Surrender is Scary

And other thoughts I am having this week

Hi! I’m Kara, and I’m so glad you found my work. I’m a Registered Psychotherapist who works with Strivers. Together we unpack ideas around achievement, control, development, and growth, with the goal of learning how to strive, deliberately.

Some bite-sized food for thought this week, in no particular order, from my heart to yours:

(1) Many of us believe that by controlling ourselves we are able to control the world around us, and that’s simply not how things actually work. We can’t thin ourselves into being desired, perfect ourselves into being safe, or work ourselves into being valuable. We are not in control of anything outside of our responses to this life…. and how humbling, terrifying, and maybe if I linger on it long enough - freeing - is that?

(2) The promise of productivity is satisfaction, but the pursuit of productivity often leads us further away from feeling satisfied. There is no habit stack that can give you enough time to satisfy all the parts of you, all the time.

(2) There will never be enough time, no matter what you do (this one hurts).

(3) The parts of us that matter the most often conflict. The conflict makes it hard to enjoy what we are working towards, hard to be present, hard to sustain sometimes, even when we are being deliberate. The conflict is meaningful though. It’s how we make life ours, and not others, how we come to know ourselves, to grow, and ultimately, to create our days, weeks, months, and years. Our multidimensionality, its discordances and harmonies, allows us to stake a claim in our lives that reads “mine and mine alone.”

(4) The goal is not to rid our lives of problems. To be alive is to wake up to, endure, and experience problems. The goal is to increase our ability to tolerate the distress that accompanies them.

(5) Surrender is scary. Not so scary though, that it’s not worth trying… and aren’t you curious what it would feel like to try? …. Is that what Faith is?

(6) There is no right or wrong way to be you, so you might as well pick the ways that make you feel most alive. Do you know what makes you feel alive?

(7) … and this classic by Mary Oliver, especially the opening lines (You do not have to be good / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through desert repenting / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves [I mean, WOW. Just Wow.]).

As always, be gentle with yourself and be gentle with one another.

ps - This may start dropping on Friday (or another day in the week) as I experiment with my process and schedule. Thanks for your patience as I practice and sort things out!