Roger Housden - Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have

Praise for Dropping the Struggle

Surrender is an essential goal of all spiritual work. Letting go of the control that we never really had is both our great task and the key to a life of joy and inner peace. In Dropping the Struggle, Roger Housden has written a simple but brilliant guidebook to help us do just that. With inspiring poetry, engaging stories, and deep insight, this book is a heartful invitation to let go of fighting with life and open to the wisdom and love right inside us. I highly recommend this beautiful book!

JAMES BARAZ, author of Awakening Joy and cofounding
teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center

This wonderful book is an antidote to overachievement, a welcome respite from striving to have it all, a voice of sanity in a world addicted to self-improvement. Irreverent, profound, and hard-hitting. I loved it.

MARK MATOUSEK, author of Ethical Wisdom

Dropping the Struggle is a beautifully written message from the heart that speaks directly to what my life needs now. An inspiring, life-changing book that challenges us to open our arms to the life we have rather than wishing we had something else.

MARCI SHIMOFF, author of Happy for No Reason

Gently and wisely, Roger Housden points to the timeless knowing within us, which dissolves the need to struggle with life, with others, and with ourselves.

ROGER WALSH, MD, PHD, author of Essential Spirituality

This book came to me just when I needed it, helping me to loosen my tight fist on how I want things to be and take another step toward acceptance. Dropping the Struggle is filled with rich inspiration from many sources, such as the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who tells us to Want the change. / Be inspired by the flame / Where everything shines as it disappears. Thank you, Roger Housden, for giving us the old truths in a new way.

ELLEN BASS, author of Like a Beggar and coauthor of
The Courage to Heal

This book is a deep drink of water for my soul, which has run itself ragged with my own little self-improvement obstacle course. I read it because I trust Roger Housden. And I trust Roger Housden because he speaks the language of the heart: poetry. With luminous clarity, radical authenticity, and tender appreciation of the human predicament, Dropping the Struggle is more than a teaching and bigger than a book: it is an invitation to transform.

MIRABAI STARR, translator of Dark Night of the Soul
and author of Caravan of No Despair

Roger Housdens Dropping the Struggle is a book of confessions, advice, and easy-to-digest wisdom on how to lean into surrender and beingness in spite of our Western hardwiring of constant doingness. If you are seeking a path to the Sea of Tranquility, let this book be your guide.

ARIELLE FORD, author of Turn Your Mate into Your Soulmate

Dropping the Struggle is a wise, compassionate, fierce gift and gentle guide for living fully with more ease. Blending poetry, storytelling, and science, it leads the way toward a more open heart and mind.

MARC LESSER, author of Less and
Know Yourself, Forget Yourself

DROPPING THE STRUGGLE

Other Books by Roger Housden

Travels through Sacred India

Sacred America: The Emerging Spirit of the People

Ten Poems to Change Your Life

Chasing Rumi: A Fable about Finding the Hearts True Desire

Ten Poems to Set You Free

Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living

Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime

Ten Poems to Open Your Heart

Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Redemption

Dancing with Joy: 99 Poems

Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again

Sacred Journeys in a Modern World

Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

Saved by Beauty: Adventures of an American Romantic in Iran

Twenty Poems to Bless Your Marriage

Keeping the Faith without Religion

Copyright 2016 by Roger Housden

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. It is not meant to take the place of diagnosis and treatment by a qualified medical practitioner or therapist. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of using the recommendations can be given, or liability taken.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

First printing, September 2016

ISBN 978-1-60868-406-9

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-407-6

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

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CONTENTS

Life, as we all know, is conflict, and man, being part of life, is himself an expression of conflict. If he recognizes the fact and accepts it, he is apt, despite the conflict, to know peace and to enjoy it. But to arrive at this end... a man has got to learn the doctrine of acceptance, that is, of unconditional surrender, which is love.

HENRY MILLER

HENRY MILLER IS SURELY RIGHT: life, as most of us experience it, often consists of challenge and conflict. We begin life by struggling to get here out of the womb, and that is just the beginning of a very long road. Sometimes we feel as if we are battling with odds that nearly always seem to be stacked against us. So you might think that dropping the struggle, as the title of this book suggests, means giving up on life, throwing in the towel in response to whatever challenge you are faced with. But Millers thinking here doesnt take that route. It leads to the unconditional surrender of love. In the book you have in your hands, dropping the struggle leads not away from life but deeply into it.

The kind of surrender that Henry Miller points to is an echo of Nietzsches idea, amor fati, loving your fate acknowledging and accepting the conditions of your life exactly as they are, whatever they are because that is what you have. This is not to say your fate cannot be changed thats not what Nietzsche meant no, he was saying that this moment right now is your fate. Each moment of your life offers you an opportunity to respond more creatively, more intelligently, than the last moment.

Yet how does loving the life you have embracing it fully just as it is become a natural experience day to day? Thats the question this book invites you to live. I believe that you can only fully allow your current experience into your consciousness when, if only for a moment, something in you stops struggling with your experience, stops trying to make it other than what it is. You allow your full experience when you feel the space between your fear-based thoughts and let yourself rest there, where nothing ever is. Then a deeper knowing can move through you and emerge as needed into appropriate action.