Choice & Surrender

Friday, January 21, 2011

DREAM that all 3 of my love interest have just left me, each with another woman. We were in a big modern business building, glass and steel, and I had just spent time laughing, holding hands, and dancing with each of them in turn. Yet when it came time to leave the place, they chose someone else. I was smiling and hurting inside as I saw them go through the revolving door. I remember goofing around with J.P. earlier and ending up on all fours on the floor, and he on all fours as well on top of me, like nestling tables, both of us laughing uproariously. J.D. was there too…

DREAMWORK:

The hurt was palpable even after I woke up. The pain of rejection, confusion, disappointment, crashing shock. Then having to hold myself together with sheer pride. Meals on wheels of hot humiliation and cold grief everyday from now on. These are old, familiar feelings that I haven’t thought about for a while now.

The glass tower was the areana of status quo life I’ve lived most of my adult life. We were all going after the same things, following the same routines, navigating by the same laws, living and dying the same way. This was how we related. This was how we stave off loneliness, how we fit in. This, of course, began in the teenaged years, under crushing peer pressure. At any rate there was safety and security, regularity and normalcy inside this hot house. I could have chosen to stay in it, laugh and love my way into old age, leave and grieve relationships regularly, just like everybody else in there, and die when the black hole gets too big and there isn’t enough of me left to stay on the ground.

But this glass tower was a place for the young. The 3 men were youthful, romantic figures, perfectly preserved as moments in time by my memory. Yet I have not recovered completely from loss of love. These were loves I wanted but stopped myself from reaching all the way for. In the case of both J.P. and J.D., out of fear of defying my conditioning. More than likely, it saved my heart from being broken, but it also eliminated chances to experience love, however imperfect they might have been.

I remember so clearly the playfulness and spontaneity of our bodies tumbling like a litter of puppies, loosened with total abandon into laughter. I have never laughed so loud and hard in all of my life. It was all so innocent. Yet I expected more.

Was it also because I did not take them seriously, did not declare my commitment to love so was taken for a player? Had I played at love like children rough-housing for the afternoon, then had to go home when dinner was called?
~~~~~

For some reason this dream is frustrating me, as if it’s hitting me below the belt and I don’t know why. As I settled into sleep for the night I let it run as it will in my mind, and it came to me that the glass tower shows false freedom, like the fishbowl idea most of the modern business buildings are fashioned on, it is a pretense at being transparent. What is false freedom to me? I’ve a feeling this is the blinders I can not see past. I’ll just let my thoughts run…

I thought I was free, after leaving much of my early conditioning behind, to choose who to love and to love whom I chose. Because I felt I had lost control over that before, I should have it back. I should have control over it. I didn’t know control is very different from choice. Control is procured with fists tightly clenched; choice with hands open. One is hot, the other cool. One is black-or-white, the other a rainbow.

It’s true that in the dream I had no control over the outcome, but I had 3 men to choose from. I ‘explored’ my options but did not make a choice. I waited for them to choose me. I was entirely passive, right up to the end. I swallowed my disappointment and smiled through my heartbreak. I have to choose, when the freedom of choice is presented to me.

It seems such a hairline of difference between manipulation for a desired outcome and making a choice based in surrender. Surrender is not synonymous with passivity. I’ve never felt very clear about this. But if surrender is not just sitting around doing nothing and waiting for fate to knock my door, then what is it? Surrender is looking at the choices I have with hands and heart open, grounded in love and stillness, and letting that love (for myself, for the greater good, for Life) guide me to the best choice for me, accepting and trusting that this is the best choice, even if I can’t see it at the moment.

So what does this mean to me now, with the choices I am facing? I have the choices of going out to get a job for money, or continue to focus on self-healing and honing my skills in writing, or stop trying/doing everything and see what comes, or combinations of the above. Looking at these choices with as much openness and love and stillness as I can, I allow love to guide me now. Love, what will you have me do?

Love says:

"Love yourself. When you love yourself, you stop struggling like a fish caught in a net. The net is the struggle. Ditch the net.

When you love yourself, you wouldn’t beat yourself up. Again, ditch the net.

When you love yourself, you allow the best to come your way, and when it does, you do not turn away from it because it’s not what you expected, because it’s too expensive and you’re on a budget, because it’s too this or that. Ditch the net, the struggle, the fear.

Surround yourself only with love."

Stay loose, spontaneous, playful, and in the moment, as we were in the dream, but stay alert and open to choices. Make the choice of loving myself.