Tao Te Ching 23

If you open yourself to insight, you are at one with insight and you can use it completely. If you open yourself to loss, you are at one with loss and you can accept it completely.

Open yourself to the Tao, then trust your natural responses; and everything will fall into place.
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Opening ourselves can be a frightening experience. New insights can challenge our sense of what is good and right and true in the world and that can threaten our carefully constructed, albeit false, sense of security.

Opening ourselves to loss is more than frightening. We exert a tremendous amount of energy in resisting a loss. The bigger the loss, the more we resist it. It’s hard work to accept a loss, but it’s even harder work to not accept that loss.

By opening our defenses and letting that loss “sink in”, by actually feeling rather than resisting or repressing the pain, we’re able to dissipate that pain over a much larger, open space rather than keeping it contained in a closed and deeply embedded place.

It’s like releasing smoke from a bottle. Outside the bottle is a much, much bigger container than inside the bottle. Natural dissipation brings natural relief from grief.

Many of us have closed ourselves off to the way that life naturally flows around us, on the “outside”. By opening ourselves, we allow that natural flow back inside our “bottle” and allow that flow to clear the stagnant air trapped inside. We relearn how to trust natural responses and with that trust we regain the insight that all things are the only way they can be at that moment.

We realize that accepting the present moment completely is the only real choice we have. All other choices are smoke in a bottle.