BEING MOVED
Nothing you can do about it
We have all experienced the feeling of being moved. It could have been while watching a movie or while witnessing an actual experience play out before your eyes. Something touched you and emotions arose, and they just rolled through you. Nothing you could do about it except let it happen. Maybe you tried to stop it, shut it down or figure it out, or maybe you just surrendered to it happening and allowed it occur. You were touched and then you were moved. It was automatic, and if you didn’t interfere with it by stopping it or trying to make it more than it is, then the process, rhythm or movement completed itself.
If you zoom out you will see that this is how life works all of the time. You perceive something and are in someway moved by it. This isn’t just true for emotions, it’s true on all levels of ourselves. If you feel the sensation of hunger you will find yourself being moved to the refrigerator to put some food into your mouth. You might think that you are the one doing this, but really you are responding to something. Something is moving you to move your body to walk to the kitchen and take a bite of food. Perhaps it’s the sensation of hunger, maybe it is boredom or lack, but nonetheless there is something moving you. Another example is say you experience a thought about something and it excites an urge in you to create in someway. You are then moved to take action. You may grab your computer or a pencil and begin to write some stuff down. Your fingers might move across the keyboard as you research and write. You mat find yourself walking to your car, turning on the ignition and driving somewhere to meet someone to move your mouth or body to be in communication with them.
So often we think we are the one doing all the moving and are unaware of what is moving us. Something itches and we are moved to scratch it. Joy or sadness arises and we are moved to feel it. An idea about a novel invention is revealed to us and we are moved to take action on it. There is this impulse and this impulse is life itself, moving your mind, emotions and your physical body. You of course have the free will to not scratch the itch, not feel the joy or sadness, or not take action on the novel idea, but if you don’t interfere than life just moves through you. There is activity and action, but it is effortless. Effort doesn’t arise out of activity, it arises out of resistance to activity. When something wants to move through us, but we don’t let it, this is effort. It takes effort to not scratch the itch, where scratching it would imply movement or work, but without effort. It takes effort to not feel the emotions that are present within us, this is why we call it repression when we don’t feel what we are already feeling. It takes effort to stop the creative flow, and our energy gets more and more depleted with the less action we take on those thoughts that move us.
LIVING SURRENDERED
The mover
Surrender has become a common place word in spiritual circles, but few really know what it is. Surrender is a moment, or many moments, of loss of personal control. It is not something that you do. Surrender cannot be done. It can only be given into. The reason why most people don’t regularly surrender is because it feels like death. It is death to the separate person you are identified as. That one who thinks it’s right and thinks it knows what and who it is. In surrender it is no longer about you. It’s not about what you want, who you think you are, and what you think you have to do to fulfill your big mission or calling. To the mind surrender can seem boring or like a lack of power, because the personal will appears to get obliterated. It’s not that it actually does, it’s just that it falls into a much larger will and stops operating independently. The entire job of your personal self (aka your mind) is to keep itself alive, front and center. The mind likes to hold its grip, because if it loses its grip it believes it is lost. It feels like a fracture to do so, yet that very fracture is what breaks you open into something much larger and vaster than your perceived separate self.
Why am I talking about surrender now? Because surrender is a state of complete non-resistance. It is experiencing the fullness of being moved. While you get tastes and touches of it when you experience an emotion, thought or sensation that you are moved by, the fullness of recognition in being moved happens in surrender, in that state of complete non-resistance. In surrender all of your attempts to stop being moved fail. While previous to surrender you could stop a feeling, ignore a sensation or choose to not take action on a thought, in surrender that is no longer an option. You’ve given yourself over completely to be moved. The controller or the doer is no longer running any part of the show. If you are tense, tight, gripping, constricted, holding your breath, trying to let go, or trying to make something happen, you are not surrendered. You are not experiencing the fullness of being moved.
So what is the mover? What is the source of what moves us? Some might call it Soul, Love, Light, Awareness, God, Goddess, the One, the Mystery or Life. It’s your true identity. You are the mover, just not in the way you think you are. When you surrender you really only surrender into yourself, so there is no real loss of control, there is only loss of fake control. Control that you think you’ve had, but that you never did. That control which caused all of your suffering because you thought things were supposed to look or be a certain way in order for everything to be ok and when they didn’t you suffered. The secret is that things are only ever supposed to be the exact way that they are. When you stop insisting otherwise you fall into love, love with what is rather than resistance to what isn’t.
There is a season and a rhythm for everything. In some seasons it is time to be a somebody, to have preferences, to have individual desires, to take massive actions on your life that seem to be something that you are doing. This is healthy ego development and a necessary part of the human experience. In other seasons it’s time to be nobody, to drop resistance and rest back into the source of your true self. The more you come to know yourself through a surrendered state of being, the more you rest into the arising. You recognize you are moved (the “you” here being your body-mind) and you are also the mover (the “you” here being source), and there is nothing you can do about it. This is to live surrendered, recognizing that receiving is giving and giving is receiving because there is nothing but you, that is the one you that is inclusive of all.
Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado
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