Surrender: In Memoriam of a Cat Guru
Every day after my morning yoga practice I read a piece of my teacher’s book in which some of her wisdom has been captured through the years. The portion that I’ve read that day is titled Surrender. It’s about surrendering to the moment and leaving the ego aside; letting go of the illusion that we’re in control. Little did I know that I’d be tested on this subject that same day.
One Friday I had to take my male cat for a minor surgical procedure. I left him at the clinic in his carrier, he was looking at me with his big eyes, not having a single clue what’s ahead of him. I felt bad. Every time I have to leave one of the cats at the vet I’m always expecting the worst. What if there’s a complication? What if they lose him? What if she escapes? What if …? The mind has total control over me.
Despite my head-dramas, the procedure was successful and they called me to pick him up a few hours later. Phew!
Later that day my mom called. She is a hopeless animal lover and rescuer. We had so many animals that have been treated for various injuries on our balcony or in her garden, from crows fallen off their nests to lost hedgehogs, from beaten cats to injured ducks, and many others in between. The last addition to her wild tribe was a young grey and white female cat who was visiting her in the garden. During one of these visits my mom noticed that she was pregnant. She immediately started to make arrangements for the cat to be spayed after the delivery and taken to the shelter for adoption together with her kitties. However, in approaching her due date the cat disappeared, leaving everyone thinking that she went into hiding to give birth to her kitties. And she did…
When my mom called I thought she was checking up on my cat’s post-op status but her voice was shaky.
“Do you remember the cat from the garden? She didn’t go away, she was in the garden all along, hidden. I didn’t see her nor hear her! She was having babies all alone and one got stuck halfway… When I found her she was in such a bad state. I rushed her to the vet but she died in my car. How come I didn’t see her all this time? I didn’t hear her… If only I had gone to the garden 1 hour earlier, maybe they could have saved her…”
She was devastated, and frankly so was I. I weeped for the poor cat, imagining the suffering she must have gone through. The female pain. The misfortune of events. My heart ached for the little kitties. She did everything right and got everything wrong.
I was trying to come up with an explanation to console my mom who’s been feeling guilty for not spotting her earlier. To help her make sense out of this. But what to say?
“It will come when we have to leave our bodies. It will come when we have to let go of our loved ones. It will come when we enter sickness or old age. It will come, it is inevitable.”
Satya
Most of us / most of the time we have a very narrow view of the world. Everything is rotating around I, me, myself, mine and in doing that we also live in the conviction that we are the ones in charge — the masters of it all. Certainly we can put our efforts to achieve a goal or pursue something we wish for but this is just a grain in the vast desert of the Universe or Intelligence or God, however one wishes to call it. Sickness, deaths, heartbreaks and all other events that we deem being opposed to ‘life’ and ‘enjoyment’ are the checkpoints when we’re stopped to re-evaluate our beliefs and let go of the thought that we’re in control. Let go of the tiring (inner) fights and the swimming against the flow. This is a futile energy draining activity. Trust, acceptance and surrender, on the other hand, are light, easy and peaceful.
In living in egocentricity we also distance ourselves more from the concept and raw reality of impermanence. Especially in the West we sanitise illness and death by putting (old) people in cold hospitals, old people’s homes or hospice. We let people die away from their homes in non-personal environments. This doesn’t make the passing easy and it only increases the feeling of injustice when death comes. It keeps death at arm’s length, a stranger, an enemy. Out of fear of death we second guess the Universe.
There is no life without death and there is no death without life. These are two complimentary events, of which one we cherish and the other we try to avoid . This avoidance creates disconnection and disconnection creates distress. To re-connect we need consciousness. Consciousness about everything being a dance between life and death — one cell dies and another takes its place, every moment we die, and every moment we are born. Women’s bodies especially are a great reminder of impermanence which is engraved in our cycles: the first period, menstrual cycles, pregnancy and giving birth, all through the process of menopause when it all ends. Birth and death.
“You cannot change it. That which you cannot change, accept — and accept it with joy. Don’t unnecessarily hit your head against the wall, just pass through the door.”
Osho
The garden cat is a symbol of all that and it has found my mom for a reason: to teach her about death in its fullest. In the past months there have been a few death events that my mom had to deal with, always ending up with her clinging on the memories, guilt and sadness after long battles against death. This time she wasn’t given a chance to fight, to rationalise it better, it was just presented to her there in all its roughness and indiscrimination.
No matter what we do, we will not get or develop a good explanation of the ‘why’. We have no idea in reality about what any creature’s karma is. There are bigger things at play than you and I, a bigger picture. The garden cat is a reminder that we need to trust the Intelligence and let it go rather than go into ‘what if’ loops and self-judgements of the ego, trying to reverse back time. This doesn’t mean that we should go numb or be indifferent. We can feel in surrender, we can be sad in acceptance, but we shouldn’t be fighting against something that we have no power over.
Trust, letting go and acceptance of the as is opens us to new insights from every situation, creature and object. That way everything that comes on our path becomes our guru.
And so have you, gentle garden cat. Wherever you are now, thank you.
🖤
Om shantih shantih shantih
