This is an excerpt from a blog by one of my favorite writers, Oriah Mountain Dreamer. Although she’s clearly not talking about infertility her insight into denial and acceptance of physical limitations struck a cord with me. My condition (DOR) is beyond my control. It is my reality. I can continue to rail against it and waste precious time and energy or I can accept it (and the reality of the options that I have) and move forward. Anyway, I highlighted the parts I particularly liked.

Flowering Anyway
As I do my morning prayers and meditation I am brought- once again!- into awareness of the vastness of what I do not control and how much energy I waste in denial of this. Oh, I get that I don’t control other people or the weather or many other changing conditions. But the place where I keep hurtling myself against a brick wall (and then wondering why I wake up covered in bruises) is around my desire to control how things impact me.

…this body-self has particular limits, limits that of course are not static and unchanging but never-the-less real….Insisting that my physical body can do what it can’t lands me in bed or at the medical clinic with some frustrated and bewildered doctor asking (voice volume just slightly shy of shouting) “What are you not getting about this? What can I say that will communicate to you that if you insist on doing what your body cannot you will end or housebound or bedbound or worse?”

What am I not getting? That although we have choices we are- I am- not in charge of a great deal.

So, once again I surrender to what is, accepting – albeit not as gracefully as I would have liked- my limitations in this moment. I accepted long ago that hang gliding and seventeen hour work days are not in the cards for me. With more difficulty, I recognize that there are very real limits to the assistance I can offer others right now, that they may be disappointed and angry or may not believe that these limits are real. I surrender to the possibility of being misunderstood or judged. Because I can’t control that either.

My favourite card in the Xultan Tarot deck is “Strength.” It’s an image of a cactus flowering in a pot. It reminds me that at any given moment we find ourselves in a particular “pot,” a set of of conditions that may be personal and specific to us or embedded in the reality we share, things that shape and limit available choices. 

But there is nothing within the present moment limitations that stops us from flowering, from being all of who we are and offering what we are to the world. The form may be not as we had hoped or imagined, but unfolding and living from our essential beingness is always possible.

I want to use all that I am and all that I have for flowering. I don’t want to waste one bit of time or energy on denial of or fighting with present-moment limitations that are beyond my control. Because flowering, unfolding into the life we are given regardless of the ever-changing conditions, is what brings us joy. . . . is what heals the world. . . . is why we are here.

Oriah (c) 2013 (You can subscribe to Oriah’s weekly blog athttp://oriahsinvitation.blogspot.ca/)