I’m sharing this reflection today from lived experience.

I have known what medicine calls adrenergic storms—states of intense sympathetic overdrive that feel like pure terror in the body. It’s been a long time since I’ve had one, but recently, an episode returned. This time, something was different.

Instead of resisting, I surrendered.

And what I found…..once the intense wave had passed….was not devastation, but Love, the only place it could return to.

This piece arose from that experience.

There is a moment, quiet and unassuming, when we surrender to fear…..not in defeat, but in stillness. When the endless struggle to resist, to control, to outrun what frightens us finally breaks, something remarkable happens. We see. Not with the eyes of judgment or the mind’s tangled reasoning, but with the clear gaze of the soul.

Fear, like all illusion, thrives on resistance. It feeds on the stories we tell ourselves about danger and separation. But when we stop pushing against it, stop naming it as enemy, fear reveals its true nature: a doorway. A passage not into darkness, but back into the light we never truly left.

This is the grace of surrender. Not giving up, but giving over…..our burdens, our defenses, our need to understand. In that letting go, we find what was always beneath the fear: love. Gentle, abiding, and vast beyond measure.

As with all things, the illusion passes. The veil lifts. And what remains is not the terror we expected, but the truth that was waiting……patiently……for our return.

Love was always there. It only needed to be remembered.

Nigel Lott teaandzen.org

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