Surrendering the war within oneself 🙏

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Sunday night, 11p.
It always surprises me how much it takes me to appear in front of people, let alone facilitating activities. I love this work because it forces a nerdy introvert like me to come out, to touch and be touched by the world beyond my mind, but boy, it’s real exhausting.
I went to bed, slowly tuning into the sacred solitude that nourishes me. It has been a long week of good, meaningful and nevertheless draining work.

Monday morning, 2.15a
Scratch, scratch, scratch. An insatiable itchiness woke me up. Bed bugs. The room was hot, damp. I was tired, exhausted, annoyed.
I breathed through, focusing on the sensation rather than reacting against them. The toes, the feet, the back curving on the mattress, the fingers tingling. My body was alive with the itchy sensation everywhere. I tried to focus on a particular pain point on my neck, noticing the undulation of an itch from very subtle to brain-hurting, yell-inducing climax. All in silence.
To make the carnal torture worse, the stomach started complaining beneath the chubby tummy, too full from half a kilo of rice cracker just before sleep. I know, it wasn't as much of a joyous treat as it was a mindless boredom-induced binge.
A night doomed for an inner war indeed. In the past, a loud voice inside me would have screamed inside. "I don't want this. I don't want this." Then a cycle of self-hatred and blaming will feed onto each other into a terrifying nightmare.
Thanks goodness, I surrendered to all those unpleasant sensations and finally felt asleep.

Surrender in the war against oneself

After a fitful night, I woke up with this phrase in my mind. “The war is over. I surrendered”
When unexpected bodily annoyance like this happens, I don’t want to fight. I want to allow and even welcome it not as an enemy trying to seize everything from me but rather a messenger foretelling me about something important. What if it's a calling for a neglected conversation with myself?
I often heard people described their inner life like a battle between different parts. This metaphor goes in many forms within the masculine self-improvement circle. From obvious one like fighting the Resistance, overcoming the (lower) self, winning the battle to less angsty ones like rising up to the challenges, reaching goals, peaking performance, each seems to point at an imagined enemy or opponent somewhere in the inner landscape to beat up. Even the word "willpower" almost implies that we have to stock up resources in order to prepare for some final battles, either with one darker self, with the evil force in society or with the harsh nature out there.
This "Inner Life is War" metaphor is so common that I start to suspect many people don't think about its implications consciously. What does it mean to win a battle within oneself? Who wins and who loses? I managed to rest and recover, so I maybe won against sickness. Or maybe the fitful night truly defeated me, and in surrendering, I healed?

I used to read this kind of motivational mantra and felt inspired. “Everyday is a battle, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but the most important thing is that you keep on fighting.”

No. Even if it is an inner battle, you don't always have to fight.

When you take the fight in this battle too seriously, the only way to win is to completely destroy the opponent. As a result, the part of you that loses is lost. Is that what the whole of you really hope for? A common example is when you get too good at forcing yourself to “be strong”, “disciplined” and “tough” for fear of looking vulnerable, letting others down and disappointing yourself. Whenever that happens, the warrior in you win at the cost of alienating the inner wounded child who yearns to be cared for. Your conscious mighty will has won so many battles that it never bothers to consider if there is an alternative to fight.
There is. It’s called “surrender”. When the loudest part inside you stops fighting and surrender, reconciliation becomes possible. The warrior grows compassionate and listens for the first time what the child always screams but never gets heard. "Please don't fight, I beg you..." Surrender takes a different form of strength, not by force but by trust. That you will be ok when you let go. That the world will be ok without you trying to save it. It doesn't mean you should do yoga and dance and cuddle all day long. Rather, it means you may want to bring that spirit of resting and renewing as you go about achieving and saving the world.
I don't know about you, but if I am forced to fight, the only choice that makes sense is not to fight half heartedly but to surrender. I’m sorry for being a coward, but my courage is all spent in quitting.

The challenge of peace time

"The war against my self is over" is perhaps one of the most important declarations one can ever have, especially those who buy into self-improving, competing-with-oneself model.
The war is over. It's peace time now, which will take a different kind of work. It starts with cultivating relationships, first and foremost within here, instead of piling up resources to prepare for the inevitable war with an enemy out there. It's no longer survival of the fittest; it's thriving of the most nurtured.
It means less about gathering productivity tools that can help better oneself, which is sadly often sold through guilt-tripping tactics of "you must keep getting better, for if you aren't progressing, you are regressing". That’s still a Cold War against the self, simply morphed into a less obvious and sometimes more dangerous form of self-hatred.
No, life is neither that linear nor binary. Not moving forward doesn't mean you are going backward or even staying still... You can be dancing on the spot, you can be smelling the air, you can be reciting poetry. Even when you are doing what you think as absolutely nothing, there is still the breath, this delightful bantering between the inner and outer world.
For those who are used to war, peace time is very uncomfortable. There is no obvious enemy, no clear mission, not even goal to achieve. It's no surprise that campaigns to fight poverty, reduce suffering and end hunger make nice titles for war-like activities in peace time. Even well-intentioned NGOs and activists often find themselves fighting uphill battles competing against heartless corporations and irresponsive government with the goal of avoiding doomsday on Earth. I don’t know how much of this is residual thinking from war time or human aggressive nature, but whatever the case, I don’t think it will create a future that we wish for. The only way to care about the world is to fall in love with it.
Sure, there must be a sense of urgency and gravity in everything we do AND also with the patient acceptance that none of our work will have visible consequences, that we may die not knowing whether our lives have mattered. To live meaningfully, one must get comfy in the void of meaninglessness. I know, it gets deep fast.
You can imagine how living in paradigm is so hard, especially for those only familiar with linear, goal-oriented way of life. You cannot even strive to "do" it well. You can only let go of the exhausted will, the prime motivator of any big outward targets, and shift into an open mode of inner observation and exploration. To do the non-thing that our busy, checklist-obsessed mind hates the most: waste time. Which is what precisely our body teaches us to be with sickness.

Welcome home

The itchiness was gone in the morning. I felt surprisingly refreshed despite the seemingly bad sleep. Perhaps the itchiness had to take it full course, and all I could do was to be with it.
Phewww. The war was indeed over, leaving my body soft, my mind clear, my heart open. The inner landscape seemed desolate and empty as if the storm has swept away everything. There was no need to immediately "look on the brighter side" and fill this landscape with good stuff again.
I wanted to take my time to cherish the empty land, to wander around its newfound curvatures and revel in the beauty of the inner world. Sometimes in following the desire to dig deeper and find out what is really there and what it all means, I may have forgotten that this emptiness itself is the truth. It's like coming into a house and noticing the pretty decors but forgetting that the house itself was spacious and beautiful. The subtle art is in seeing both.
Another deep breath. It felt like I have just crossed the threshold back to life, healed and whole from a battle I didn't want to fight, a surrender that I need and most of all a mystery. It's wonderful to come home.

“In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day […]”
What to Remember when Waking – David Whyte.

This section of the Enzyme is reserved for deeper musing, a part that most of general public wouldn't even care to read. This week is about a meditation of Nothingness/ Emptiness for those who do practice some meditation.

On Nothingness

I didn't accomplish much in the last two days due to what I first thought of as bodily annoyance. Now I'm seeing it not as recovery time but rather time for a different conversation.
When you work on nothing, you are still working on something. To be more precise, you let Nothingness work on you.
This is not a word play as much it is a phenomenon you can test: when you rest and let your attention wander both inwardly and outwardly, you develop an attunement to the ever ongoing exchange, one that will make you sharply yet gently aware of the generous space beyond what you need to do and what the world wants you to do. That space is "Nothing", a thick and rich ground that physicists may like to call "dark matter" whose existence animates every "thing" else.

In human body experience, it is the tiny space between the in-breath and out-breath. I have never heard any meditation teachers mentioning it, and I wonder if they intentionally left it for me to notice. Isn't it interesting that that space exists?

I suspect that once you notice nothingness as the elephant in every room, people will start noticing you differently. To use a teeny word, you are working on your "vibe", although it's not strictly "work" by your definition.

p/s: Shinzen Young explains it better here.

Sharing is sprouting.