Category Archives: Surrender

A Poem from My Hurt Self

Sometime ago I wrote a poem.

It came after I had cried deeply, I’m not sure for how long. Afterwards, I sat down with my journal and, without any fore-thought or planning, out came this poem, exactly as it is written below.

I haven’t shared it before now for a few reasons. The main one being that these words came straight from a part of myself that felt judged and vulnerable, and definitely not yet comfortable with sharing very personal parts of me and my experience.

Indeed, this poem felt to be so me when I wrote it that I felt very exposed even sharing it with a few close friends.

Also, some of these hurt feelings were angry when they were first uncovered and my purpose in sharing is never to model that living and acting in anger is something that I think is worthwhile, good or loving.

In publishing this poem publicly today, I am certain that I don’t have a point to prove with my parents by doing so. In fact, strange as it may seem, I don’t even feel that it is a poem about my parents.

This is a poem about me and my journey. It came from a part of myself that felt very raw and real when uncovered and I’m sharing it now because I think that the words have a certain power because they are written with the childlike lack of sophisticated and facade that I experienced at the time.

Today, Jesus will welcome our first round of participants for the “Developing my Loving Self” assistance group. This group will address the importance of connecting to and releasing all of the injured parts of ourselves. So, it seemed apt to make this post today.

I hope that the poem might inspire you to be real and to become more sensitive to the hurt, often childlike, parts of you that are long suppressed and desperate for your attention, care and love so that they can be integrated and their pain released.

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A Poem from My Hurt Self

I never got to feel pretty

I never got to feel free

You always were the bosses

And I never got to explore me

 

I’ve never liked my body

I’ve never felt at ease

I’ve always felt as your puppy

That has to beg and fetch and please

 

Now I feel so angry

I feel I’ve lost so much

I want to take back my body

And I wish you would know the cost

 

You’ve taken such a toll on me

I feel so much regret

My life, it feels half over

And I’m not even a grown up yet

 

I want to make you sorry

Make you pay for what you’ve done

But none of that will help me

I’m in this for a longer, better run

 

So instead I’m reclaiming my body

I’m learning to say no

I’m claiming my own territory

My heart, my body, my soul

 

You are betrayers and abusers

You made me feel so wrong

to want my life, my joy, my partner

You’ve engulfed me for so long

 

It’s been hard to find myself

Amidst your needy cloud

You felt so damned entitled

I could never speak the truth aloud

 

But I am hiding not a minute longer

I’m breaking up these chains

A new girl is emerging

And taking up the reins

 

She is stronger and braver

Than you have ever been

And you won’t even recognise her

But eventually, I know – you’ll want her on your team

 

In the end you’ll turn to her

You can’t outrun your terror

And there is only so much pain

you’ll take before you’ll want to know how she could change

 

I am proud of who I’m becoming

And I don’t want your shit no more

I’d rather please my Maker

Than abide by family law

 

There is a bird within my heart

Still caged but breaking free

She is crying but also singing

She is finding a new way to be

 

I want to soar through treetops

And dip and glide with grace

I want to heal my wounds and worries

Until I find my home, my space

 

Your reign on my life is over

It’s me now, but I’m not alone

I found a friend, a lover – a fine, good man –

With the same heart as my own

 

While I want to wish you all the best

In truth, I hope one day you’ll see

The pain that you’ve been running from

And how that’s damaged me

 

I say that for your own sake

Because by that time I’ll be long gone

Soaring free into my new life

With my prince upon my arm

 

vegemite kid

My Struggle to Surrender – Part II

Back in December I wrote a post about surrender – specifically My Struggle to Surrender – and I promised to get back to you about what I was learning and working on. So much has happened since then and it feels like December was a year ago rather than just three and half months. Recently I have begun to write about surrender in a whole new way and I want to share that here soon. Before I do that I thought it may be worth posting the writing I had all but finished back in December as Part Two to the original surrender post.

You may remember that I was reflecting on the space of surrender – the allowance of all of my emotions, all of the time….

I could pick up the pace, I could go to the place where I let my emotions lead, where I let myself become a teary mess for days at a time, I could surrender. This is the most rapid way to change and grow. I know intellectually that this is the better way and yet I don’t trust God enough that I will survive the tumble over the cliff; I don’t believe that I can do it.

Yeshua is helping me so much with this issue and I want to share with you some of my discoveries about my blocks and the tools that are helping me with this issue.

The Things I do to Avoid Surrender
Usually I do one of two things. The first thing I call ‘Toughing it out’. This is where I tell myself things like: ‘well I just have to feel this, this is the only way to grow, I’m just being an idiot, God made me to be able to do this, I’m just going to push on’ I try to force myself over the edge. I get all rigid and try to survive it all rather than feel it all. And, no surprises here, I don’t end up feeling very much at all.
The second thing I do – lets call it ‘Sulking it out’ – is more like ‘I can’t do this on my own, AJ can I have a cuddle?, I think I’ll have a cup of tea, maybe some chocolate, I just want to watch a nice movie’ i.e. I become needy, I seek comfort, I feel I will be able to cope if I just feel a little better.
In both cases I am avoiding my true grief, I am avoiding the place of surrender, of overwhelm. I am either ‘toughing it out’ and shutting down my vulnerability or I am ‘sulking it out’ and looking for external things to help me avoid my feelings.
Fear Stops Surrender
I know intellectually that experiencing my pain will lead to healing and growth. So why am I so afraid??
I must have a false belief about what it will be to surrender emotionally. So lets call this belief or set of beliefs my ‘block’, the thing that blocks me feeling everything all of the time. The belief must be false because God created me to be able to cope with all of my emotions.
So what are my biggest fears and false beliefs about surrender?
  1. I can’t cope with the emotion
  2. I will be completely out of control if I surrender to this emotion
  3. I will feel crazy, I will look crazy to others, others will laugh at me, or condescend to me
These huge beliefs inside of me have their origins in things I learned in childhood through my early experiences and the way my parents viewed emotions.
Its no surprise, given the state of our world, that my parents themselves have fear of their own emotions. In my childhood they treated themselves most of the time in the way I usually resort to i.e. they ‘toughed it out’. Instead of having a good cry, they taught me to get on with life and that it was foolish to spend too much time feeling sorrow or grief. So I learnt that I could feel grief for a little while but after that I was feeling sorry for myself.
I also come from a family where ‘making fun’ of others or paying a person out for their idiosyncrasies is considered good natured and normal. This is the culture in one side of my extended family. Cruel sentiments, condescension and ridicule were often dressed up as ‘having a joke’. As a kid I was labelled a ‘drama queen’ because I was so expressive and often emotional. Growing up that made me feel ashamed of my emotions, I learned to not be so ‘sensitive’ and I become a ‘joker’ too. As an adult I now have the belief that if I’m overly emotional I will be made fun of or condescended to.
Also, my parents, because they feel afraid of their own sorrow, find it hard to allow it in their children. They felt completely powerless and distressed if I was inconsolably sad as a child. They hugged and ‘comforted’ me at the first sign of tears. So little me, instead of getting the message, ‘Its OK to have a good cry, you can handle it and in fact you will feel a whole lot better when you do. Just come and see us when you’re done’ came to believe ‘Crying is scary, I need someone with me, I can’t cope with my emotions’
So, all of these early messages about emotion, have resulted in me have never having had the experience of just submitting to big emotions and the entire process is now shrouded in fear. I now feel weak, crazy, out of control and like I can’t cope when I have large emotions.
So what do I do?
Understanding all of these early messages helps me see my blocks a little more clearly.
I can feel frustrated that my parents didn’t encourage my tears but that doesn’t get me anywhere. They have their own fears and blocks to work through and blaming them and being a victim still doesn’t release the blocks that are now a part of me.
However connecting to the pain of these early memories and releasing it, reduces and eliminates my fear of those things happening again. If I have grieved being judged for being expressive and emotional I will no longer fear it. I will have worked through the emotion and know that feeling myself is worth it and if people try to make me feel small for crying it won’t effect me.
I can also enlist the help of my intellect to help me begin to challenge the false beliefs. One of the problems I have and see many people having is that we tend to ‘live in’ the emotion; we keep resisting the feeling of it and instead tell it to ourselves as a truth. I can remind myself that the feeling ‘I can’t cope’ is not the Truth, it is JUST AN EMOTION.
In fact the only way I am going to release this block is to stop believing it is the truth. The Truth is actually that;
–        God created me to cope with all of my emotions.
–        That when I feel everything I am actually most connected to myself and therefore the most in control.
–        That its not crazy to feel the emotions that are already there inside of me
When I live in the feeling ‘I can’t cope’ I actually use it as a way to control my feelings, the other alternative is to experience ‘I can’t cope’ as an expression of grief. This is the key to releasing the block.
For example yesterday when I was writing my first ever blog post I was full of fear. I was sitting at the computer typing away and every now and then I would be hit by huge feelings of terror of exposure and rejection and I would begin to feel ‘I can’t cope’. At that point I would go rigid, get up from the computer and go and do something else. My experience of ‘I can’t cope’ was almost angry; I was telling it to myself as a truth and it was a way to control my feelings.
If I had been releasing my block, I would have been typing away, felt overwhelmed and softened. I would have sat and sobbed out all of the feelings of ‘I’m just not up to this, this is all too much, I feel like I can’t cope’. My block would have been released from me as an expression of grief.
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Have a great week everyone. I’ll be back sometime to finish my musing on surrender!

These days Yeshua and I are enjoying the beginning of learning teams, listening and watching as some of you express and step into desire and we’re busy planning trips in the coming months. The autumn days are full of spectacular light and I’m feeling a quiet joy at just being together and loving God.

Blessings to you,

Mary

A Fork in the Road & The Wounded Dog

A Fork in the Road

I’m passing through a season on this path where life seems difficult. In the past month I have come to confront some big residual addictions (that I found hidden below the obvious ones J). It’s felt tough and I’m still in it. Lots of my other avoidances – food, alcohol, anger, running away etc – all seemed easy to give up compared to these. I am really attached to the feelings of being ‘Daddy’s little girl’ – it helps me avoid so much shame and worthlessness. It helps me avoid all the loss and longing for my Soulmate that feels so consuming I doubt my capacity to breathe if I submit to it. I really, really want to feel safe and protected – instead of feeling terrified of losing him, of being harmed, of people hating us.
In the past I’ve felt my passion to become more loving and closer to God has pulled me through so much processing. Often, even just realising my addictions, has helped me to begin to break them down. These last few weeks though, I’ve had to get brutally honest with myself. Just because I can see that this set of addictions prevent me from loving more completely and that they block my connection to my Father, doesn’t mean that I want to give them up. Facing my deepest unworthiness, my Soulmate grief and my terror feels like a task I am not up to yet.
The place I’m in feels harrowing. The roads divide before me – one path is the path to God and my dear, sweet mate. The other is a continuation of the well worn road of my life till now. It’s the road where I get to feel warm and fuzzy because people accept me and tell me “wow, you’re a great girl!” It is the road where I accommodate everyone else’s demands and desires because I don’t want to feel alone or rejected. It’s the road that keeps me in addiction to love’s substitutes – approval, reassurance, avoidance and hugs that help me deny my pain.
The former road means facing feeling alone, unsafe, unworthy and ashamed. This road, the one to God, takes a course through the dark emotions. The second takes me around them, on any number of detours, escaping the lows of shame and grief, for ‘higher’ ground. The only problem is that on the second I seem to tire so much and it never, ever, leads me to God. That road only leads me to a cul-de-sac and when I get there at the end of my long and tiring life I know I’m just going to have unpack my backpack and in it I will find the shame, unworthiness and grief I was trying to avoid all along.
On the first road I don’t have to carry a backpack. It will be painful at first but I know as I go the scenery will improve and I may even start humming a tune or two. But there is pain in starting out, and there will be pain in staying the course.
How much do I really want it?
Am I willing to step directly into the things I fear?
The second road still calls me. It tempts me; it masquerades as the easier route. The surface is smoother underfoot… but it’s that darn backpack that weighs me down.

I feel frustrated that I know the best path to take and yet I do not take it. I’m sitting dawdling. My backpack gets heavier by the minute and I have a tendency to whine about it. How uncaring is that? I want to whine about how heavy it is when it is my choice to keep lugging it about. It’s tiring all this lugging. It’s more than tiring it gets painful. Which leads me to the dog..
The Wounded Dog

I wanted to share a story with you about a dog full of barbs. It was told to me by Yeshua and comes from our brother John, who while here on earth the second time, was given this story from his spirit friends.
Imagine a dog who has been shot full of arrows with barbs on their ends. They are stuck in his skin and he yelps as he moves. He is in constant pain.
There is no way to remove the barbs without more pain. Barbs by their nature become lodged and stuck; their prongs embed in the skin at different angles. The most loving thing we can do for the dog is to ask him to lie still and allow us to remove the barbs as gently as possible. We can’t prevent the pain but if he doesn’t thrash and kick he won’t be injured further.
Now imagine yourself as this dog. The process of birth and growth from childhood has left you stuck full of barbs – not barbs from God but from our forefathers’ decisions to neglect God and love, from our own life’s choices which have placed pain within our souls. So we are now full of painful wounds, tender to touch.
God is so tender and loving and He wants so much to see us free of barbs and wounds and all of the sharp things caught in our coat. He will do everything he can to ease them out of us gently. The barb that hurt so much going in is going to sting coming out. There is no avoiding it. But if we lie still, if we surrender and allow God’s Hands to gently work, it will happen quickly and we will feel the sheer relief of it leaving us.
It is when we fight and resist that the process becomes painful, we cause more injury to ourselves and those around us when we thrash and rebel against what is most natural. In trusting and allowing we liberate our pain and in letting go it hardly hurts at all. Like the prick of a splinter exiting our palm, the quick, sharp, pinch is nothing compared to the feeling of relief as it comes out.
And this is the key lesson our spirit friends were tyring to teach us – our pain now is almost entirely due to the fight against feeling what is already within us. We are so terrified of the removal of the barbs. We believe it is the ultimate pain, not realising that it is actually relief.
So instead we fight and struggle or we try to find a comfortable way to numb the pain.(1) But this only augments our suffering. The barbs can start to fester, an infection can spread throughout our entire lives.
The greatest way to relieve our pain is the simplest – to allow and feel what is there while we let God’s Love and Grace remove our error.
“The new birth is the flowing of the holy spirit into the soul of a man and the disappearing of all that tended to keep it in a condition of sin and error. It is the love of God that passes all understanding…
Your will is the thing that determines whether you will become a child of God or not. Unless you are willing to let the Holy Spirit enter into your heart, it will not do so. Only the voluntary submission to, or acceptance, of the Holy Spirit will make the change.”(2)
Submit and allow the barbs to be removed.
At my fork in the road I so desperately want to fight. Indeed I spent some hours yesterday just fighting with God about it all. I feel angry at love. Can you believe that? I want to be angry at AJ for just loving me because it reminds me of how much I hurt, how much I missed him. It’s like, because I don’t want to feel the pain of loss I have deadened a part of my heart. Now that I have AJ in my life everyday it is harder and harder to avoid the pain of this partitioned off part of my soul.
I have screamed and sobbed at God, wanting another way out, any other way but through, any other road but the first. God, in all Her tenderness, just waited, waited for me to stop thrashing while she gently tries to remove the barbs.
It’s hard to trust Her.
She’s still waiting and I resist Her Love.
You know what it’s like when you’re having a bad day at work. You’re OK while everyone is just doing their thing. They may even be terse and bossy with you. You’re fine until that one person just reaches out and says, ‘Hey, you look beat, would you like to talk?’ The sudden kindness is the thing that tips you over the edge and you find yourself crying.
I feel like my whole life has been one long work day, with me beating up on myself for not doing well enough, and others around me demanding I give more. Now when I consider opening up to God, who just wants to hold me and says ‘I love you no matter what’, it feels like I’ll loose it, completely loose it.
So I push Her away.
I push away my Heavenly Mother who Loves me.
I push my mate away.
I resist anyone who is tender and gentle because I can’t bear the contrast between what life has been and what it can be.
There are so many barbs.
I’m praying now for the strength to surrender to myself, to God’s process. The process She designed with infinite care, the road that brings me back to Her.
I’m praying for you to, that you may also find this courage.
Sometimes we get so used to the barbs that we feel they are preferable. Or we decide we don’t mind the heavy backpack, we believe we deserve it.
Sometimes the hardest thing to surrender to is LOVE.
“Surrender dear sister, surrender” I hear my guides whisper “Take the shorter route, though it feels you will plunge directly into darkness, trust the Father, for from that point on your load will be lighter and your steps will be surer.”
“Take the narrow road that leads to God.”

[1] The Pharmaceutical industry is based almost entirely upon this principle; “How can we help you numb your pain?”, rather than release its cause.
[2] Excerpt from a message received from Yeshua, channelled by James E Padgett in 1915. For further information on where to view or purchase the Padgett Messages see here, here and here.

A Whole World Afraid To Feel – And My Struggle To Surrender – Part I

The whole world is afraid to feel in one way or another and it is my belief that that is where most of our problems begin…

We are afraid to feel shame, so we hide ourselves, we create barriers within. We harbour things we don’t want anyone else to see and through this process we become false, we loose connection with our true selves.

We are afraid to be different, ridiculed, so we suppress our true selves to fit in with the crowd and through that we limit change, not only in our selves but in our communities and society

We are afraid to just grieve and feel loss and devastation, so we justify unloving actions, like violence, to save or avenge a life.

We fear the afterlife and the end of relationships through death, so we go to extraordinary measures to cling to the physical body. Because we are afraid to explore the true causes of disease i.e. all this suppressed emotion, we push modern medicine to the limits, creating empires of drug companies who now invent illnesses in order to make more money from our fears.

We don’t want to feel powerless, we are afraid of others taking advantage of us in our vulnerability so we seek status as individuals and as nations we go to war.

We get angry and lash out instead of feeling our fear of change or attack. We try to control every last variable in our lives, including our ‘loved ones’, in order to avoid our terror of loss, of change, of the unexpected.

We are afraid to look stupid, so we stop asking questions. We stop seeking and in doing so lose our largest asset to learning, the thing that as children helped us discover so much; i.e. our wonder and curiosity. In its place we breed cynicism and doubt.

We are afraid to love in case we loose it, afraid to open our hearts and be vulnerable because the feeling of being rejected feels unbearable. We can miss out on the greatest happiness; of being connected and honest and close to our partner, if we let the fear of grief and pain hold us back.

We are afraid to hope because we once hoped and believed in magic and were disappointed. We shut down the grief of this disappointment and instead vowed never to be so naïve again. Not understanding that if we cried for our loss we would not be afraid to hope again (and cry again if need be).

We believed our parents were heroes and then they turned out not to be so now we don’t believe there ever could be heroes.

If we could all learn to just submit to our grief, our shame and our fear we would free ourselves to take steps that were driven by real love and care and consideration for ourselves and for others. These things I know to be true. In fact I believe in the power of these things to change the world so passionately that I dedicate every one of my days to understanding what it is I am avoiding and releasing my fear and pain. I do all this because it helps me to grow in love. And I know it works – I am a different person today than the one I was three years ago.

That doesn’t mean however that I don’t still struggle to submit, to surrender to ALL of my grief and pain. I still fear loving AJ with my WHOLEheart in case he suddenly dies. Sometimes I still prefer to punish myself rather than feel my shame about things I have done in the past. I still fear complete surrender to my deepest grief, and sorrow.

Yesterday I came face to face with how much my lack of surrender to all things was impeding my progress towards God, towards my soulmate and towards true joy.

Its one thing to become more emotionally aware, to ‘cry it out’ regularly, quite another to submit at all times to whatever emotion pops up and kicks me in the guts.

‘Omigosh!’ I hear you say ‘Why on earth would you want to even do that?!”

Well I believe we are all born in a state of surrender. And we like it! As infants and toddlers we feel totally comfortable and natural just letting our emotions flow freely. We don’t try to protect our hearts; we open them in trust and joy, whenever we desire to love. Until we are taught to fear our pain, we don’t need someone to hold our hold while we cry; we just feel the hurt until we’re done. We don’t try to look tough; we don’t avoid being a ‘cry baby’. We are born knowing that it’s natural to feel. We arrive with the innate the ability to experience and to surrender to ALL of our emotions. It’s only as we grow that our environment and the people who are most dominant in our lives, alter our relationships to emotion. Some of us get taught to fear our grief, that it is weak or self indulgent. Often we are shamed for our fear, told not to be ‘silly’. We instantly learn that it’s not acceptable to show our fear or that we are foolish to have it, and we bury it deep inside. We get teased for our excitement and wonder. Others of us get taught to use our tears to manipulate. This takes us down a path away from our true feeling state, and into a world of self deception and false emotion, used only to control. One way or another, by the time we are three or four, we end up far away from our natural, feeling, connected state. A state in which we cry when we feel pain, shake when we feel afraid, express joy and excitement without reserve. We surrender, without censorship or shame, to the kaleidoscope of emotional experience that colours our lives.

This is the state that I long to return to.

The only problem for me, and for all of us really, is that, because as kids we were shut down so much, alienated so often from our authentic emotional connection, we all have A LOT of grief and pain stored up inside. There are so many past hurts and pains that were squashed and still now cry out for expression. We carry so many fears buried under our everyday rage and control. To surrender means, not only submission to our feelings in the here and now, but letting go to feel what lies beneath them. The real beauty (and pain) of true emotional processing is that when I submit to each current pain it leads me back to pain stored from the past and if I am humble I will feel and release it all so that that childhood injury will be gone from me forever.

Until now I have been dealing with my past pain and hurt in bite size chunks. Letting some of it go has been life changing in the positive to put it mildly. I feel happier and more whole than I ever have. But deep down I know I am still resisting the place of ultimate growth. I am feeling my hurt and fear in bits and pieces. It feels safe and manageable. In short I’m on the slow track. You cannot ‘surrender in stages’ and the very fact that I’m not surrendering means that I still harbour fears and insecurities about the very process of allowing my emotions, about being emotional. Sooner or later I’m going to be stuck for good.

I know I need to surrender. I find myself time and again coming up to my emotional cliff face, seeing that over the edge lies the place where I just let all of the grief and suffering pour out of me, where my emotions lead and my intellect takes a back seat and……

I get stuck. I feel afraid.

I shut down and find myself saying “I can’t cope, I can’t do it, it’s too much, how can I feel this?”

So why is surrender so hard???

Stay tuned for what I have learnt about surrender in past two days.

P.S. If I happen to reach a place of surrender before tomorrow I may not post for a while… Days of tears, sobbing and snot will ensue – which I think will strangely feel like a sweet, painful victory and cause for celebration! After which I promise to return and tell you the secret to it all.

If I don’t reach that place in the next couple of days I’ll be back to share what I think is the secret and why I’m still struggling to implement it. (Along with; common ways I avoid surrender but pretend I’m emotionally processing fear vs. surrender, the power of truth, and other tips and truths AJ has helped me out with.)