“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.
 

For a person to deepen into, to come to a spiritual awareness or consciousness, something from beyond them has to start happening around them that takes on meaning and puts them on a journey.

There are historical examples of this – the Hebrew-murdering Saul who was knocked off his horse and made temporarily blind before becoming the number-one apostle Paul; Sadhartha, who accidentally caught a glimpse people’s pain outside his kingdom walls before leaving home to become the Buddha; then too, any of us who have heard that voice calling in the night.

It’s a calling forth, a gathering up, a stopping moment, where the spiritual gravity or pull of the place stops everything in its path because of the mystery of it, because of what it awakens in a person. It’s a taking-off-your-shoes experience, a you’re-on-holy-ground experience that starts a person on a path, to follow that voice, that light that first captivated them so.

The spiritual journey is putting words to that sense of holy gravity that pulls us to it, calls us by name, sets us on a path. We’re stopped in the middle of what we’re doing by some inexplicable but profoundly alive encounter that compels us to turn over everything we thought we knew in return for one more encounter, one more experience of that sacred energy.

We surrender, then, to that felt gravity, to that spiritual pull, to that non-physical presence that compels us forward to a particular experience where we encounter the sacred and experience ourselves as more than what we appear. We develop an inner knowing, a third ear, an intuitive resource within that receives this presence, this instruction in ways we can’t articulate.

We begin to experience ourselves as inwardly anchored in some solid, trustworthy place, out of which our energy and decisions freely flow. This carries a certain weight that influences us from within to trust it as having more perspective, more insight and wisdom than we have from our shortsighted view. It’s as if we begin to act out of a higher intelligence, a larger wisdom.

We surrender to a higher reality – call it the Universe, Higher Power, God, Divine Intelligence, or whatever metaphor we choose – that proves itself trustworthy in informing us how to fulfill what lies at the center of our lives. We come to trust in an inner voice that reveals the better choice, the more fulfilling option, the right thing to do in a particular situation.

The journey is marked with intuitive clues that allow us to live in between states of knowing, without rigid expectations. We live fully in the world yet keep one ear cocked, just in case we hear that voice, that inner pull, that clear directive that informs us of the next right step. When we relax into it, it leads us to deep connections we could not make by our own choosing.  

The place within to which we let go becomes sacred ground — It grounds us. We become more hopeful, more confident we are not alone on the journey, but led. We experience in specific ways how the non-physical world supports our physical world – shifting shapes of divine energy at work around us and in us – like a face we can immediately pick out in a crowd, a song that pulls us to the side of the road. We give up security for authentic selfhood.     
  
This kind of spiritual surrender is holy, and healthy, and highly personal. We each enter the forest in a different place, for different reasons, with different potentials. Listening for that voice within and being sensitive to clues spread throughout the forest are all the guides we need to lead us home.  

Sometimes the lights go out in our visible world. Our rainbow color turns pitch black; we can’t see anything positive. If we are not accustomed, at times like these, to switch to a different frequency, to a different energy source, we’ll feel lost and victimized – like finding ourselves suddenly without electricity in our home, with no candles to light our way.

Energy shifts and plays itself out on different levels. If we are not aware of how sacred energy, energy of the invisible world, intersects with our human energy, we will not know how to call on this energy when our visible world grows dark. If we are unable to shift to a more transcendent view of what is happening – the long view – we will get caught up in the draining, disorienting details of the short view — the particular anxiety-provoking circumstance.

If we have, in the past, sought stillness and nurture with such things as meditation, music, art, nature, yoga, we have already experienced fleeting moments of wholeness – moments of sweet expansiveness, of timeless peace, a knowing that reaches beyond our human perspective. We can use these practices to still our mind and to place ourselves in the healing path of wholeness.  

Living prepares us for dying – with losses, disappointments, unwanted endings. Likewise, sacred energy in us allows us to resonate and identify with the wholeness we already are, from eternity’s perspective. Letting go of life into the dying process is something we have to initiate long before we let go into actual death, or we fight death. Shifting our awareness from the visible world we can see to invisible energy and patterns we can’t is, likewise, something we have to practice before we are faced with crisis or darkness and need this support.

Wholeness is a universal experience, embedded in the human psyche. We see cycles in nature — moon cycles, countless examples of nature’s becoming, becoming, becoming. Symbols that infer wholeness – the mandala, other ancient symbols that portray the union of opposites and the dissolution of duality. We experience wholeness in a beautiful piece of music, in a moment of harmonious union with another person.

Wholeness is available to us, but we need a spiritual practice that invites it into our life in order to integrate it into our person. When we speak of sitting in the darkness until the light present in it begins to come through, we are speaking of calling into consciousness this sacred energy, this stream of light from another realm of being that sustains and directs the world we know. This is not easy to do in the hard times if we don’t practice it in lighter moments.

I once heard an old Protestant hymn, “It’s Because Of Whose I Am.”  It’s because I am one with the wholeness at the Center that I will never be lost, destroyed, or forsaken. It’s because I am one with the wholeness at the Center that everything that happens to me is something the other end of which is in invisible hands that are pulling me towards my wholeness, my full potential.

In our youth, we are not drawn to such energy. We are too focused on raising children, building careers, fulfilling worldly tasks. This is as it should be. Age brings with it the leisure and reflection that welcomes the nearness of wholeness. We can take the longer view – see ourselves as part of the life-death-life cycle, part of the eternal movement of life pouring through us. Becoming a grandmother helped me to experience this in myself. 

Wholeness, the propensity for wholeness, is available at all ages, of course. I nursed from its maternal presence on my waterfall as a small child. All young children have stolen moments of wholeness, but life has a way of dictating other priorities that push this propensity aside.

It is our task, at any age, to learn how to relax and to move with that which moves and informs our visible world, our body, our soul, to move into the other mind of us. This support from the invisible world, this sacred energy that pulses through us, is always close, but it takes a shift in consciousness and presence. It takes discovering the spiritual within our animal nature, looking for the deeper meaning of what it is to be human, even in the worst of circumstances.  

This means not clinging to our favorite rainbow color or life circumstance in the trust that an inner directive knows better than we how to cooperate with the wholeness at our core. It means finding the wholeness, the totality of life, in circumstances that may terrify, derail and even strip us of our comfort and feelings of well being. It is a belief that life is coming back around to carry us forward, even as it feels like we are being pushed back.

In our moment of crisis, life comes back around for us in that still moment of quiet when what we are experiencing flips over into more comfortable energy. We emerge, more resilient, more aware of ourselves as part of something larger than we can say, than we can know, yet not larger than what we experience at our core.

Our breathing shifts from that heavy, tight breathing pattern into a more comfortable, rhythmic flow. As we become more conscious of our breathing, we become more conscious of those invisible hands reaching out for us just beyond awareness.

We had a rainstorm last night. A good rainstorm is just what I need to remind me that life is not supposed to be perfect. Life is whole.

I have a dry creek bed in my back yard, to hold and channel the runoff when it rains hard. It begins on a hill and slopes down into my yard. Otherwise, the runoff from the street, as I am in the lowest plain, carries everything into my backyard and makes a mess.

Every now and then, a heavy rainstorm shows me who’s the boss. I woke up this morning to see my small river rocks, or pebbles, spread throughout my yard as if it was a rock painting in the grass. I could never create such a lovely design as nature had so easily. It was wondrous, if it wasn’t that I knew I had to go out there and spend the day restoring order.

We try so hard to keep life neat and ordered, with everything interlocking in symmetrical and sequential patterns. Our day should follow our plan, just the way we write it in our day-timer. Our relationships should be as easy as the self-help experts say they can. Our professional life should unfold like those of all our friends who seem to have their act together. 

But, life is whole, not ordered, and, certainly, never neat. Wholeness contains all possibilities, all opposites, all options within the circle of itself. Days run smoothly then blow themselves out into chaotic free-for-alls. Relationships look neat and tidy to the neighbors; they never are. And, our professional life? What sacrifice was made if they assemble like directions in a cookbook?

I walked the neighborhood this morning. There’s a tree across the street around the corner. The local electric company was out with chain saws and workers on lifts, replacing downed wires and restoring power. I passed the duck pond and stopped to watch the ducks. Three baby ducks were playing in the puddles – one more reminder of nature’s cycles and what wholeness brings. Life is always ready to come back ‘round again and offer what wasn’t, just moments before.

Joseph Campbell came to believe that the soul of life is not about meaning, but about aliveness. We participate in life’s aliveness. That’s why we’re here on earth, to participate in the wonder of it — the ups and the downs, the beginnings and the endings that never really end, the cycles that bring drought and then rain storms and baby ducks. The more alive we are, the more open we are to what wholeness and the life-death-life cycle of which we are a part offer us in terms of humanness, the more meaning we create from that aliveness. The gift is that we just are.

I love those small river rocks that form my dry creek bed. They force me to pick them up and play with them after virulent rainstorms and place them back in ordered patterns, different somehow than how they were just days before. I don’t know what order, or what place in line they liked the best. I can only put them back as the moment predicts, as instinct dictates and imagination leads me. I know they’ll only rearrange themselves and spread out across my lawn once more.

Is this not the way of life? Don’t I daily pick up the pieces of my life that have been scattered across my field of becoming? Don’t I lead with my imagination and my soul to place them exactly where I think they need to rest? And doesn’t life, one more time, scatter my plans and safety and should-be preferences into some other lovely design I would never orchestrate myself? What else is left but to say, “Yes, yes, once again, yes.” I want the aliveness. I’ll have to accept the chaos.

Wholeness is everywhere, offering every opportunity for us to see beyond the momentary setback or confusion to the work of sacred energy active in our life. The circle cycles back around to embrace our surprise that life is always larger than we can contemplate, that what happens before us is participating in something larger than we can even dream of. That frightful rainstorms and baby ducks and even death are in the service of our becoming our freest selves.

The day wasn’t wasted. I’ve played in my back yard under nature’s canopy and participated in the aliveness I want so dearly to embrace in me. And, even with the hours I’ve spent creating order in my yard where once again I know chaos will break loose, I love the wisdom of it. It’s only when I delude myself into thinking I’ve created an order that will last that I leave myself open to being reminded in even more devastating ways.

Wholeness has an order all its own. I’d better learn to love it and laugh with it and participate in it as it fashions even me into what it dreams I can be.

When I was a child, I had a baby doll. I could change the expression on her face from a smile to a frown by turning the knob on the top of her head. Turn the knob and my doll was smiling. Turn the knob and my doll was frowning. I always knew the smile and the frown were but a turn away.

Life experiences shift and change just as quickly. Like the colors of a kaleidoscope, the elements of change are always present, ready with the slightest shift to create a new experience. Rather than be intimidated by or fearful of this unpredictable, impermanent aspect of life, we can learn to anticipate and befriend it. Psychology calls this “holding the tension of the opposites.”

As we move from Center into everyday life, we move into the field of time, the field of duality or opposites – night and day, right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark. It is the field of change, the field of suffering, the field of our human endeavor. Our perspective of this field of time and how this impacts our life determines the freedom and comfort we experience as we live out our life.

If I believe the universe will provide what I need in order to become whole, I can trust that what ever happens to me is in the service of my wholeness. I can call the light of consciousness into whatever darkness I find myself and hold the tension until the dark is transformed into its opposite – until it releases the light present in it. Rather than view a downturn, the opposite of the safety I experience now, as negative, I would see it as part of my evolution toward wholeness. 

If I believe man is “fallen,” estranged from nature and transcendence, pitted against an impersonal universe, I would not trust my natural self to know what is best for me. I would not trust that what happens to me – a shift into an opposite energy — is what is supposed to happen, part of the evolution of my wholeness. My goal would be to outsmart the fates and gain the upper hand. Any downturn of circumstance would be seen as a misfortune to avoid at all cost.

Were I to rename the faces on my baby doll in light of these two perspectives, I would rename them fear and joy. Fear and joy are like two aspects, or opposites, that shift and play with one another, always present when the other is present, even when hidden from our awareness.

If I believe the universe will provide what I need in order to become whole, I will address any fear I experience with the assurance I am in the hands of a wisdom greater than my own. I will view my anxiety as an indicator of my aliveness. If I believe that man is “fallen,” that life is unsafe, I will view my fear as a way for me to hold my edge as I compete with others to try to gain control of whatever happens. I would act out of negative energy instead of positive energy.

The face of fear on my baby doll, then, congers up two different experiences depending on my perspective of the universe. “There’s nothing I can do to stop the unexpected” leaves me on guard, trying to outsmart the inevitable. “There’s something I need to learn from what is happening right now, some new energy trying to be released in me” does not entirely alleviate the fear but couples the fear with the joy that I am moving towards some shade of wholeness.

If we have been lulled into believing — by the American Dream, by our religious ethic — things should always be good, that, if we do the right thing, we are safe from harm, we are devastated and disoriented when bad things happen. We take it personally, like we have been singularly picked out for this momentary derailment, by God or by some downturn of fate.

In reality, it’s the natural law of things. As the stock market goes up, it is already correcting itself and making its way back down. As we make special effort to live a healthy life, we are, at that same moment, in the process of dying. As we try to get everything in our life under our control, something will happen in the family or in our finances to throw us into chaos. Everything contains its opposite. It is the natural course of things, not an unexpected catastrophe.

Holding the tension of the opposites means that we become more comfortable with transitory moments, with the in-between states of knowing, with the turnaround that is occurring at this very instant. It is befriending fear and joy as two blurred feelings within the same experience: I fear losing the magic that cannot be sustained while delighting in the joy that the magic brings.

Our thinking can terrorize us or set us free. “This isn’t supposed to happen to me because I follow the rules” sets me up for terror. I see any downturn as personal, catastrophic, a threat to my core safety rather than a natural movement. Seeing sudden shifts as natural allows me to more easily ride the waves. If my intention is pure, if I have done my best to do what I see as the right thing, I can trust that life, the universe, the transcendent that informs me at my personal center, is somehow near, coaxing me towards my ultimate wholeness.

I am more able to sit with the fear until I can dance with it, dialogue with it, learn from it, and eventually, transform it into something that offers grace. Rather than fear the unexpected, the downturn, I recognize it, as it is happening in my life, as an old friend coming back around to greet me. I am able to hold the two experiences as part of the whole movement called change. This allows me to surrender myself to a deeper act of living in the world.

As a child, I was in charge of turning the knob on my baby doll’s head to change the frown into a smile. As an adult, I am in charge of changing the thinking that goes on in my head, to change the fear, or frown, into a joyful celebration of life as it presents itself to me on a daily basis.