Faith is Needed

How I understand it? Why do I believe it? Where does my faith come from? How do I know? 

I found a place of surrender. Whereas beforehand the thinker was always the doer. That’s the concise version, let’s see if we can unpack that. To understand that place of surrender I imagine a time where I “trusted in God” and let go. In the past when I felt a physical pain in my body that wasn’t necessarily caused by an external force, perhaps something like a pinch in a nerve, or the sensation of a pulled or damaged muscle, I would often recoil, in that I would have an immediate knee jerk reaction which was frequently accompanied by a thought and/or emotion of fear. A characterization of it as damage or as negative. It was an immediate acceptance that I’d been hurt and will remain hurt for an unknown amount of time. 

These instances of pain occurred somewhat regularly throughout my life at times when I moved in an unconscious manner; not being aware completely of my body and performing an action that in lacking awareness lacked the control of the muscles involved which led to the injury. Within the first few years of exercising regularly I can recall a time where I was lifting weights above my head and felt something in my upper back/shoulder area. It wasn’t an overwhelming pain so I decided to act in the way in which I was “supposed” to in that I would push through the pain, so I performed a least one other repetition. I then felt the pain more significantly so I halted the movement and ended my exercise. I then went home and drank the pain away. When I was intoxicated I was moving freely without pain or fear but when I awoke the next morning I couldn’t rotate my neck at all nor sit myself up in bed. I was incapacitated for several days. Over the following five or six years I felt I was always at risk of something like this happening again and it did happen an unknown number of times. The last time I can recall was about two years ago, well the last time it was really bad, because there were many days where I would wake up and find that my shoulder or back had a pain in it that required me to move very slowly and carefully. So this time I woke up with slight pain and when I was cutting vegetables for lunch I moved ever so slightly but not consciously and something shifted or bent or broke and I felt a lot more pain. It wasn’t unbearable as long as I didn’t move swiftly. For the following days I could barely move my head. I had been practicing making every movement a conscious movement up until that point but this injury caused me to take that intention more seriously. Since then I have had many experiences, many occasions where I would feel the same initial twinge, but in being completely aware of the movements of my body and holding that idea that nothing had to be bad or negative, I would approach it curiously, I would have a reaction of pleasant surprise as if to respond to an unexpected gift that I was curious to open. It was a conversation, I would think ‘oh what do we have here? How can I help you? What are you about? How can I assist you on your way?’. I felt like the pain had a direction, a trajectory, and if I opened myself to it then I would open a path for it to move throughout my body and find its way out, or find its way back to equilibrium. But when I responded with an ‘oh shit, what is this, this hurts’, then reflexively I would tense a muscle or a tendon and push against the pain’s “path”. In doing so, adding more energy to it and keeping it localized so it can spiral and do more damage. 

So this process of acceptance and understanding of the pain started to be available to me more often and more strongly and whenever I felt an initial twinge I would pose the question to myself without words ‘what movement or lack thereof is necessary to appease this twinge?’, and the large majority of the time the answer would be shown to me. As time went on and this skill improved there would still be the odd occasion where my mind would suggest a movement and it would not suffice, so there would be another inquiry, ‘what movement should I make now?’ And another attempt would be made while my intention became more focused. An emotion would begin to arise, a drive to accomplish, a determination, and I would make several other attempts. For a while when this would happen I would eventually accept defeat, accept the pain and find a position that was most comfortable, assure myself that it will be okay and then try to rest so my body could do its natural healing, the healing devoid of conscious effort.

Since then a new level had been reached in this process; instead of making the second inquiry, instead of increasing my conscious focused effort and becoming determined to ‘use my skill to heal myself’, I chose to surrender, mentally. And it’s not that that surrender would imply that I would stop the movements, or that I would stop trying to facilitate the healing path, but “I” stepped out of the way. I let the emotion go, that fierce determination, the identity of doer or actor that comes with ‘I am going to do this’, and the mantra “trust in God” would just occur in my mind. It was as if God was assuring me that 'it will be okay, you don’t need to worry or be scared or even determined about fixing this, just let go, let it be, let it do what it needs to do, be not attached to the outcome, if it heals the pain then that is what it does, and if it adds to the injury then that is what it does, be equally okay with both outcomes’. Now as a result of this, my body has always found the necessary path, the one of least resistance that offers the most relief, but I think it should be said that this isn’t a promise or a guarantee that is to follow after all that was reassured by God. God doesn’t say ‘do all this, let it all go, be not attached to the outcome and THEN it will be healed’, that isn’t a promise. That is where the faith comes in, I have to let it all go and just trust that it will do what is best. That is what happens, don’t get me wrong, but in order to experience this phenomenon one must take that leap of faith. One must surrender without being certain that it will heal. Because if you are certain then you attach yourself to it healing. You have to be equally unmoved by whether or not the pain actually subsides, you must be okay with both options. And in order to be okay with both options, one must be okay with pain, and one does this by knowing that even in excruciating pain one will have God’s guidance to make the pain as bearable as possible. Again faith is needed.