excerpts from A Return to Love
by Marianne Williamson
For in God’s hands we rest untroubled…
What if we truly believed there is a God – a beneficent order to things, a force that’s holding things together without our conscious control? What if we could see, in our daily lives, the working of that force? What if we believed it loved us somehow, and cared for us, and protected us? What if we believed we could afford to relax?…
…We've basically been taught that it's our job as responsible adults to be active, to be masculine in nature — to go out and get the job, to take control of our lives, to take the bull by the horns. We've been taught that that's our power. We think we're powerful because of what we've achieved rather than because of what we are. So we're caught in a Catch-22: we feel powerless to achieve until we already have.
If somebody comes along and suggests that we go with the flow, maybe lighten up a little, we really feel hysterical. After all, we're total underachievers as is, as far as we can see. The last thing we can imagine doing is becoming any more passive than we already are.
Passive energy has its own kind of strength. Personal power results from a balance of masculine and feminine forces. Passive energy without active energy becomes lazy, but active energy without passive energy becomes tyrannous. An overdose of male, aggressive energy is macho, controlling, unbalanced, and unnatural. The problem is that aggressive energy is what we've all been taught to respect. We've been taught that life was made for quarterbacks so we exalt our masculine consciousness, which, when untempered by the feminine, is hard. Therefore, so are we — all of us, men and women. We've created a fight mentality. We're always fighting for something: for the job, the money, the relationship, to get out of the relationship, to lose weight, to et sober, to get them to understand, to get them to stay, to get them to leave, and on and on. We never put away our swords.
The feminine, surrendered place in us is passive. It does’t do anything. The spiritualization process – in men as well as women – is a feminization process, a quieting of the mind…
…The right relationship between male ands female principle is one in which the feminine surrenders to the masculine. Surrender is not weakness or loss. It is a powerful nonresistance….
When we surrender to God, we surrender to something bigger than ourselves — to a universe that knows what it's doing. When we stop trying to control events, they fall into a natural order, an order that works. We're at rest while a power much greater than our own takes over, and it does a much better job than we could have done. We learn to trust that the power that holds galaxies together can handle the circumstances of our relatively little lives.
Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside…surrender doesn't’t obstruct our power, it enhances it…
…To relax, to feel the love in your heart and keep to that as your focus in every situation — that's the meaning of spiritual surrender. It changes us. We become deeper, more attractive people.
In Zen Buddhism, there's a concept called "zen mind," or "beginner's mind." They say that the mind should be like an empty rice bowl. If it's already full, then the universe can't fill it. If it's empty, it has room to receive. This means that when we think we have things already figured out, we're not teachable. Genuine insight can't dawn on a mind that's not open to receive it. Surrender is a process of emptying the mind…
…The wise person doesn't’t pretend to know what it’s impossible to know. "I don’t know" can be an empowering statement. When we go into a situation not knowing, there is something inside us which does. With our conscious mind, ‘we step back in order that a higher power within us can step forward and lead the way.’…
We don't have to be struggling all the time. If you think about it, "taking the bull by the horns" would be a very dangerous thing to do. In fact, ambitious tension actually limits our ability to succeed because it keeps us in a state of contraction, emotionally and physically. It seems to give us energy but doesn't really, like the white sugar of mental health; there's a short high, followed by a crash. The cultivation of mental rest, or surrender, is like eating healthy food. It doesn't give us an immediate rush, but over time it provides a lot more energy.
This doesn't require sitting in a lotus position all day. We still get excited, but more gently. Many people a spiritual life with a grade B movie, but God doesn't get rid of all the drama in our lives. He just gets rid of the cheap drama. There is no higher drama than true personal growth. Nothing could be more genuinely dramatic than boys becoming real men and girls real women…
…We are simply asked to shift focus and to take on a more gentle perception. That’s all God needs. Just one sincere surrendered moment, when love matters more than anything, and we know that nothing else really matters at all. What he give us in return for our openness to Him, is an outpouring of His power from deep within us. We are given His power to share with the world, to heal all wounds, to awaken all hearts… |
