In my book, Simply Sacred, I wrote about a client I called John, a man in his thirties who came to see me at hospice when his wife was dying of a brain tumor. They had tried every treatment to no avail, and she was at the end of her young life. During our first session, he told me he was at peace with the situation. Of course, he was devastated for himself and for his wife, but he had a deep faith that everything that happened was divinely orchestrated—even this. When I asked him how he had been able to come to such acceptance of what they were facing, he told me that God (he happened to be a devout Christian) doesn’t promise that we will never experience hardship. And he explained that he turned to his God to carry him through life’s inevitable storms. This allowed him to weather them with greater equanimity and to continue to grow and evolve from his experiences. This fundamental belief is what allowed him to surrender to life, to his situation.
The spiritual masters of India tell us we are bound by the law of karma, or cause and effect— “As you sow, so shall you reap.” Each of our actions has an equal and opposite reaction. They tell us that on one level we are each living in a world created by our own actions. So resisting what happens makes no sense. This is not to say that we can look at someone, like John, who is undergoing hardship, and judge that they have done something to deserve their difficult circumstance. The law of karma is complex—beyond our limited ability to fully understand it. But what it does tell us is that life requires us to surrender to what is in each moment. And having the knowledge that, on some level, we created our circumstances, helps us to accept what comes to us. The only way to transcend the law of karma, they tell us, is to stop identifying ourselves with our actions. The identification with the doer of action creates karma. It is said in the East that the purpose of the spiritual path is to free ourselves from our karma by identifying with the highest aspect of ourselves.
John’s approach was in contrast to many of those I encountered in my work at hospice whose belief systems crumbled in the face of their devastating losses. They fought against their ‘what is,’ believing it shouldn’t have happened, angry at God, thinking they were being punished, and so on. But John lived his spiritual beliefs–they supported him. In his case, his spiritual path was devotion to a higher power, which allowed him to surrender in the face of great difficulty.
Don’t we all tend to resist the difficult things that come our way? But really, if we could begin to see that everything that comes our way–especially the most difficult challenges–contain valuable lessons, wouldn’t we embrace it all? In the East it is said that all of the experiences life presents are in accordance with our karma. Nothing that happens in our lives is wrong, everything that comes to us is designed perfectly to teach us what we came here to learn.
It’s important to note that John still experienced the normal grief process when his wife died. Trying to avoid our natural emotional reactions, in what is called “spiritual bypass” is not the answer. As I saw at hospice, it takes great courage to face our deepest emotions. But the more authentic we can be, accepting all of ourselves in the moment, the more alive we are.
I think of a quote by philosopher David Whyte: “The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears.” Following a spiritual path that wakes us up to our authentic Self, that requires reaching out to something larger than our limited sense of who we are and what life is all about, is key to releasing the fears that prevent us from living the full expression of ourselves here and now.
Consider This: What will it take to release the fears that are keeping you from experiencing the full measure of your innate vitality?
