I had just finished facilitating a week of our Aligned Surrender program.  As I closed the laptop I was thinking about an experience that I had more than a year ago in a class that I was taking myself. The memory went like this:

I was sitting cross-legged in my chair staring at the computer screen that was resting on my reiki table. I had been in the class for almost a month at that point and while I was enjoying it, I couldn’t sink into the container. I found myself sitting awkwardly on the outside of the container and noticed that many other people were too, very few were actually sinking into the container. I had worked in a container long enough to know that the material being presented was one thing but the container that you were absorbing the content in was a completely other thing. Working in a container is incredibly powerful and always gives me the ability to see mirrors and look at myself differently through the eyes of someone else, yet I wasn’t allowing myself to belong in this container. 

I started to ask myself why. Why was I standing on the outside of the container? Why wasn’t I being vulnerable? Why was I self-protecting? Why?

The answer came quickly and easily. The facilitator of the container was directly connected to someone who I was trying to impress. I knew that I was trying to impress this individual and yet didn’t really want to admit that because when I admit that then I would need to stop. So, I admitted it to myself, I owned it solidly. I was trying to get this individual's attention rather than simply being myself and allowing whatever was meant to happen, to happen. I was trying to control rather than surrendering. It was obvious to me that in trying to get attention and in trying to impress that I had been unwilling to show up vulnerably. I was showing up trying to prove myself and in that energy, I was proving nothing. At that moment, I changed. I stopped trying to prove myself, I stopped trying to get attention, I simply showed up ready to learn and soak up as much knowledge as possible, I showed up to heal, I showed up to grow. When I made this shift, everything changed and I got so much more from the class than I ever expected, but only because I showed up vulnerably.

As I came back from the memory and back into my body I had to smile. I thought about some of the people in the container from the last round. Some of them were being vulnerable and sharing from a deep and raw place and I had watched them heal and grow. The people who were unwilling to be vulnerable and were coming from a place of trying to prove themselves were making much slower gains. I silently wished that those who were trying to prove themselves got to have the same kind of epiphany that I had experienced so  they would get the most from the program.