In the course of my work with thousands of people over 30 years, I have come to make a very significant observation: the people who become adept at surrender are far happier than those who don’t.
What gets in the way? Needing to be right, feeling offended, insulted, wanting to get even, and countless other expressions of the primitive survival ego. In a nutshell, when people mistake surrender for resignation they are not able to surrender. To be resigned is unwillingly giving in to a greater power, while surrender is letting go of the need to have power over another.
Surrender is a conscious act of letting to, and is both the movement of a single moment and the movement of a lifetime. It may be the path you take during an argument, when you drop your end of the rope and breathe into your heart, soften your belly, and begin to listen to the other person. It may be the path you take when you face the fact that you are no longer fulfilled in your job, or your marriage, or anything you had previously devised to keep yourself happy. It is the foundation of recovery in the Twelve Step Program, where members learn to surrender their will to a higher power and thus surrender their attachment to the addictive substance.
Surrender involves letting go of what you are experiencing and are identified with in order to open to something uncertain. Often it involves conscious suffering, usually loss, that you both experience and witness within the larger context of your life. It involves a kind of spiritual or mystic death, after which you are changed, and life is no longer a dedication to self but a celebration of life. It involves showing up as who you really are.
The tool of surrender is not a sword, but rather, the ability to be vulnerable, honest and kind with yourself and others. You surrender, realizing that whatever sadness, anger or fear you are experiencing is something you must embrace, and you drop your resistance to it, out of a desire to be free.
Acceptance is a kind of passionate surrender, and the Universe is incapable of saying “no” to your intense yearning for liberation. You must simply offer the Universe a passion equal to its own. There is no bribing the Universe, God, or whatever you call that power. Surrender is an expression of the Soul, while resignation is an expression of the ego
To surrender means letting go of our judgments about good and bad, in ourselves and toward others. This capacity for non-preference is illustrated beautifully by a Kashmir mystic named Lal Ded, who walked the streets of India naked, so that there would be nothing between her and God. Many disciples followed her, singing her praises, while others along the way jeered and sneered and threw fruit at her. As a result, her disciples became angry and began shouting at those who were mocking their beloved Lal Ded.
To teach them this powerful wisdom of the principle of having no preference, so that they could surrender their anger, when Lal Ded came to a cloth merchant, she bought two bolts of cloth and had the salesman weigh them both on the scale, showing that they weighed the same. She hung one piece of cloth over her right shoulder and the other over her left.
As Lal Ded and her disciples walked through the day, each time she received praise she tied a knot in the cloth on the right, and each time she received an insult she tied a knot on the left. At the end of the day, when she came to another cloth merchant, she had him weigh both bolts of cloth. Indeed, they weighed the same.
Surrender is an act of wisdom that arises from the awareness that everything is perfect the way it is, and the sooner we surrender to what is, the sooner we are free.
May we surrender resistance to what is quickly, and open fully to all that is meant to be.
