Openness, Surrender, and The Hidden Reservoir

 We all have various capacities for willpower inside.

Your ability to use your will to break through barriers and overcome obstacles
will be different from the next person’s.

But there will be times when your willpower—no matter how strong—will not be enough.
There will be times when the only way to access the strength you need
is through collapse, through surrender.

There is a hidden reservoir of strength available to us
when we become vulnerable enough to touch it.

Life runs on duality, always pulsing between two poles.
Sometimes you feel as strong as a mountain.
Other times, as humble as a blade of grass.

The idea that we can always be at our A-game
is one of the most destructive myths of our culture.
It is not with nature.

Just as night gives way to day,
our energy will rise and fall again and again.

Most of us only value the high.
But our greatest power is in the low.

When you are broken, tender, at your weakest point—
that is the moment of greatest potential.
If you can simply be there,
then out of that place the seed breaks,
and new growth emerges.

Making good use of our lows
is how we make one hundred percent of life count,
rather than just fifty.

This is possible because when we are low,
the ego becomes easier to surrender.
The ego is like a thin membrane between you and Life.
And at those times, it becomes paper thin, porous.

Then you can drink deeply from the ocean of Life—
From the power that the ego normally prevents you from accessing.
And everything drawn from that hidden reservoir
goes into powering your next high.

If we use the cycle of highs and lows well,
our life becomes spiral-like, ever-widening.

Each surrender in the low increases openness in the high.
Each openness in the high prepares for deeper surrender in the low.

Life becomes a spiral of surrender and openness
until you are fully open and fully surrendered
whether high or low.

At that point, you have transcended them both.
You are simply with Life, in its fullness,
whatever the conditions.

The alternative is the effort to be linear—
the illusion of constant improvement,
of more and more productivity without end.
That path leads only to breakdown.

So honour your vulnerability.
Often when we feel utterly hopeless,
when every option has been exhausted,
the mind becomes most open
to possibilities it could never have conceived before.
And in those moments, grace steps in.

Practice is meant to lubricate the mechanism both ways—
increasing your capacity to open deeper, to surrender deeper.
Your life grows bigger.
Your capacity to be with Life, as it is, increases.

This is real fulfillment.

And if you continue in this way,
you will not stagnate.
You will keep growing in capacity.

There is no doubt about it.