“What’s the most important question people should ask themselves today?” someone asked Albert Einstein. With exquisite wisdom, Einstein responded, “Is the universe a friendly place?”
People who didn’t feel protected or cherished as children, people who have been wounded by life, have a hard time believing the universe is on their side. Their core belief ranges from “Nothing will turn out right unless I make it happen!” to some bottom-line assessment that life is a bad mother, and God, a bad father. They don’t feel safe.
“Nothing ever turns out like I hope,” grieves Diana. This client, a woman who feels the need to control everything, tends to overdo at every turn in order to prove her worth. In her drive for perfection and approval, she can not let go of anything. Fibromyalgia has taken over her body and is thwarting her need to be caretaker for everyone in her life.
Rather than acknowledge her illness as a message from the universe that she needs to learn another way of being in the world, to slow down her doing, Diana saw it as a dirty trick from God’s hand. When she arrived on my doorstep, she was inconsolable. It took a lot of hard work for her to finally realize her disease was trying to save her rather than trying to destroy her.
Clients ask me how to get in touch with their spiritual self, yet when we begin to work on letting go, on being rather than doing, they shrink back, clinging to all those take-charge behaviors that worked for them in the past. I’ve learned from Einstein’s lead; I have to help clients come to see the universe as a friendly place before I can help them learn to surrender to its exquisite wisdom.
Can I trust that “it” will be there for me when I need it? Can I trust that what happens to me is what I ultimately need in order to become the whole person I am meant to be? Can I trust that as I send my energy into the universe in the form of a request, an intention, a prayer, a response is already on its way back to me?
This doesn’t do away with the threat of harm or illness or death. It shifts the perspective, the meaning of and the suffering from what any harm, illness, or death bring. It’s not what happens to me but my attitude about what happens that determines healing. My capacity to influence my experience is dependent on my belief that I have the resources I need, within myself or available from someone who will help me, to change or to derive meaning from my present circumstance.
If the fertilized human egg has within it the blueprint that purposely directs the entire process of human development, why wouldn’t the universe also contain this propensity? If I can accept this notion of the wholistic nature of life, I can also be open to the notion that the universe is so ordered that adversity itself contains within it the pattern and opportunity for me to discover the next step I need to take toward becoming whole.
Surrender, then, involves an openness to and a conscious discernment of the messages and directives hidden in our everyday experiences, not as a passive resignation to an indifferent universe, but as a watchful steward in a purposeful one. It means always being in touch with messages from our outer lives while also listening to our inner voice.
Rather than see life’s wounding as directed against us, we begin looking for signs, listening for inner angels with messages about a better way, a more whole way, through the forest. This kind of control – listening for the right next step from a source of wisdom we have come to trust – is the only control we need. Rather than try to control the outside circumstance, we take control of our internal unfolding until it leads us to the best we have in us.
Trusting that the universe is a friendly place colors our willingness to risk, to form relationships, to be open to what we need to learn from anything and everything that happens. Without that trust that life is on our side, that whatever happens to us is something the other end of which is in the wise hand of some power or energy larger than our own, we learn only to act so as to avoid – loss, disappointment, failure. We avoid those very things from which we can learn the most.
Trusting that the universe is a friendly place brings peace of mind, resilience in the face of adversity, and a philosophy of life that leaves us open to our experience rather than suspicious of it. We find comfort in our connection to all things living rather than estrangement from nature and the transcendent principle at the core of life.
We come to trust that it is not our responsibility to be caretaker of the world. There is a universe, a Good Mother present to give what is needed to those we love to bring them to their personal wholeness. What we think they need or even want for them is not always what they really need. That is part of the mystery of wholeness and of personal growth.
I’m sure that Albert Einstein thought his question for moderns would help them explore the physical universe and its possibilities. I’m grateful he offered us this metaphor for exploring the inner universe of heart and psyche, and the possibilities this offers for our healing.