Journaling Surrender Versus Submission

“How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.” – John Burrows

Being female means we be Medicine!  Like the herbs and plants and trees and water, and earth, we need renewing, careful guardianship and nurturing, as we surrender to service of others.  We have a difficult time letting go.  We seem to confuse submission with surrender and it is not the same.  We feel like we need control (thanks Ego) and sometimes it simply must be, as in forgiveness not being for others but for us.  Sometimes we tire of 'letting go'.

Everyone has seen a tree that was trimmed when it was young.  New limbs sprout and/or, right from the roots, the tree will spring new limbs, all askew, but springing.  We know about bonsai pruning.  All of us has been pruned.  All of us have experienced hands that prune and clip.  All of us have had others try to make us be other than what we are.  The business of letting go means the deep work we need to do to thrive and begin again.  Every woman has begun again over and over and over again.  There is no failure in that.  It is beautiful that we have the volition to be whatever we end up being by letting go of old scars and trauma and to bloom beautifully.

Most of our deep trauma that we allow to define us decades later, happened when we were young.  It rewrites itself in furthering incidents.  We can become trauma's story or we can let go and become healed so we can become healer.  We are constantly in the act of surrendering that which does not cause us to bloom.  Many of us have experienced times of wither, rage, melancholy because we simply cannot make ourselves 'let go'.  The child self is scrambling around in our brain and it is she who throws the fits, cries for justice, whines for compensation, etc.  The mother within feels sacrificed.  The grandmother within feels isolated.  We choose what to drag around or what to let go of as we mature and realize nothing changes yesterday but ourselves and our choices.  Some of us stay out of life because our Ego says it is easier than surrendering to reality.  We, so easily see submission as demeaning, as dominance, as costly.  We forget we are our own healers.  We forget that the gift of the feminine means we are natural healers.   We get so egotistical we think that life and living is all about us, when it is all about service to others.   We are medicine, not for ourselves, for others.  That is another part of our ability to create as co-creator of Creator. 

So many of us experience times of rasping against life and each other.  So many of us bristle up like a porcupine, so many us give off barriers to self like a skink carries it smell long after the threat is over.  Some of us get stuck in our thoughts about what boundaries are.  Our boundaries are our own.  They are hidden but always there.  It is how we stay on the path we choose to follow.  No one knows what your boundaries are unless you constantly show our fangs or our turned back again and again, or that we have verbalized them.  We can get so annoyed, so insulted, when someone crosses our boundaries, but how were they to know?  Sometimes we do not even know ourselves.  Like a flower gives off its own sweet or sour aroma, we emit vibrations and we never seem to take our boundaries out for airing and given a good shake to get rid of old boundaries we no longer need and no longer serve us.  Sometimes we submit to our Ego self and stay stuck in ways of the past.  We emotionally react, from our Child Self, to events that are decades later.  Our self-protection can be so negative and stop us from rising into full bloom or letting go of stuff that drags us down.  We choose.

How easily we turn on our narcissistic Self when we refuse to surrender to what is best for all.  We say we are tired of surrender.  We refuse to jsut let go of things that hold us back because, for a time, life seems all about us, and we have problems seeing things from another's perspective.  It is the 'all about me' attitude that can turn us hard, turn off our feminine gifts of sixth sense of intuiting the WHY of others.  Admit it.  We all have times where we submit to our own self-torture, to our own sense of victimization, to our sense of self deservedness.  It is when we carry these things on our backs that we become different characterizations of authentic self.  Some of those characteristics are not pretty.  We become chaotic within, we become angry within, we become that tantrum throwing child.  We begin to think we 'ought' to be able to have everything the way we want them.  Then life drags us along and hit wall after wall of what will come when we have no direct path and are not lugging bundles of 'stuff' in our arms so we do not see where those decisions we make end up:  Thus the patterns in our life.

We bemoan our circumstances, but fail to realize, we scripted it for ourselves.  Life was and is and will be ever hard and only our willingness to let old stuff go will make our travel easier. Submission to reality is huge.  In submission do we truly allow for our true purpose to come about. Without it comes anxiety because we may have been really busy keeping up the facade and defense.

I, for one, rant and rail against submission of any kind to anyone who I feel is not worthy of authority or my respect.  I find it very difficult to submit but find it easier to surrender.  I can easily just sigh and take my lumps.  Some things are jsut easier to let go of. 

What think you?  What are your thoughts on surrender versus submission?  Can you journal about such.  As you see on my page, she might surrender but she will have her hands on her hips. 

©Carol Desjarlais 9 22.19