Through My Weakness I Found Strength: Surrender and Vulnerability

I have often throughout my life, retold a story about my mother-a story that I had long identified deeply with.

She was pregnant with my sister, I was 4, and I watched as my mother announced that the grande piano must be on the other side of the living room. Without hesitation, she was on all fours, with her pregnant belly hanging below her, as she used the strength oh her back to inch the piano, slowly, but surely, across the vast space.

I liken the way I had lived most of my life, to being on all fours, inching the weight of a grande piano on top of me, just like that amazing mother of mine. With no inclination that I not only deserved to rely on others, but that I MUST rely on others, I travelled through life, doing it all, and doing it solo, inside and out-just like her-”being amazing.”

We were fine. We didn’t need help. We didn’t need support.

This “we” I speak of, it’s a lot of us. Women who are too strong for our own good, we’re strong until we’re weakened by our own doing.

The doing holds up until it just can no longer.

This is when the universe steps in. It says to us, “you’ve been given signs, you’re not getting quiet and still enough to hear and see them, so now it’s time to step it up.” Then it happens.

Again and again, the woman who has been inching her way across the floor with the weight of the world on her back, surrenders to a power greater than herself.

The universe sent me my sign in the form of excruciating head pain. For seven weeks, I continued on, “doing it all” and suffering more and more each day. It took my husband’s pleading that I see a doctor to finally move my compass.

Today, nine months later, I am on the eve of brain surgery. I have never been so weak on the outside, but i have never been so strong on the inside.

Throughout this health crisis, the greatest challenge and gift, has been in the surrender.

I was forced to crawl out from under the piano and ask for support. I was forced to get vulnerable. I was forced to be human.

This meant not only asking for what I need, but knowing what I need. In order to know what one needs, one must have awareness. In order to have awareness, one must get quiet, get still, and listen.

The universe “stopped the music.” Up to this point in my life, I had been meeting myself in massive ways, but now I was really going to meet myself.

Every moment of stress went straight to my head. Every negative thought went straight to my neck. Every time I attempted to “do it all”, my vertigo kicked in.

For the first time in my life, I had no control. Literally, none, and I had no choice but to learn the lesson being presented to me. I realized that this was happening for me, not to me.

Tomorrow I will begin a new season, the season of recovery. Today I close a season of health challenges and self-discovery. I enter this new time in my life with the tools I’ve needed for much too long.

These tools I now journey with, will serve me in honoring my needs, relying on others, getting still and getting quiet, so that I can hear my own inner voice.

In letting go of my need to do it all, and to do it all myself, I am not weak…I am strong.

Thank you universe for giving this gift to me.