☯️ Surrendering through Victimhood

Letting go of the stories of who we are and how things should be

One of my favorite spiritual teachers, Adyashanti, once wrote that "All victim mentality is a means to stay in separation."

Feel into this for a second. All conceptions that "this person did me wrong" or "the world is so challenging" or "life is hard" are just stories. They're human conceptions layered on top of the IS-ness of reality.

Perhaps moving beyond victimhood involves dropping all stories about why the world wronged us and why something shouldn't have happened and realizing that no situation in our life has the power to make us suffer. That our stories and narratives are masterminding our suffering in complex ego-defending ways.

Through surrendering, we may feel that we'll be lazy, but the irony runs so deep — instead of laziness, we'll be moved by the completeness and totality of life itself!

"When we say a simple and sincere yes to life, yes to death, yes to the ego's own dissolving, we don't have to struggle anymore. ... Flow is what navigates us through life — not concepts, not ideas, not what we should or shouldn't do, not what's right or wrong." - Adyashanti

And maybe surrender means to honor whatever arises, no matter how much fear accompanies it. I'm brought to this common choice I face of either doing creative work or hedonistic pleasure. On one level surrender means to drop resistance to whatever is happening (even if I choose pleasure), but in another context, surrender means to choose creativity because that's what consciousness beckons forth.

To choose pleasure would be to resist the natural creative urge within. To run from fear is to resist reality. To surrender to the fear and let it come in all of its intensity is to move closer to the perfection of life itself.

The victim mentality tells us that the world is to blame for our low self-worth. Buying into this is an avoidance of the responsibility of surrendering to the fear of what's authentically beckoning us forth. A way of avoiding reality in its totality.