Awakened Conscious Conversations
Healing the world one episode at a time by offering realistic solutions to the journey of life. Both self hosted ( By The Gentle Yoga Warrior) and guest episodes.
Many of our guests have overcome significant obstacles and transformed their lives.
Rich with deep talks and solo endeavours, often offering tips on living a more conscious life.
Many episodes include a bonus optional meditation!
Awakened Conscious Conversations
The Art of Surrender: Finding Peace in Difficult Life Choices
Angela Williams Gorrell is a speaker, consultant, and an ordained minister in the Mennonite Church USA with over fourteen years of ministry experience. She has taught at schools including Yale University, Baylor University, and Fuller Seminary. Her research has been highlighted by the New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post among others. Her publications include Always On: Practicing Faith in a New Media Landscape and The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found.
Angela William Gorell shares her framework for navigating life's difficult decisions through practical and spiritual guidance. Drawing from her own experiences of deciding whether to pursue tenure and whether to stay in her marriage, she offers wisdom on finding clarity when facing life's crossroads.From the Author My goal is not that you reach the same decisions as me or the other people featured in this book, but that you learn how to take your own journey into and through difficult decisions.
• Braving Difficult Decisions combines practical guidance with spiritual wisdom
• The decision-making journey integrates historical wisdom, real-life stories, and proven practices
• Surrender is not giving up but a process of purifying our intentions and accepting reality
• Physical practices like open-palm meditation can help embody the practice of surrender
• We often choose between familiar pain and unfamiliar pain when making difficult decisions
• Working through grief requires naming our experience, questioning, and imagining transformation
• All difficult decisions are made with humility - we never have complete information
• Your story is important and can always be edited, regardless of past choices
You can find Angela Gorell at www.angelagorrell.com or on social media @angelagorell.
Her book "Braving Difficult Decisions" is available in hardback, Kindle, and Audible formats worldwide.
Start for FREE
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
A note for every episode: we do not necessary agree with all the views on our podcast and leave listeners to make their own mind up with what they do or don't agree with.
For a Shamanic healing session with our host
Want to be a guest on Awakened Conscious Conversations? Send The Gentle Yoga Warrior a message on PodMatch, here:
no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Welcome, angela hi, thank you so much for having me, jane. I'm really eager to jump into conversation with you.
Speaker 1:I'm so eager to have you on the show as well. I think our audience is going to learn a lot from you today. And um, and what a beautiful book you've got to share with the world as well. I think our audience is going to learn a lot from you today. And what a beautiful book you've got to share with the world as well. So I think it's always important to sincerely share great work like that. So today I thought we'd talk about not exclusively, but why in life, when we've had difficult decisions, how we can sometimes worry if we've made the right choice, and I thought what about? What better person to speak to us today than yourself, angela? Firstly, would you mind sharing a little bit of backstory of your life's experience so far, your path to our listeners?
Speaker 2:yeah, absolutely Absolutely. Like all people, my path has been filled with complex choices, you know, sometimes really ones that don't impact my life as much as others, but ones that changed the whole trajectory of my life, where I lived and how I spent my time every day. And so I really wrote my book, braving Difficult Decisions, out of my own desire to have a journey that would walk me, guide me, through making difficult decisions. I began to think about this book in the eight months that I spent trying to decide if I should leave my job or not. I was a professor at a university in the United States and I'm still in the US, but just for listeners, depending on what country you're listening from.
Speaker 2:I was up for tenure, which is the biggest promotion that you can get as a professor other than becoming a full professor, and it's sort of the unicorn type job in the academy these days of getting a tenure track job and then getting tenure. It's the thing that we all really want, that we're taught to want and to desire in our careers, and I wanted it. I thought at the time, but then, as it was coming for me in this particular context, different things were arising for me that were making me question whether this was the place that I should work, especially for the next decades of my life, whether I should go up for tenure, and it was surprising because I would have never thought when I took this job that that would even be a question for me. But the more that things were happening around me and within me, the more I began to realize I needed to discern whether this was for me, and I spent eight months trying to figure this out and I really wanted a book that would help. And then I should also say that in 2020, I went on a journey for a few months of trying to figure out if I should stay married or not, and anyone who's had this question knows that that question does not come without a lot of wrestling.
Speaker 2:No one gets married to leave their marriage. So whether you stay or whether you go anytime, you've been through that process of really trying to discern what you should do. It's a very heart-rending process. It's emotional. There's a lot of questions about, I mean, because this person that you're in a relationship with, you spend all your time with them. That's free. You live with them, your life is intertwined with theirs and so to undo it really feels like an undoing of most of your life. Really, back to back, within a two year period, I kept I would turn to books on guidance and on discernment, and I kept wanting a book that was both practical and spiritual, a book that would feel like there was someone across from me like, try this and now think about this, and then what about these questions? And I, and so I wrote the kind of book that I longed for during that time.
Speaker 1:And I, and so I wrote the kind of book that I longed for during that time and that's very helpful for the world to be able to have a book, a book like that, and I really admire your honesty and what two big things to have to kind of navigate through the job, which sounds like the dream job, but in your heart it sounds like you knew that it wasn't the direction you want to go in and also like a marriage, like you said.
Speaker 1:We've all been there where we kind of like question and and like kind of wonder, um I was. When I was looking at your book I noticed that you had like three major strands to it. Please correct me if I'm not um no, you're right yeah it's like the um.
Speaker 1:First of all, it was a kind of discernment process of how to make decisions, which sometimes it's so hard to make decisions for people in general, I think and then you took inspiration from historical figures that had made decisions where it was not necessarily the best thing for them, but it was the best thing kind of to do with great steps of bravery.
Speaker 1:And then you also interviewed people that um had gone through different things. What an amazing three things to put together, and maybe you could explain a bit more about that to our readers, how that can help.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's perfect, jane. Thank you so much for bringing that up. It was important to me first to learn from other people who had written about discernment and who had written about decision making and, like I said, there are books that I read that were really practical and that were like these are the five questions you should ask, or these are some spiritual practices that could help you. But for me, I really wanted a journey that integrated a number of things, that didn't feel too shallow for what I was going through but also didn't feel so complex and esoteric or elusive that I was like I don't really know if I'm doing the right thing, you know. And so I really tried to learn from other people who've written about it and then intertwine the best of what they had offered into a journey. Secondly, as you said, I looked at historical figures, people living and dead, who I felt like had not only made really difficult decisions but who had lived really boldly, and I wanted to know what gave them the ability to do this. What were, as people in our lives, trying to make complex choices? And one of those big things that I noticed was, at some point, for all of them, they couldn't not do what they did. It was like it kept them awake at night. It was like there was this burning within them.
Speaker 2:And I think all of us at some point, when we give ourselves enough time, when we really attend to our own souls, to our inner knowing, as Joy Harjo calls it she's a poet when we attend to our inner knowing, when we spend time for me as a person who believes in God, in God's presence, and when we give it some time, I think there's a day when we realize I can't not do this thing, whether it's like I stay or I go, I say yes or I say no. There's a day when we really I think we feel in our soul what we're meant to do. And I think if we attend to our souls enough and we really participate in a meaningful journey, then we will have changed enough within to be able to do whatever it is that we need to do. And I think that's as important as figuring out what to do is really preparing our own soul to be able to have the strength to do what we need to do.
Speaker 2:And then the last part was, yes, like interviewing a number of people who had made difficult decisions and trying again to learn from them as well. And then I tell seven of those stories throughout the book, and that was really meaningful for me. It helped me to realize what makes difficult decisions difficult for people, what are the big questions that they have, what are their biggest hurdles, and so then and then, you know what did these people do that really gave them the courage to keep moving forward in their lives, and so I'm hoping that anyone who reads this book just feels encouraged at the end of the day, mostly like, okay, I'm encouraged, I'm braver than I think.
Speaker 1:Perfect, exactly Because sometimes we doubt our own bravery. Yes, we have like this kind of fear. When you were saying about knowing the right thing to do I'll just quickly tell you is that when I was supposed to help run this course and I knew my dad wasn't well and had been ill for a long time, but I just had a feeling he was going to die.
Speaker 1:So I kind of left the course, even though I let people down to kind of go and and spend time with him, and he did. He died two weeks later. So I kind of listened to what was the right, the right thing to do and and there was like no doubt, that's what I had to do, regardless and everyone was understanding. But it was so that that came to my mind when you, when you shared that that story is that sometimes we know what kind of what we need to do, even if it's the circumstances that make it feel difficult. So as I was reading through your book, I found that you know, we can have like this you had the bit about the stirring, but then the surrender and we can know what we need to do. But how does someone access that surrender to kind of feel that trust in God or whatever it is they believe in spiritually, and how can this book help them with that?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, I'm so glad that you spent that last couple of weeks. Midst of difficult decisions is disappoint other people for the sake of something you know. I think that the two hardest aspects, probably, of difficult decision are like disappointing other people and then also hurting other people. You know, when we realize that, yeah, yeah, and I can share more about that there was a paragraph that you wanted me to to read from my book, so we could, we could come back to that. Yeah, about the paragraph that I chose, and I think that that's really connected to what you're saying.
Speaker 1:It's the surrender part, where you know like sometimes we call no surrender, or trust in god or, for those who say it more esoterically, like trust in the divines, and how your book can help people with that, because I think surrender is sometimes the biggest obstacle, for I know that can sometimes be in my life definitely uh, yeah, and I think surrender for me, um, I really love the idea that in the word, surrender is render, and so part of surrender is offering up something for judgment, and to render something is to purify it, and so surrender isn't doing nothing, I think, sometimes when we think about, and it's not giving up either.
Speaker 2:But so I think if we associate surrender with doing nothing or giving up, that sounds like a terrible should do next what the way forward is. And if we think about surrender as a process of purifying our intentions, of clearing the way to make a way forward, then I hope that it feels better to you, even inspiring and helpful. And I think surrender is a form of acceptance and it doesn't mean acceptance is different than consent. Acceptance is different than affirmation or liking something Acceptance is. I realize that this is what it is, this is how my life is at this moment, and it's this willingness to accept that this is the state of things and also that I don't have to be attached to this state of things. And so surrender is, most importantly, I think, a practice. And just like we practice the piano and we're not just good at it, most of us don't sit down at a piano and then just like play like Bach. You know what I mean. It takes a lot of action and engagement over time and then one day we realized that this thing that was so strange to us and unfamiliar has become a familiar action that even maybe feels like home to us. So surrender I find it really powerful to do bodily forms of surrender where we really and I know that as a yoga practitioner, you're very, you know, in tune with your body and what your body's wisdom, and so I love the idea of taking some sort of bodily surrender when we're first especially trying to engage in this. But really, even over time, and so that could look like laying down in corpse pose on a yoga mat where you're laying on your back, arms and legs outstretched. It might look like sitting like a child, and I like this where you know you're hot, you're on your knees and like you're sitting up and your hands are out. If you're in your wheelchair, you're sitting, your hands are out, maybe your palms are open and you're placing whatever it is your decision, your question, your situation into your hands, and then maybe you turn them over and you release it and take some deep breaths as you do that, and I think that over time, as you engage I mean for me my friend I talk about my friend Liz in the book and when she was being ordained as a priest, she laid on the chancel and put her hands on top of each other and then put her forehead on top of her hands and just in total surrender to her vocation, to the community around her.
Speaker 2:That would uphold her to the wisdom of her tradition, and I think that that's a powerful form of surrender for us, especially when we're in really difficult like when we just feel totally helpless and powerless to just accept that. That's how I am right now. I am, I can't see in front of me, I can't see behind me, and so as we engage in this practice of surrender, over time I think it becomes a natural way that we engage our lives. It can be, yeah.
Speaker 1:Often by physically kind of going into surrender position and that's kind of I can see that it's going to make one kind of open up a bit, a bit more to it, rather than you know, sometimes we think, oh, I must surrender, and end up not surrendering by saying I must surrender. So that was, that was very helpful. Um, as I was looking through your book, what I found also very helpful was that you have with each chapter you have kind of like a question and then a prayer and then you've got some actionable things at the back of your, your book, of how people can do that. I wondered if you would mind sharing an instance of that or, from you, anything that you would like so, um, yeah, I felt like that.
Speaker 2:Um, I wanted people to have multiple ways of reading this book and I was hoping that it would be the kind of book that you could return to several times over, like as you have different decisions that you're making in your life, different questions. You're trying to answer that. Sometimes maybe you just have a question, like you know, I want to hear what to do, I need to, you know I need to be studied, I need to whatever, and that you could use the questions in the guiding questions and prayers in the chapters to go, oh, this is the chapter I need right now, and so I have a list of all the questions and prayers on one of the pages so that you could, someone, a reader, could just turn to that and then go oh yeah, that's what I need right now, and so one of them. For example, there's a chapter called Sifting and it's about where you're trying to figure out, like, maybe you have two competing beliefs.
Speaker 2:When I was trying to, when I was going up for tenure, for tenure, one of my beliefs was we need more women in this department and so I need to be here as an advocate of women and as one of these women boys, we can't have less women.
Speaker 2:If I leave, we're going to have even less women who are here, and that was a really strong belief of mine. And then the other belief was I'm not emotionally and mentally healthy in this department and those were competing for me and I really was trying to figure out which one you know. And so for the sifting chapter, it says how do I? The question is, how do I know what is true? And I don't know that true there means like for all time, but for this moment, like what belief is the guiding light for me in this moment? And then the prayer is teach me. And so, yeah, the hope there is that people can ask, you know, can have these questions, that, can you know that hopefully these questions are articulating a question for them that they really do have? And then the prayer is just a simple steady me, teach me, lead me, help me. That can become sort of this, almost like a breath, practice as you're doing this journey, Like, okay, I can return to this little prayer to go.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm not alone do you think it's because we try to as humans, we try to solve everything out with ourselves, and then we put this immense pressure and then we kind of sometimes like the dog chasing its tail, trying to think where do I go when we kind of surrender into our faith, and that kind of guides us. But I like the fact that the prayers are like short sentences because then it's kind of you know, it's teach me what. You can't really go anywhere else with that, rather than kind of like listen or surrender and be, and that's what I particularly liked. I liked about your, your work. So so you said about the two difficult decisions that you had to make very close together. So if I'm a listener, listening today and thinking, oh yeah, actually I've got to make a big decision, there are several ways they can work through. Your book isn't there? Maybe you would like to explain, angela, that'd be great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So obviously you can just read it from front to back and that's going to be like a journey where you're going to start with what is the stirring I have within? Can I articulate it? To myself, to God, to another person I trust? So you start with being able to articulate your stirring and you'll move through the journey to.
Speaker 2:It will take you, through engaging and surrender, to maybe finding one or a few other people that you can take this journey with. Maybe they also have some difficult decisions that they're trying to make and you could do the journey together. Or maybe they're just going to be your friends, your companions, because they care about you and they want to support you. And then it'll move you into working through difficult emotions, whatever might be coming up for you fear, anger. Some really constructive ways of moving through difficult emotions engaging your body, engaging your mind, all of it together. And then beliefs and letting go of whatever you need to let go of from the past, because sometimes our past weighs on us and it makes it hard to keep moving forward. Summoning from our stories, our family's history, for strength, and then thinking through our values, thinking through beliefs, considering the sorts of people that will maybe make it difficult for us to make this decision, or the kinds of people we need to support us, filtering our decision through a number of different you know, when you're having paralysis, analysis, paralysis I have a chapter dedicated to a number of different ways you could think through your different possibilities and really, and then the idea is that you finish this journey with a sense of sated joy, that you have, even for a couple of minutes, some contentment in the story that you're living in. And it doesn't mean that you're going to take this journey and make even a radical change in your life. The radical change might be within. Radical change in your life. The radical change might be within. It might be that you're transforming your own relationship to your life, that the way that you look at your circumstances shifts throughout this journey.
Speaker 2:But then the second way is what I was just describing, where you can look at the questions and the prayers that are the heartbeat of each chapter and go. That's what I need to answer right now. That is the prayer I need right now. I'm going to go to that chapter. Or then, finally, you could start with the appendix, and in the appendix there are a number of exercises that go with each chapter but you don't have to read the chapter to do the exercise. That will wake up your I think you'll feel like it'll wake up your courage. It'll wake up, it'll make the decision feel manageable. You'll be like, okay, I know what I need to do. It'll break down the decision into parts. It'll give you like in the seeking chapter. It gives you a way of meeting with other people and helping them help you. I mean, these are really concrete things to do, practical tools that will give you a lot of confidence that's really helpful and and also, people can fit them in their lives.
Speaker 1:Can't, because, you know, sometimes people say, oh, I haven't got time. But we it's important one that we do invest in time in ourselves. But I know from experience a little bit adds up each day. So you know like people could do it as an exercise daily or or, uh, how many times a week that they've got time to kind of fit in. So how does um, how do you remember? Sorry, yeah, I was gonna say I was gonna ask you this actually. So, yes, how can we find faith and trust in a painful process? You know these really painful things like, I don't know, grief and difficult, all awful things that can happen. So how can we find the faith and trust in that painful process, especially when sometimes we may feel like a victim or things aren't working out the way we want them to be?
Speaker 2:I think that that's where the surrender chapter becomes helpful again is that we return to surrender when we're feeling those difficult emotions rising up in us, finding a form of surrender that helps us to take some deep breaths and to just realize. This is difficult, this is hard, this is hard on my soul, like I am grieving, I am scared, any number of things. I'm saying that that is my reality right now and I'm not detached from that reality. I am facing it, I am recognizing it and also I have an awareness of it. But also I'm not alone. God is guiding me. The universe is going to show me what to do. I won't always feel the way that I do right now. And then also that's where the sensing chapter is really helpful.
Speaker 2:I have ways of just really working through an emotion, and so you could take something like if you're really experiencing deep grief, that you start with where you feel that in your body. I love my therapist has taught me that you know when I was feeling it deeply in my if I felt like an elephant was on my chest when I was grieving, to grunt several times loudly. If I'm here, if I'm feeling it like I have a you know, a pit in the middle of my stomach that I hum several times loudly, and this is a way of you know. So you're finding a bodily way of releasing your grief. This could look like allowing yourself to cry. It could look like dancing. It could look like getting a towel and wringing it through your hand and imagining that. That's you like wringing out your emotions. You know, putting on music and allowing it to draw you into tears and really being. I think it's important that we give ourselves permission to grieve when it rises up in us and that we release that in some way so that it doesn't stay in here. But then I think it's about like I have this practice of lament in the sensing chapter.
Speaker 2:I think it's important that we learn how to lament A lot of like. Some cultures are really good at this. Some people come from a community where lament has rituals that help them to work through it. But if you come from a culture where it's really buttoned up and people don't share their emotions people don't cry around each other, people don't then we don't know a lot of times how to work through our grief, how to actually allow it to teach us something, to show us something and really, at the end of the day, grief is usually another form of love, right, it's that we have, in some way, we feel disconnected from or have lost something that we love, and so we need to give ourselves permission to say I loved that, I lost that, and so lament.
Speaker 2:I love this three part of lament. One is naming. This is what has happened. This is what I'm sad about. Questioning is the second part Asking questions of the universe, of God, of others, like in writing, or it might look like a voice memo that you leave to yourself and then, or that you just talk, you know, say it out loud, and then the final part is imagining If this situation were to shift, if I were to be transformed through it, if I were to learn something, if God were to break into this situation, if you know, what might this look like? If I were to be comforted, how would that look? You know that sort of thing and a process like that helps us, I think, to realize that we're not crazy for being sad, that we're being very human. It's a very human experience that we're having and it's a good thing yeah, absolutely it is.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we can shut ourselves off from our emotions and and by allowing to feel it, I feel that we become whole again, because you know, yes, it's like we can, we're meant to feel, feel them and then we can kind of release them. Um, is there anything? Is the one thing that you wished everybody knew? And also a bit of an open ended question, but I just I always find this fascinating and also very helpful is is the one thing in life that you wish everybody knew, and if so, what was that?
Speaker 2:there's so many things, so many things. Um, wow, where where do I start? How do I just put it into one thing? I think that I put this in the book, like your story is important, and if you're sitting here, listening, still breathing, it's not the end here, listening, still breathing, it's not the end. Your story can always be edited. You can you still have paragraphs to write, you know. But and so I'm glad you're here, we're glad you're here, I'm glad that you are alive and that you're contributing your story to this planet.
Speaker 2:And the story that you're writing is not just important if people you know, if it's famous or if it makes a lot of money or anything like that. It's important just because you're existing and breathing as yourself, and and so it might sound cliche, but no one's ever lived that's like you. You are the only you that has ever been and that will ever be. You're a very unique person on this earth just by being you, and so that's a beautiful thing. I hope you feel loved. I hope you feel dignified and worthy, just as you are today.
Speaker 1:Listen to that, I feel so calm and it just feels so reassuring. So I'm describing that so so, so well. Angie, would you mind reading a paragraph from your book? I always think it means more when the author reads it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Um, I did read this book for audible and, uh, it's always fun yeah, it's always fun to be in the studio doing that but it's also nerve-wracking because you're like, did I pronounce that? I think so, you know. Um, but yeah, we, I was saying that I, we kind of alluded to this earlier, um, but so on page 150 and 151, I have this paragraph and it's in the last chapter, but it says Sometimes you come to know the thing you need to do but don't want to do it because you know it will break your heart.
Speaker 2:Maybe it will break someone else's heart too. It is one thing to ask God for what to do and another to pray to have the strength to do it when you know what you need to do. When we are making a decision that hurts, we are often choosing between familiar and unfamiliar pain. We are choosing between a pain we have ways of managing and a pain we are unsure how to treat, and most of us favor pain we already know how to manage. My friend Michaela I quote her in the next paragraph she says that most of us prefer chronic pain over acute pain, and I think that this was something. Yeah, I learned a lot.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, that's fantastic and I really enjoyed your book and I'm going to buy some copies for for gifts as well, for people as well. If I'm a listener listening right now, how can they reach out and and what services, um, and all your consulting and things like that can you, could you explain for them?
Speaker 2:yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I love so much to hear from readers and so if you read any one of my books, please feel free to message me through my website, which is just my name, wwwangelagorellcom, and my last name has it's go with two R's and two L's, so G-O-R-R-E-L-Lcom. You can message me through my website. I love, like I said, I'd love to hear from you. I do one-on-ones with people occasionally, where I meet with people for spiritual direction or coaching and then but then I also I mostly spend my time leading retreats and giving keynotes and stuff like that, and so you can contact me through my website for anything of that nature. But I also would love to be friends. So if you want to be friends through Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, you can find me at all those places, just at angela garell will help, you know. You'll be able to find me on any of those places.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll make sure I put those details in the show notes as well, so in case anyone missed that. But uh, and if I want to buy your book, I noticed we've got it on like it's on amazon uk, amazon us. I'm sure it's amazon worldwide and it's it's available. I know it's available in the UK in hardback copy and also Kindle. And you've just said that you're doing the Audible version as well. When's that out, the Audible?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it actually. It's already finished and it's been in processing at Audible and so it should be live. It might be live today. It'll be live any day now. Yeah, so you could check. If you prefer Audible, it'll be live any day now. Yeah, so you could check if you love, if you, if you prefer audible, it'll be live any day now perfect.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll make sure again. I'll put some details of that. So just thank you, go, angela, I'm mindful of the time. I could talk to you forever. Is there anything we feel that we have covered that you'd like to share as a leaving note?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that the last thing I'd love to share is just that, if you're worried about regretting your decision, I just invite you to think back to what I just said about being able to edit the paragraph that you're living in. You know, we can always keep editing, we can always keep trying to make sure that we feel good about the story that we're living, and so part of the journey of making difficult decisions, I think, is if we take a wrong turn or what to us feels like a wrong turn or a mistake, that forgiveness is always available. You can forgive yourself for taking a wrong turn, like you can forgive yourself for taking a wrong turn, and that that's why there's other people to rely on as well to help you through anything like that. And then also a lot of people ask me like how do you know when it's the right thing? I mean, you might feel that inner knowing, but you still are like but we always make difficult decisions with great humility.
Speaker 2:We always make difficult decisions with great humility. All of us. I mean even the wisdom literature in the Bible, for example, the chief aspect of wisdom is humility. We never quite know that when we don't ever have all the information possible. We cannot predict the future. We can only move forward with prudence, and so try to take it easy and not be so hard on yourself, because you'll never just like everything we do. We do with humility and with a little bit of like. Okay, I'm going to try my best with the information I have, but that's all I can do.
Speaker 1:Be kind to ourselves and trust the process rather than yeah, angela, it's been an absolute pleasure. Um, I'm definitely going to follow you on on instagram and good luck with the work, and the world needs more people like you, so thank you for bringing your amazing light to the podcast today thank you, chain.
Speaker 2:Thank you for what you're doing in the world, for how you're participating in people's healing, for for having me. I look forward to following you back on Instagram.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, angela. And, dear listeners, as always, stay tuned. There's a meditation inspired by today's show. But everyone, the wonderful Angela Williams-Gorel, thank you, angela. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Take care. Thank you. Top tips for the meditation is either sit nice and cross-legged on the floor with a nice straight back Always nice to sit on a block or a cushion or, if that's not available for you, you sit in a chair with the back nice and straight. The important thing is you're not slouching, and if you're doing something that requires a little concentration, all you need to do is just pause this and you can reconvene the meditation at a time that is good for you.
Speaker 1:If you're doing the meditation, let's begin so for today's meditation, inspired by Angela's wonderful podcast episode, and I thought we'd do a meditation for surrendering, again inspired by Angela's brilliant words.
Speaker 1:So we're going to sit up, nice and tall, whatever that is for you, and you're going to close the eyes and, as we breathe in and out through the nostrils, feel a sense of calmness, a sense of ease and a sense of equilibrium, of balance, as we come into the spring equinox, where the night and day are the same length, and we're just going to sit with our palms facing up and we're just going inhale and we're going to breathe into our being, anything where we may feel stuck or not sure of where to go next in life and we'll see, exhale.
Speaker 1:We're going to exhale and feel as if we fill our being with acceptance of that. This is where we are right now, but that's okay. That's okay, for tomorrow is a new day and if anything is certain in life is it changes, the flux and change of life, and we just get comfortable thinking actually, yeah, this is fine, we're okay, we accept. And to accept is to surrender and just allow and be. So can you feel, with your palms facing up, that you accept, you surrender and you allow yourself to be. No need to tell yourself off or to change or to be any other way, but just allow yourself to be who you want to be today.
Speaker 1:Today and just allow yourself to be who you want to be today and surrender. Surrender, just like, ah, just let it all go, let yourself flow in the moment, feeling as if you're supported by divine and beautiful light. Surrender, realizing that the person we're generally the most hard with is ourselves, the person we're generally the most hard with is ourselves, and can we allow ourselves just that space to be, to accept, to love without judgment. Try and navigate life with discernment rather than judgment, with kindness rather than cruelty, with self-care rather than self-loathing, and just surrender in that stillness and be so. Thank you so much for listening. Dear listeners, I'm your host, the gentle yoga warrior, and, as always, do reach out, thank you.
