Allie Duzett – Surrender Session
Could it be time to surrender – and could that be the miracle you have been looking for?
I am normally a big believer in creating an agenda for your life, and then fighting hard to make it happen. I believe that many times, we can use our faith in our Creator plus hard work and perseverance to accomplish the “impossible.”
….and sometimes, that is just not the right thing to do.
Sometimes things show up in our lives that are truly beyond our control.
In my own life, I’m thinking of the many years I spent as a primary caregiver to my dying disabled brother. Taking care of him was the last thing I wanted to do, and I sacrificed enormously to be there for him in his many years of need. Honestly, I hated every second of it–BUT at the same time, there was just absolutely no chance I would ever abandon him when he needed me.
Yes, I could have left my brother to die alone while I went off and did the fun and exciting things I dreamed of for myself… but actually, no, I could not have done that.
I think a lot of us have situations like this show up in our lives, particularly when they involve other people that we care about.
Yeah, sure, you could abandon your spouse and your children and your community and your job and your various situations…. but also, no, you couldn’t.
Sometimes we find ourselves in situations that are beyond our own direct control, but we find ourselves feeling obligated to see them through, even if we internally rebel against those situations with everything we’ve got.
For example, I know of parents who have children with severe Oppositional Defiance Disorder that makes parenting them extremely physically and emotionally draining–but they can’t just abandon their child.
Or sometimes we have a terrible job situation that we feel like we absolutely cannot quit, for whatever reason.
I know of people who bought houses in neighborhoods they later regretted, and moving somewhere else ASAP wasn’t so simple.
Plenty of people are caregivers for others with severe and extreme physical and/or emotional needs, and abandoning our loved ones in their hour of need can feel impossible, even if it is killing us.
When we end up in difficult situations that we cannot bear to leave, for whatever reason, a lot of times what happens is we start rebelling internally. This can look like:
- Irritability, sometimes severe irritability, even when we’re trying to be nice
- Anger issues and severe frustration
- Depression as we think of the life we COULD have had except that instead, we have this horrible thing
- Lethargy, malaise, fatigue – a struggle to get out of bed or to be functional through the day because we are so worn out from emotionally fighting the situation at hand
- Weight gain as we enjoy the only thing it feels like we CAN enjoy in this situation: sweets and fatty foods
- Stress and all its physical symptoms, like high blood pressure, heart issues, trouble sleeping, and more
Sometimes, we basically feel trapped by our own lives, and sometimes there is no easy way out. Or sometimes we feel like God has told us to stay. Sometimes we feel like we owe it to the people we love, or to ourselves, to stick something out.
I just want to be clear, that sometimes we feel this way, and it is still time to go. Just to mention in the case of things like domestic violence, for example. If you are in a domestically violent situation, you might feel like you need to stick it out, but that may not be the actual time and place to surrender to the circumstances of your life. During this session, we’ll talk about that and when it is time to surrender and when it is time to actually get the heck out of a situation.
On the other hand, if you are a parent and your kids are really giving you a run for your money, and your option is to leave your children and move to another country to get away from them, or “get over it,” aka surrender, sometimes the right choice is actually to surrender, even though we may not want to.
Surrendering means holding up the white flag and telling God and your body and this situation that you are done fighting. You accept what is happening. You might not be happy about it, but you’re done fighting it.
Surrendering is choosing to find peace and acceptance with what IS, so that you can still be happy even in the midst of unbearable circumstance.
Surrendering to a situation is standing in front of the brick wall, and choosing to stop bashing your head on the bricks. It’s choosing to sit down and rest against the bricks until the bricks are ready to go and you can enter the next phase of your life.
Sometimes when we stop fighting situations, the situations naturally melt away from before us.
Sometimes that is the biggest lesson we need to learn: that surrender can be more effective than fight or flight when it comes to how we handle horrible situations.
Is it time to consider surrender?
All of us sometimes need to just give up. That sounds lame, or at least to me it sounds lame, but sometimes it’s true.
My disabled brother had a ton of terrible things go wrong for him towards the end of his life, and he was given something like two months to live.
Two years after that, I told God either my brother had to die, or I did, because I could not bear to leave him but I also could not bear to be his caregiver anymore. It was destroying me.
My brother lived for three more hellacious and horrible years, during which time I took care of him every day, during not one but two difficult pregnancies with hyperemesis gravidarum and then an infant.
God did not save me or my brother during those years through the passing I begged for.
Instead, God helped me give up and just surrender to it.
That was the only way to survive.
I had to emotionally and mentally realize that this was a situation where fighting, resentment, anger, and panic were getting me nowhere. Those big feelings were killing me, and not changing anything.
I had to just surrender.
Letting go of my hopes for change and my obsession with changing the scenario was the only way to get through.
And it wasn’t easy. It was so hard.
But sometimes this is necessary because of the things we choose to do with our lives, and the people we choose to serve.
Sometimes it’s necessary to surrender to our own body’s physical or emotional health challenges. Instead of resenting or fighting our chronic fatigue, our chronic pain, our obesity, our allergies, our what-have-you–sometimes the most healing thing we can do is look at ourselves and just say, “Yes. I have a big problem. And I am surrendering to it right now. I’m going to stop fighting for a while, and just rest against the wall instead of ramming myself into it.”
Sometimes giving up is a beautiful thing.
Of course, there is a time and a place.
Like I mentioned above, a domestically violent and abusive marriage is probably not the time and place to surrender.
Sometimes our horrible job is too horrible and we do need to take the plunge and make the change.
Knowing when to surrender and when not to is a critical life skill and we’ll talk about that in the session.
But sometimes it is time to surrender, and when that time comes–how do we do it?
This session works on the energy of surrender.
During this session, we will be working on a number of different things.
First, we’ll be tuning into ourselves and asking for divine wisdom on when it is time to surrender and when it is not time to surrender.
Then, we’ll work on getting clarity on what exactly we need to surrender to in our lives right now–or if we actually need to NOT surrender and make a different choice.
Then, I’ll be clearing our blocks to surrendering. Those feelings that we are betraying ourselves if we give up on the hopes and dreams that are impossible because of the other obligations we have. The feelings that if we surrender, we are abandoning ourselves. The fear that if we surrender, then things truly will never ever change.
The biggest secret is that surrender actually changes everything.
Surrender changes us – and that changes everything.
When the life lesson we need to learn is surrender, sometimes it’s as simple as surrendering, and then a domino cascade of situations shift that set us free in ways we never could have foreseen.
Surrender doesn’t mean your life will never get better.
It means your life will get better immediately, because you stop fighting your own life – and then, it opens up new pathways and opportunities that were closed to you when you were your own worst enemy.
Surrender can sometimes be the best way forward.
If this session feels like the right next move for you, you can select your price point below. I hope this session is exactly what some of us need to move forward in our lives.
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