Sweet Surrender

The message we hear from the heart of most religions is surrender. But our mind says, “Surrender? You’ve got to be kidding.” To our minds it means defeat. When you Google the word surrender, the first definition that comes up is ‘cease resistance to an enemy or opponent and submit to their authority.’  No wonder we have resistance to the word surrender.

But true surrender, deep and lasting surrender, is at the heart of all spiritual paths and it is the opposite of defeat. It is not collapse, nor fragility or even acquiescence. Instead, it is about opening to life as it is, which unlocks the doors of the prison of our minds so we can step into an immediate experience of life.

I found it easier to tap into the heart of surrender by using the word open. To me, it is what the word surrender is pointing to – having our mind, our body, and our heart open to life. But we have been trained in the opposite. Our minds believe that true safety lies in controlling life—controlling our thoughts, our feelings, our weight, our looks, our meditations, our friends, and our loved ones.

But has this trying to control life ever brought you the deep and lasting healing you long for? If your answer is no, know there is a deep longing inside of you to open to life. In the 80s, I was sitting beside one of my favorite rivers, the Nooksack, nestled in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. As the river blessed me with its presence, what came flooding through me was, ‘Enter the river. Let spirit do it.’ That moment was so profound that when I came home, I wrote it on the mirror in my bedroom with lipstick and it is still there to this day. What it points to is that life is a river, a constantly changing river, and peace comes when you learn how to enter the river…relax into life rather than always trying to fix or change it.

What is spirit? I don’t think it can be defined but to me, it points to the truth that all of life is animated by a presence that is very intelligent, very loving, and much smarter than us. And becoming a fully awake person is discovering how to open and relax into life. In other words, how to ‘surrender’.

Since that day on the river, my life has been a process of holding on and letting go and holding on and letting go and it took me a while to recognize that holding on was as important as letting go, just like the contractions when a woman gives birth are what opens her cervix so that the baby can be born.

So I learned to open to it all – the easy and difficult, the joyous and sorrowful. And because I am a work in progress, I still contract when life is very fierce, but when I do, I don’t spend much time there and my identification with the contraction being the truth has dramatically lessened over the years. And more and more moments of my life are spent opening to life – exactly as it is.

If this intrigues you, do not be dismayed by how much you contract and try to control. Most of humanity is caught in their struggling minds and all you have to do is look at history to see what price we pay for that. So if it calls to you, cultivate moments where you just let go and the easiest place to do this is with your body. We carry so much tension throughout our day. One of the ways you can soften resistance is to simply exaggerate your holding on your in-breath by tightening every single muscle you can find in your body and then slowly, on your out-breath, let it go. Do this for as many breaths as it calls to you and then simply open to this living moment of your life. One of the easiest ways to do that is to close your eyes and bring your attention to sounds. There are all sorts of sounds going on in you and around you and yet we rarely hear our lives. To listen to the music of your life, to really listen to it, is a moment of surrendering to life.

Cultivating moments such as these are treasures in the middle of the roller coaster of life. The more you give yourself the gift of moments such as these, the treasures accumulate until you truly begin to understand that trying to find safety in your mind is like locking yourself in a cage at the zoo with all the lions. But deep and true safety comes from simply being here for life – as it is. Life may not always be likable, but it is eminently trustable.

Open, open, open!