“I’m losing my shit”, says a person to the group on a recent yoga retreat at Esalen. The teacher eloquently directed the topic, adding in, how awesome is it to lose one's shit. “Wouldn’t we want to lose our shit? Why would we want to carry around our ‘shit’?”
I laugh, how often I find myself holding onto the past which is ready to move out and make space the new. I can see it in others and celebrate their shit losing, but my own, oh how I want to grip it tightly.
The first time I came to Esalen Christmas of 2014, I met this same yoga Teacher, Peter Sterios. I was in a constant state of keeping my shit together, and it was crazy exhausting. I needed to drop the heavy load and Esalen was going to make that soberingly apparent.
As I began to let go of my traditional lifestyle, I started to see the walls I tried so hard to build, come tumbling down. My first instinct was to grab on, to dig my heels in and keep my environment safe and comfortable. But as I let the shit go, it shifted, it happened; life wasn’t falling apart, it was falling into place.
What would happen if I shifted that energy of holding on? Where could all that time, effort and thoughts go? When I look back at things in my life that were the most magical, they all came when I did not ask when I did not bang my head into a wall, but when I surrendered.
As the saying goes, when one door closes, another one opens - Where else in life are doors opening up but cannot see because of the effort it takes to keep the present one from closing?