The Current Beneath My Feet

When I Stopped Fighting Life

"Ultimately there is nothing I can tell you about surrender except… Having nothing and wanting nothing; not keeping score, not trying to be richer, not being afraid of losing; not being particularly interested in our own personalities; choosing to be happy, no matter what happens to us. These are some of the clues. The rest we learn with practice and grace."
~ Swami Chetanananda

If you had asked me twenty-five years ago what I believed about God, I could have given you an answer.

It would have been the answer I had been given. The one I had been taught. I knew the stories. I knew the verses. I knew what faith was supposed to look like. Looking back now, I don't know that I had ever truly experienced faith for myself. I had simply accepted someone else's certainty as my own.

Then my daughter Kara died.

Grief has a way of asking questions that tidy answers cannot survive. The version of God I had been given no longer made sense to me. If this was God's plan, I wanted no part of Him.

I wasn't angry in the dramatic way people sometimes imagine. It was quieter than that. I simply stopped reaching. The certainty I had once stood upon dissolved beneath me, and for years I found myself in unfamiliar territory, no longer knowing what I believed.

If someone had asked me then whether I believed in God, I probably would have answered no. Not because I was convinced there wasn't something greater than myself, but because I could no longer believe in the God I had been handed.

What surprises me now is that I don't remember deciding to believe in something greater than myself again.

There wasn't a dramatic awakening or a single moment when everything changed. No voice from the heavens. No prayer that suddenly made the world make sense. Whatever shifted inside me happened so gradually that I almost missed it.

It unfolded over years.

Years of rolling out my yoga mat before the sun came up. Years of sitting in meditation, often wondering if anything was happening at all. Years of filling journal after journal with questions that had no immediate answers. Years of wandering mountain trails, noticing how the rhythm of walking could quiet the constant chatter of my mind. Years of learning to stay present with my own life instead of constantly wishing it were different.

At first, I thought those practices were changing me.

Now I wonder if they were simply peeling away everything that wasn't really me.

The old stories. The fear that I had to control life in order to be safe. The belief that if I could just plan well enough, understand enough, or prepare enough, I might somehow protect myself from heartbreak. Layer by layer, those stories began to loosen their grip.

Healing, I've discovered, rarely happens in dramatic moments. More often, it arrives disguised as ordinary Tuesdays. Life quietly hands us another opportunity to abandon ourselves, another opportunity to betray what we know deep inside, another opportunity to let fear make the decision. At first, I chose as I always had. Then one day, almost without realizing it, I chose differently.

Life asked again.

I chose differently again.

And then again.

Looking back, I don't think healing happened because I finally learned to trust myself. I think I learned to trust myself because healing gave me hundreds of opportunities to remain loyal to the person I was becoming.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I had become the person I had spent so much of my life waiting for someone else to be.

I became the one who stayed.

For a while, I thought that was the destination.

Now I think it was only the doorway.

Because something unexpected happened as I learned to trust myself.

I began to trust life.

Not because life became easier. It didn't.

But because I started noticing a quiet current beneath everything.

I can't explain exactly when I first became aware of it. I only know that when I look backward across my life—even through the chapters I would never choose—I can see that something was always moving beneath the surface. Not preventing pain. Not rescuing me from grief. But continually inviting me toward a life that was more honest, more spacious, and somehow more fully alive than the one I could have imagined for myself.

That quiet trust has changed the way I make decisions.

Years ago, I don't think I could have said yes to the life I am living today. I probably would have stayed in the safety of my corporate career because certainty felt wiser than possibility. I probably would have needed to know exactly where The Creatrix or Sunflower Yoga Studio would lead before risking so much to build them.

And I don't think I could have said yes to Eben. Not because of who he is, but because of what loving him asks of me. Years ago, my need for certainty would have been louder than my willingness to love. Parkinson's would have looked like a reason to protect myself. A reason to choose a different path. A reason to convince myself that practical was wiser than vulnerable.

Today, I see it differently. Everything about Eben brings me alive. Loving him has become one of the clearest expressions of trust I know. Not because I pretend Parkinson's doesn't exist or because I know what our future will hold. I don't.

But I trust something deeper than certainty.

I trust the unmistakable feeling that this love is worth saying yes to.

I trust that whatever our future looks like, my life is richer because our paths found each other.

Years ago, I would have chosen certainty.

Today, I choose aliveness.

Yoga has a name for the understanding that slowly found me.

The final niyama is Ishvara Pranidhana, often translated as surrender. For a long time, I misunderstood that word. Surrender sounded like giving up, becoming passive, or simply accepting whatever happened. My experience has been something altogether different.

To me, Ishvara Pranidhana is not about withdrawing from life. It is about participating fully while loosening my grip on the illusion that I can control how life unfolds. It asks me to do the work that is mine to do while trusting that something larger than me is holding the rest. Whether someone calls that force God, grace, providence, the universe, or simply Love matters less to me than the lived experience of walking in relationship with it.

That doesn't mean I've arrived.

I don't think anyone does.

Life is, and will always be, an ongoing rhythm of finding the current and drifting away from it.

These days, I have simply experienced that current often enough to recognize when I've wandered.

Usually, it begins quietly.

I'll wake up trying to solve my future before I've even finished my coffee. Financial worries have a way of pulling me back toward old habits, whispering that if I could just plan a little better, earn a little more, or control a few more outcomes, then I could finally relax.

I've learned not to judge those moments.

Instead, I recognize them for what they are.

My lens has become cloudy.

Not broken.

Just cloudy.

So I return.

I return to my yoga mat.

I return to meditation.

I return to my journal.

I return to the mountains.

I return to conversations that remind me who I am.

None of those practices tell me exactly what to do.

They simply clean the lens through which I experience my life.

The clearer that lens becomes, the easier it is to hear the quiet wisdom that has always been there. The easier it is to recognize the current beneath my feet.

These days, if someone asks me what I believe, my answer is surprisingly simple.

I believe we are deeply connected—to one another, to the earth beneath our feet, and to something greater than ourselves.

The word that feels truest to me is Love.

Not love as an emotion.

Love as the quiet force that continually invites us toward wholeness.

Love as the current that never stopped flowing, even during the years when I couldn't feel it.

Perhaps that is the real invitation of Ishvara Pranidhana.

Not to arrive at surrender once and for all, but to experience it deeply enough that we recognize when we've drifted. To remember that there is a current beneath our feet, even when fear convinces us otherwise.

Life has never asked me to stop drifting.

It has simply invited me to notice when I have...

...and gently return again.

With practice.

With grace.