Sweet Surrender

I was being interviewed the other day by a woman who is in a health coaching program. I swear I am going to hire her to come in and ask me questions every two or three weeks. She's so smart and so inquisitive and asks such good questions. I get so clear and have so many great insights when I talked to her.

We were talking about the use of Ortho-Bionomy® with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. She mentioned the connection between stress and IBS and we began to riff on that. Ortho-Bionomy is very relaxing on a surface level, but I mentioned that the stresses that contribute to IBS tend to be deep-seated issues and that really, the great benefit of this work is that it reaches deep through the surface stresses and down into the deep seated ones that lie beneath many of our pains.

Somehow through this, we got to a place where she said that, in some ways, she envied people of fundamentalist faith because they had access to this ability to have these profound healing experiences and then briefly related a story she'd read about a woman who was able to be rid of her chronic fatigue through Jesus.

The word or concept (I don't remember which) that stood out for me was "surrender". This woman gave herself up to Jesus, but what she really did was let go of any illusion of control or investment in being able to fix her situation. She was willing to let go of her ego, her attachment to her need to fix, and her intention for what and how the outcome of her healing should take place.

This ability to surrender the ego is something I believe to be a core piece of Cultivating the Healing Presence; there is no differentiation between creating that space for yourself or others.

Do you think Jesus took her pain or was it something else? Is it easier to surrender if you have something to symbolically surrender to?

As a sidebar, my tai chi instructor told me that if you strike someone between the eyes (without much force), it causes their body to temporarily freeze up and become disoriented. His teacher called it the "Preacher 's Knockout" - just watch some faith healers to see why (oh, there's one just below the xyphoid process too; you'll see him use this too):