Every day I write a to-do list. It’s a bit like the washing in this house, i.e. never ending. No matter how many things I tick off the list, it is rarely complete. Once one task is done, another takes its place. In addition to all the things on said list, I have my father to care for, three teenagers at home and a business to run. I am what my spiritual mentor has coined ‘The S T R E T C H E D woman’
What can I do to remedy this? I’m reading a book at the moment called The Surrender Experiment where the author writes about how he sat alone in the woods and meditated for days on end and then decided to surrender and go wherever life took him. He said ‘yes’ to things he would rather refuse and as a result, all kinds of opportunities came his way.
He allowed his higher self to run his life and the results were much better than they were when his thinking mind was in the driving seat.
It reminds me of the tall pines that I witnessed swaying in The New Forest the other week. They were big and strong, yet they yielded and moved gently with the breeze. If they were too rigid, these trees would snap in strong winds.
I want to be like that. Going with the flow, allowing the current of life to sweep me along without blocking it with self-built dams of stress, doubt and fear, for they are the things that stop me growing.
Marion’s advice to the stretched woman is to care for herself, before others. To make time to do things that bring joy and to meditate. ‘Everyone’s life becomes easier when they do some kind of meditation practice,’ she wrote in an e-mail to me this morning.
Michael A.Singer who wrote The Surrender Experiment, makes all his important decisions from the calm place he reaches during meditation. His journey is fascinating – he went from sandal wearing hippy in the woods, through to bestselling author and founder of a multimillion dollar software firm. The right people, opportunities and even cash, all came into his life at just the right moment, as if by magic.
The moral of this story? I need to keep going with the meditation and learn how to surrender. I didn’t meditate for a couple of days either side of our bomb scare and I could feel the difference. Sometimes my mind doesn’t quiet at all and recently, it’s been particularly noisy, but the process of sitting down and noticing how I feel is so useful. Most recently I’ve realised that despite all this spiritual work, my inner voice is still very harsh. It’s time to be kind to myself. I’ve said this many times before on this blog and can’t quite believe I haven’t changed the script. Still, there’s no time like the present…