As I am working on my new project - which is not really a new idea but something I have been working on over the past few years and now all the pieces are finally coming together in one big synthesis - I find myself doing things the old way.
I am strategising around the pitch deck, how to raise money, how to develop the MVP (minimal viable product), who to partner with and hire, how to protect the integrity of the vision and make sure that it unfolds successfully. And as I am doing all this, I keep telling myself you can’t make any mistakes, see:
And then I pinch myself and remember, hey, this is the old you and the old way of doing things. What I am working on is so dear to me, that I feel it’s too important to make any mistakes but by acting like that, I am making the cardinal mistake of getting in my own way. My only job is to hold the vision and get out of the way. This is not the usual way how to build a company but it’s the way this one needs to and will be built.
The most powerful lesson I received during my recent Ayahuasca experience was the power of surrender. In that ceremony, I was asked to let go of everything I have (money) and everything that defines my public persona (like my social media accounts). I was asked to give away and cancel everything, see:
Letting go of everything was the key that unlocked my journey of rising up into the heavens and experience love, celebration and beauty in ways I had never experienced them - in the subsequent nights of drinking the medicine. Ayahuasca is a powerful experience but the most powerful part of it is that it makes you experience a clear and intense message about how to live life. My job is to bring what I have learnt in Ayahuasca into my “normal” life. That is the very purpose of it. To learn the lesson in a this “crash course” so that the message really comes across - and then, and that’s the most important, I am meant to embody it “in real life.”
Embodiment is the key word. I can know everything about what I need to do but I am not doing it. What is the point of knowing it then? There are two steps to an awakened (or happy or fulfilling or whatever word you like) way of being: Awareness is the first. Without it, no change is possible. But awareness and hence knowledge of “how to be” is only the first step. It is a simply a requirement, a prefix for the actual, the real step of living it which is embodiment. I don’t just need to know how to be and what to do. I need to actually be and do it.
So as I am working away on my venture, I realise I am embodying my old way of doing things. And the moment I catch myself, I remind myself that this is no longer. I am here to surrender. I am simply a vessel, a conduit to bring the vision to reality. I am not here to control it, to force it, to plan it. I am here to let the universe show me how it is meant to unfold. All I need to do is to take one step after the next, to follow my intuition and see who I meet in the process and what happens as a result. And then follow that recipe with the next step again. Simple.
This might sound crazy. And my (old) mind definitely agrees. How can you not control and strategise? How can you build a company without it? All the more a large and complex project? And I fell for that line of reasoning. That is, until I catch myself and remember that powerful night (of Ayahuasca) and all the beauty it unleashed - after I had surrendered everything, most importantly my ego.
Whatever I do in life does not serve the purpose to show how great and smart I am nor how important I am nor to make me rich. My job is to express myself authentically and with integrity, to gestate and birth the vision and then to get out of the way so it attracts the people to grow and make it flourish. And when I do, when I get myself out of the way and let life and the universe take its course, what will be born out of it will be many more times more beautiful than what my mind could ever have envisioned.
That is the power of surrender. I have experienced it in “another realm” and now my job is to trust and to have faith in its unfolding. And of course do all the things that you need to do in building a business like raising funds, hiring (and firing) people, articulating and communicating the vision so everybody is clear and aligned with what we are doing but, and that’s a big but, I am not here to control it. I am here to envision it, to influence, to mend, to guide it and then be open to see what unfolds and where it takes us.
Taking one step at a time and then look from that new vantage point to see where we need to go next. That is very different than to plan a fixed route to a fixed destination and not being willing to deviate from it. A river does not decide where it flows, it naturally flows with the environment and to where it needs to go, thereby carving its riverbed and becoming ever more stable and anchored as it grows.
And this is what I am here to do. And, I believe, we are all here to do. We all want so much to get to a certain place in a certain way. Or rather, that is the sense I am getting looking at myself and the world and people around me. We all want, want, want but that prohibits me from actually going to the very places I am meant to go, that are much more beautiful than anything I could ever imagine, and the journey of moving towards it is effortless rather than the fighting and efforted way of wanting to get somewhere and asap.
And as I am typing these lines, I sink deeper into surrender and trust that everything will work out even more magical than I could ever have imagined. Which reminds me of the first meditation in the book the The Three Magic words:
This Universal Mind knows the answer to all of my problems, and even now the answers are speeding their way to me. I needn’t struggle for them; I needn’t worry or strive for them. When the time comes, the answers will be there.
The full version is here:
Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher, was asked by his followers at the end of his life what his secret was. His response: “I don’t mind what happens.” I am here to show up, do the work and then let go of expectations, detach from the outcome. It doesn’t mean I don’t desire a certain outcome, quite the opposite, desire is what creates the drive to make things happen but it means I am open to see what unfolds and thereby I leave myself open to all the possibilities rather than the only one I had in mind.
Surrender is the most magnificent, effortless and powerful way of being. I have experienced it first hand. It can move mountains in a way no other way of being can. My job now is to practice and embody it every day in every step I take. And what a life that will be.
And to remind myself of that, I created this sign that sits on my desk:
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