The Strength Of Surrender

Once there was a woman who spent her whole life climbing a very high mountain. She began as a child, and she could not remember a time before the mountain.

Year after year she would ascend the steep cliffs, and in the process she became very good at the motion of climbing. The muscles in her legs and her back grew very strong, and after a while, climbing felt as natural to her as breathing.

As time passed, and she went higher and higher, she didn't even have to try and climb anymore - her body did it automatically. At last, one day, the woman reached the top of the mountain. She was overjoyed with her achievement, and couldn't wait to start out on the next portion of her travels, and to conquer her next
mountain.

As she looked over the horizon, she saw a beautiful blue lake, stretching sideways as far as her eye could see. But being a climber all her life, the woman had only lived on the mountains, so she had never seen a lake, and if fact, did not even know what a lake was.

She watched the strange expanse before her and concluded that it must be some unusual kind of blue mountain. Since the only way to continue her journey was to cross the odd-looking blue form, she decided she had to "climb the lake". So the mountain woman walked up to the water, and began to try to "climb the lake" with the same motions she'd used to climb the mountain. At first she could not understand why she was not making any progress, and, in fact, was exhausting herself.  She mustered all the energy in her body and tried to "climb" even harder, placing one leg in front of the other, using her hands to try to grasp the "blue rocks". But her efforts were useless. She kept falling over, and wasn't going anywhere.

Just about this time, when the mountain woman felt like giving up, she noticed a person floating on top of the blue lake, gently gliding his body through the water with the slightest movement of his arms and legs. "What are you doing my friend?" he called out to her.  "What does it look like?" she answered, her face flush with embarrassment. "I'm climbing the lake".

"Good woman," the man of the lake replied, "don't you know that you can't cross a lake by climbing it? The only way to travel through water is to swim".

"But I am such a marvelous climber!" the mountain woman insisted. "I've spent my whole life learning to climb. I can climb any mountain. I can reach the top of any peak. Surely there is some way I can climb the lake."

"I'm sure you are an excellent climber," the man of the lake answered politely. "But that skill won't help you here in the water. It took one kind of wisdom to get you to the top of the mountain - you had to make your power stronger than the mountain. Now you need to learn another kind of wisdom to get across the lake - you need to surrender to the power of the water and allow its force to be stronger than you. You don't have to try hard anymore. In fact, the less you try the better you will do!"

And so it was that the man of the lake taught the woman of the mountain how to swim. At first, she splashed and thrashed around in the water, for she was accustomed to using her very strong energy in her climbing. But her teacher was very patient, and she learned how to float on the water's surface, and allow the waves and wind to carry her gently forward until she was hardly doing anything at all.

And that's how the mountain woman learned that the strength of surrender is just as powerful as the strength of pushing forward.