All around us we see warrior symbolism.  We have a war on cancer, a war on drugs, a war on terrorism, a war on poverty.  When I was first diagnosed with the brain tumor in 2010, I immediately took on the persona of cancer ‘warrior’.  Challenges arise in our lives to propel us to grow outside of our safe little life boxes, so going into ‘fight’ mode may seem like a decent place to start.  A little warrior imagery imbues us with a sense of power and purpose.  My song of choice was “Eye of the Tiger’.  I envisioned myself beating the pulp out of Clubber Lang, aka cancer cells.

War will never solve global terrorism, poverty, the drug problem or cancer.  As long as we keep pumping money and energy into these cliché ‘wars’ we prevent real change from taking hold.

When we focus too much on seeing our challenges outside of us, we miss the point.   Challenges aren’t gremlins looking to mess up our perfect lives.  Challenges are teachers that our higher consciousness  (I call mine ‘Big Erin’) brings to us when it is time for us to expand.  You can’t avoid them.  Our souls will constantly propel us to grow.  The teachers come in many forms including the scary diagnosis, the loss of a job that wasn’t fulfilling, but was paying the bills (and keeping you feeling stuck), or the loss of a loved one.

Cancer came from within me.  Cancer cells are MY cells.  Who the heck am I fighting?   Luckily, as time passed, I morphed from being a cancer warrior to a cancer sojourner, someone on a journey.   It was only when I began to accept (surrender) my health status and where I was in that exact moment that the true power I had started shining through.  In case you were wondering, I physically feel amazing.

Surrender is a word that gets a pretty bad rap in our society.  Most of us were raised to push ourselves to the brink in order to succeed.  But I think surrender deserves mad respect.

There are 2 forms of surrender as I see it.  I am experiencing the latter.

1. Give up and give in – this isn’t the productive form, in my opinion. In this state, you feel powerless, you feel like a victim, you throw in the towel.  From here, you think your challenge is outside of you, you can’t see a way out, you assume there is no way out and you rely entirely on someone else, perhaps God, to save you.  Sometimes good results come from this kind of release.  It’s certainly been my experience that striving just keeps what I want farther away so when you give up the fight, you do make space for other things to come to you to experience, but when something does improve, you see the improvement as a fluke or as the result of outside influence.
2. Acceptance –From here you acknowledge where you are right now. You don’t deny it or pretend it’s not real.  Rather than distracting yourself from your challenge, YOU LOOK RIGHT AT IT and see it for what it is: a moment, an experience, an opportunity to expand yourself.  When you really see it and really feel it, you no longer fear it.  This is a transformative place.  In this state you observe your world from a state of wonder.  You marvel at all the interesting experiences in front of you.  I wake up in the morning with no intentions, no  expectations and with no stress!   I just witness and engage as I feel fit.  From here you don’t have to fix anything.  I’ll repeat that because it is at the heart of real surrender:  When you accept who you are, where you are, and what you are experiencing without needing to change it or fix it, you are transformed.

I’m sorry to tell you that I have no steps to get you there.  That flies right in the face of what all the self-help materials with their myriad steps have told me.  I no longer seek self-help ‘tools’ as I have finally accepted that everything shows up for me for my benefit whether I understand why or not.  There is no formula, magic pill or ‘work’ that needs to be done.  The truth is that you couldn’t really ‘fix’ it if you tried.  It is a shift in consciousness that just comes when you are ready for it, but it isn’t ‘enlightened’.  It’s a choice.  It’s a different perspective, and one that makes me far happier.

From this place of acceptance and surrender,  you find joy.  You don’t ask ‘why’ as much as you say ‘wow’.  You let things unfold just as they are meant to and life feels magical.