Why does it never get easier? The surrendering to not knowing. The surrendering to uncertainty. The giving in to the unknown. I've been practicing this my entire adult life in different contexts and situations, and somehow, every time I find myself in a season of significant uncertainty, here I go again having to learn how to surrender to it. 

It feels like my experience in the float tank last week before my surgery. Peter gifted me my first experience in a sensory deprivation float tank as a way to relax before my surgery. I didn't know what to expect beyond the likely relief I would feel by not having to listen to anything but my own heartbeat for an hour, not having to engage with the outside world for a second…

In case you didn’t read my last post, I spoke about a morning meditation that I have incorporated into my practice which has made a world of difference for me during this pandemic. It grounds me when I don’t know what to do with all of the endless possibilities and outcomes of what reality is now. It orients me toward hope when news headlines fill me with despair. It opens me up so that I have more room inside of myself to welcome and embrace this new and most unexpected reality that we find ourselves in. It reminds me to let go of yesterday, and to not worry so much about tomorrow, for today is all we have.

I wanted to make a post more explicitly about the meditation and provide some extra pandemic-specific reflections you can incorporate into each section as you read, meditate, contemplate, or pray through it.

In the midst of the most uncertain and confusing and challenging and chaotic time many of us around the entire world have ever experienced, I find myself reminded over and over again of the importance of ritual, of ceremony, of routines that we perform intentionally in order to name our emotions and orient ourselves around the values that keep us grounded in the midst of this roller coaster of emotion we didn’t ask to be on but are suddenly strapped into.