insecurity, as strength can be found in impermanence. Recognizing the truth of your human condition, you are free to release obsolete stories about what constitutes good fortune, and acknowledge that what we think of as bad luck can lead you to spiritual strength. There are gifts in our wounds and benefits in fragility. In the art of losing, writing can help you reframe your story about the losses you have endured. This is how surrender is indispensable to awakening on this writing journey.
Ajahn Chah was a well-loved Buddhist teacher who lived in Thailand at a forest refuge. An American student asked him how to cope with the fact that he could not protect his children from suffering. “How can I live with the knowledge that I can’t save them?” the American asked the old monk. Ajahn Chah smiled and pointed to a crystal goblet he kept on the table by his seat.
Do you see this glass? This beautiful glass has special meaning to me. It was a gift from a dear friend. Drinking from it gives me pleasure. When I tap the glass, it makes a lovely sound. The sunlight coming through its facets creates rainbows. And yet, I know the glass is already broken. When a wind comes along and blows the glass over, or I knock it to the ground accidentally and it shatters into a thousand pieces, I won’t lose faith because I know the glass is already broken. When you remember this is true of everything and everyone you love, you learn to treat them with special care. You’re finally able to see them clearly. And your time together becomes even more precious.
The recognition of impermanence neutralizes the fear behind insecurity. When we remember that we are mortal beings in a mysterious world, we strengthen Beginner’s Mind and each moment comes alive with feeling. Acknowledging impermanence frees us from the desperation to hold onto what can’t be protected.
Loretta learned this the hard way. A die-hard control freak, Loretta came to a writing workshop after experiencing a number of losses in her carefully managed life. Her children had both gone away to college, her husband had finally divorced Loretta after twenty years of her browbeating, and a job she loved because it made her feel powerful had been terminated. All these things had made Loretta feel important and formed the basis of her social identity. Now, she wondered if writing could help her figure out her next career move, but Loretta was about to learn more than she had bargained for. During an exercise, she made a confession: “I’ve never told this to anybody, but I want a man to take care of me, someone who can rescue me. I can’t believe I even wrote that. I hate women who want that from men. I guess that means I hate myself.”
Loretta described watching her father care for her disabled brother and wishing—almost—that she was sitting in that wheelchair. Ashamed of this secret neediness, Loretta had adopted a mask of dominance and control. For most of her life, this posture had worked: her husband, kids, and staff deferred to Loretta as the one in charge. She’d thrived on this diet of self-aggrandizement. But now they were all gone, and Loretta was suddenly face-to-face with her own insecurity. I asked Loretta to write about why she believed she needed to be rescued. This is part of her response.
I feel like a bag lady sometimes. Like there’s no real place for me. Nobody is watching my back. It’s like wandering the world with everything you have in a bag that can be ripped off at any moment. I think I need to be rescued because I’m too scared to put the bag down. My back is breaking but I can’t let go. Nobody’s there to help me. I help them but they don’t help me. Especially now. I have never felt so alone.
When Loretta read this passage to the workshop group, we were all surprised. Watching this dismissive, controlling woman drop her mask and reveal her hidden softness was poignant and extremely tender. In the following weeks, Loretta continued to explore her insecurities and tell the truth. As Loretta’s defenses came down, classmates became her allies, encouraging her to expose herself in the writing and get past the shame of not being strong enough. Loretta’s hardness melted and the mask continued to dissolve. When the class came to an end, her fellow students wanted to stay in touch and encouraged Loretta to write to them. This formerly tough broad was so moved by this kindness that she could hardly take it in. Loretta knew there was no rescue coming; also, that she would never again imagine being completely secure and protected. Instead, Loretta preferred to live with the knowledge that all things end, and this wisdom endowed her with a new kind of strength.
Are you able to live with this knowledge yourself? Or is insecurity a nemesis whose shadow you try to avoid at all costs? Your answers to these questions have everything to do with how confidently you’re able to move through life, knowing the glass is already broken.
Life is impermanent. By realizing and accepting this truth, we can make the most of the time we do have with the people and things that matter most to us.
The myth of security causes us to appreciate our gifts less because we lose sight of life’s precious fragility.
Acknowledging impermanence makes life immeasurably richer and frees us from the desperation to hold on to what can’t be protected.
Use these questions to gauge your own insecurities and see what they can teach you about your attachments, particularly the need for control.
When you recognize insecurity as a path of wisdom and impermanence as the gateway to freedom, you realize that the glass is already broken. Knowing this is a great blessing. It enables you to find the gift in the wound, the insight behind disillusionment.
The root of the Sanskrit word “guru” means “dark to light.” In this basic sense, anything that guides us from darkness to light is our teacher. Anything that enlightens us is our guru. Through your writing practice, as you come to find strength in your weak parts and gifts in your losses, you come to realize that your wounds are also your inner guides. They hold secrets to your spiritual unfolding.
How can a wound become a teacher? The answer is obvious but hard to digest: many of our most valuable lessons only come through pain and loss—however much we wish this wasn’t so. Crisis prompts watershed moments that force us outside our comfort zone to confront problems we wish we didn’t have. By facing them, however, we reveal what we’re capable of. These are moments that crack the story and let in the light.
Awakening and loss are intimately connected. In fact, most seekers come to spiritual practice out of sheer necessity. The awakening path is no walk in the park. The majority of us have to be dragged onto it, kicking and screaming, because life has pushed us to the end of our rope and the only place left to jump is into the unknown. We realize the urgency of waking up and discovering a higher, enduring purpose.
There is a gift in every wound. To find it, we must first learn to bless our own pain—however much we wish it was gone—by recognizing that unexpected power, even happiness, can arise from terrible circumstances. This is a paradox of spiritual wisdom: we cannot transform what we have not first blessed. We can’t reap the fruits of suffering before acknowledging this paradox, that every experience has more than one face. Within any turn of events there are multiple stories unfolding. As a mother whose baby died of cancer told me, “No matter what has happened to you, something else is also true.” When we realize this, we enter a new phase of spiritual awakening.
This doesn’t happen immediately. In the thick of crisis, we’re unlikely to see the dark cloud’s silver lining. But once the worst of it has passed, the opportunity for healing begins to reveal itself. Even if there is no change in your circumstances, a shift occurs in how we view them. This allows the light of insight in, and the more we open our mind and heart, the brighter this light can become—illuminating the gift in the wound. It burns away victimhood, which can mean acknowledging, without self-blame, ways in which we’ve organized our life myth around our wounds and constructed a victim’s persona, and how we hold to behaviors that keep the victim story true, even when they are self-sabotaging and make us unhappy.
This is an important point. For example, people who survived an abusive childhood can bring light to this wound by being willing to drop the victim’s mask and the label of “permanently abused person,” to make way for a new story. This means they will no longer be able to blame the present on the past, to use the losses of childhood to explain today’s neuroses, resistance, and fears. This can be challenging because leaving the victim mask behind presents us with the threat of freedom, which is the most frightening prospect of all. We will do almost anything to avoid actual power and freedom. We’d rather tell ourselves we can’t fly and sit in the cage with the door open, preferring the familiar to the unknown—however narrow and dank it might be.
When I was a boy, I spent afternoons at a stable near our house, volunteering to exercise the horses. I’d lead a horse out of its stall, but no sooner had we left the barn than the horse tried to turn around and go back to his stall. The stable hands called this “barn sour,” and it’s a good metaphor for how we resist our own freedom. When we realize this tendency in ourselves, it liberates us from the habit of stuckness.
Writing helps you explode your self-imposed limits and move toward the unknown equipped with the light of self-knowledge. Gradually, you’ll become more comfortable with insecurity and the paradoxical nature of things, and how a wound can contain a gift.
Our wounds are also our teachers. They hold secrets to spiritual unfolding.
By becoming aware that circumstances have many faces, we recognize that unexpected power, even happiness, can arise from terrible circumstances. We enter a new phase of spiritual maturity.
When we bless our wounds, we stop being a victim. We can look at the ways we’ve organized our life myth around our wounds.
We perpetuate our victim myth to avoid true freedom, and therefore cannot access our full potential.
Here are some interesting questions to write about as you explore the paradoxical relationship between good and bad luck. They can help you dismantle the victim myth.
These challenging questions can help reframe your conventional ideas about adversity to discover the other side of loss and pain. Gains do come with beneficial losses. The next lesson looks more closely at what losing means and how it sparks new understanding.
Loss is as natural as breathing. We begin to lose when we’re still children. We lose innocence upon realizing the world is a dangerous place we can’t be protected from and that, in some unknown future, we will die. In time, we come to lose our youth and naïve ideals on the path to becoming a responsible grown-up. After that, we’re likely to lose lovers, jobs, homes, friends, faith, dreams, and opportunities. To live in the physical world means being in a constant state of loss. The art of living is the art of losing.
Life strips you down—it’s part of the deal—and being willing to change is how we survive these inevitable diminutions. I’ve spoken to some the world’s greatest survivors—from Elie Wiesel, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz, to the woman whose husband was killed in front of her eyes—and all of them agree on one thing: in order to live as a whole person, we have to be willing to be transformed by loss. If we resist the inevitable, we’re torn to bits by life’s endings and detours; if we surrender our fear and stubbornness, untold possibilities come into view.
Surrendering to loss is deeply counterintuitive. Reason tells us that whatever adds to the sum total of “me” is good, and whatever subtracts from it is bad. But this is an oversimplistic illusion. Gain and loss are both valuable. Often, what feels like loss to the mind is a boon to spiritual awakening, reminding us of what can’t be lost and creating compassion for others who are in pain. Loss is an opportunity to see things as they are, tell the truth, and set ourselves free. This enables us to savor our life without believing we possess it, to love without clinging, and to enjoy awe and wonder without imagining they will last. A friend of mine who survived cancer put it best: “I realized that if life truly is a gift from God, then the appropriate response is thank you.” When we’re humble, the temptation to bemoan “why me?” changes to “why not me?” Accepting that we’re not immune to life’s losses deepens our humanity.
Writing can help you explore your losses. The Witness helps you see circumstances in the round, with an enlightened, creative perspective. You’re called on to cultivate a taste for not knowing and aptitudes for mystery, change, and surprise. Artists know that without a blank canvas, creativity cannot happen. Similarly, as a seeker on a path of awakening, you realize that without disappointment and loss, there can be no transformation. You come to see that loss is spiritual grist for the mill and that opposition can make you stronger.
After a great loss, to continue to live as what Elie Wiesel calls “a whole person,” we need to be willing to change and be transformed by it.
Loss is an opportunity to see things as they are, tell the truth, and set ourselves free. It enables us to savor our life without believing we possess it, to love without clinging, and to enjoy awe and wonder without imagining they will last.
Accepting that we are not immune to loss deepens our humanity.
Without disappointment and loss, there can be no awakening.
When you explore loss in your own life, you acknowledge that there is an art to losing and a way of surviving life’s unpredictability with grace, openness, and fortitude. Here are some powerful lines of inquiry that will move you closer to this awareness.
When you turn around your ideas about loss, and embrace a multidimensional approach to understanding experience—in which loss can become opportunity, and uncertainty a doorway to freedom—you shift your attitude toward surrender. Appreciating the tremendous power of surrender is critical on the path of awakening.
In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, compiled around 400 CE, the author offers nearly two hundred aphorisms pertaining to spiritual liberation. In this text, Patanjali sings the praises of surrender as the prerequisite to self-realization, comparing it to a spiritual passport that can take us anywhere we hope to go. When we relax our will and lean into what’s happening, we enter the state of balance and oneness that spiritual awakening promises. Rather than cling to our willful thoughts and attempt to control reality, we’re encouraged to live in a state of surrender, listening to what life is telling us, moving in the direction where we’re being guided—all the while aware of an intelligence superior to the cogitating, ego-driven mind. Writing about surrender accelerates this process by showing you where you’re hooked on control and where personal fears of powerlessness come from.
Surrender begins with the acknowledgment that a higher power is running the cosmos and animating our personal life. Call it “God,” “Tao,” “Buddhanature,” “Christ consciousness,” or “universal intelligence,” the upshot is the same: there is something infinitely more powerful than your stubborn will pulling the strings of this puppet show. When you surrender to this transcendent power and move with the energies at play, self-centeredness relaxes and you learn to harmonize with this mysterious presence.
This isn’t how we’re taught to view surrender. In our have-it-all culture, surrender is often confused with resignation and defeat. But spiritual surrender is another thing entirely: a deference to reality itself and knowing that it cannot be mastered. To our grandiose ego this may sound passive, but genuine surrender feels like a burden being lifted from our shoulders. We finally admit the obvious: we’re a dancer and not the choreographer, an instrument and not the orchestra conductor. Instead of disempowering us, surrender increases our courage, allowing us to take more risks by being less attached to the outcome. Knowing that ultimate results are out of our hands, we learn to lean in and let go simultaneously, to be totally committed yet unattached. Even when we’re required to be aggressive, we can do so in a spirit of surrender—as Arjuna does in the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita. When Arjuna resists the call to battle, the god Krishna tells him to surrender to his duty as a warrior.
When you form healthy relationships with willpower and surrender in your life, you make way for grace and balance. You end the war between push and pull. This enables you to focus on your deep intention to wake up from the dream of struggle.
Surrender has often been described as the single most effective practice for spiritual awakening. It begins with the acknowledgment that a higher power is running the cosmos and animating your personal life.
When you surrender to this higher power and move with the energies at play, self-centeredness relaxes and you harmonize with this presence.
Surrender is a path of strength that allows us to harness a new kind of power, which aligns us with the greater good and relieves the compulsion to control what is out of our hands.
Surrender allows us to live more freely, passionately, and creatively because we are less attached to how things turn out.
When you recognize surrender as the passport to transformation, you learn to welcome challenges as opportunities to lean into your resistance. This helps you open to the unknown and surrender to forces greater than you.
When you realize that surrender does not mean defeat, you’re able to move with conditions as they are. This reduces internal conflict, strengthens trust, and sensitizes you to forces of life that are beyond your control. This shift from control to surrender accelerates self-empowerment and helps to hone your life intention.