Transcending Regrets, Problems, and Mistakes

One of the biggest things I’ve learned over the past year is how to truly let go of regret.

(Psst: if you’ve got Spotify, hit play on this track before you keep reading. Or here’s a Google Play link. I’ll explain later.)

A few months ago, in September, I went to a tantra yoga workshop called the Fire & Nectar retreat. The event involved a fair bit of yoga and meditation, but what was most powerful for me were the teachings on non-dualism. A lot of it made deep, immediate sense to me, and there were also pieces that were met with a lot of resistance.

One of the most challenging things that our teacher Hareesh said was this:

If you had a chance for a do-over, would you choose for everything to go exactly the same?
If not, you have not yet surrendered.

He clarified that this wasn’t talking about a dualistic sort of surrender, more like surrendering to reality. I seem to recall he was quoting someone, but I can’t find a source in my notes or on the internet. At any rate, this was a thing that he said, and I immediately recognized it as containing a perspective that I didn’t understand. A perspective that I feared.

I recognized it as a perspective that I’d been in a battle with for several years.

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