What surrender looks like

I happened to see Iyanla Vanzant on Super Soul Sunday today...she said:

It isn't me, it is my gift, for this reason I was born. I get that its not me.  I am so afraid, and I'll say afraid, of the power and the drug of celebrity, fame and fortune. I'm afraid because I know the ruthlessness of the ego--he wants to get me and if he gets me, it'll look like God didn't win and God saved me.

I heard it and I started crying. I cried because I iterated this time after time after time.  How can I step into my greatness and not be consumed by ego?

I feel as though Iyanla is a significant part of me. She validates so many things that I think and feel and even express. She says, "Everything is a lesson god would have you learn." I have said, "God speaks in the way that we listen."  Same same.

Some part of me will often ask no one in particular, "How will I get there?" Where is there? There is somewhere that is the picture of success, love, peace, happiness, but most of all in the position to do what I know for sure I was meant to do. I reassure myself that it does not matter how, it only matters that I know my place. Because I know it I cannot help but to act from it.  I already am everything that I will be.  Some people may find that disappointing, I find it incredibly reassuring.

I've asked that same no one why people "of means" often find their way into my life. I find it frustrating because I see them as my opposite and I see them as a taunt...spending carelessly in the ways that I wished I could.  I read Louis Hay's book You Can Heal Your Life  and she said to give thanks to your bills that creditors trust you enough to give you a service and be grateful that you have the ability to pay them. I scoffed at it back in April when I read it but this week, I did it. I said out loud to god, THANK YOU because I my bills are paid and I am at peace.  I have not given significant energy to worrying about all the things that need to be done financially, I have not devoted my time to anxiety and here I find myself at peace.

Iyanla said that she is clairaudiant; that god allows her to hear beneath the words.  Ironically I told Mara the other day that I would try to explain to my (Counseling) students how to do this and they found it extremely difficult to do and couldn't even understand what I wanted them to do.  I would ask them to listen to the tone, listen to the unsaid...how do you teach a gift? How did I not recognize it as a gift?

When I met with Dr. Green this week I told him the word I felt after his class was broken. I grappled with the words to explain my sentiments fully, I wanted for him to know that I was not broken in the sense that I was destroyed, I was broken in a way that I could now produce. Broken as dawn does the night sky. I am broken open and can give in a way that I couldn't before because I did not even have the language to speak nor the voice to shout. I am broken and give light.  I am free in this. And it was not just his class...but I find that the place I was in, the place I am in touched me in such a ripe place. Iyanla was on a plane. I was in a chair in my classroom.  It is that moment when you are so intimately intertwined with the divine that you cannot help but to give in to the power of the present moment.

I have never experienced another moment as such.

Where would you have me go? What you have me do? What you have me say? To whom?

In the wake of my own surrender, I find those words...I find those words to be the prayer that I spoke through the words, "Thy will be done."

I went to a dinner party this weekend and a friend of mine was explaining his understanding of his Muslim faith. He said something that resonated with me, "I am always in the process of becoming..." We are processes...we are always moving towards some end and away from another and the way that we should go (in my belief) is always towards one of immersion with the divine.

Everything I'd been feeling, everything I thought, theorized, wondered about, questioned...it was validated.  And so I stand here open and in surrender asking those questions. Where would you have me go? What would you have me do?...and I will not hesitate. I will walk. I will trust. I feel so strongly my alignment with my purpose that a step in either direction not meant for me would be immediate samsara and right now I am choosing nirvana.  I am choosing nothing, everything, and god. I am choosing surrender.