The Power of Surrender
“Your true power lies in your ability to stay present with, consciously feel and totally surrender to the experience of complete powerlessness.” - Louise Kay
As a recovering control freak, surrender has become my soft place; my bed of feathers to languish upon.
When we believe that we are a separate self that requires defending, propagating, opining, organizing and protecting, we move about our lives as hyper-vigilant vigilantes.
We say to ourselves, “Who is going to protect me…how am I going to get what I want…when will I finally wake up?!”
If we were actually separate beings that this Universe threw to the wolves upon our arrival on this hostile planet, we would be remiss if we didn’t ask these questions. After all, it would seem that our very survival - or at least our relative okayness - would depend upon these things.
But if, like me, you’ve ever had an experience whereby the seemingly separate YOU stepped aside for even a minute (think: runner’s high, deep meditative state, the throws of passion, sleeping, psychedelic experiences) then you know it is possible for YOU to be here without framing yourself as a sole operating system.
Think of all of the times that you’ve driven somewhere and when you arrived at your destination you discovered that “you” were barely present for any of the drive. Who drove you then? How did you get there safely? How did you get there at all?
It is time that we understand our own existential predicament.
You are not who you think you are.
You are not, as your ego would have you believe, lost in the woods.
You are, as every other living thing in the known Universe, an extension of that which animates ALL life.
As Eckhart Tolle puts it, while we are not the Sun itself, we are an emanation…a ray of the source of all life. And as such, your fuel, your lifeforce is inextricably woven with and fed from the spring of Consciousness.
To put it in plain language: You are NOT a separate self. That’s not even possible. You are Consciousness itself, playing in the Unified Field in order to know and remember itself in its fullness.
So what does surrender have to do with all of this?
Everything.
If Consciousness truly is animating all things, then we can all calm down and know this: ALL IS WELL.
Even (and especially) when your mind tells you that, something is going wrong or that, it will be better in the future…you can know that in the Intelligence that is your life (that is ALL life) that even what appears to be wonky, is not.
If we can accept that, then our only sane response to the life being led through us is Surrender.
Imagine for a moment that something feels painful or challenging or even simply unknown (which we really don’t like). Imagine how it feels to fight this phenomenon.
It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. It’s scary.
Now imagine RELAXING in the face of whatever it is that is currently flowing through your experience.
Imagine taking your hands off the wheel, knowing that the highest possible Intelligence knows exactly what it is doing; that there is a Divine Purpose behind every single movement of your life; that, while it might not feel so good, you can trust it.
Imagine taking a big, huge breath and letting it go.
Imagine saying YES to everything.
Hell…I’m even feeling better just writing this!
That’s because I’m not the one writing this.
It’s all a movement of the Divine.
There’s nothing else here.
And the only thing that’s being asked of you is to get out of the way.
When we trust and get out of the way something happens to our nervous system. It switches gears from sympathetic (fight, flight or freeze) and moves into parasympathetic (rest and digest). Imagine how your physiology responds to such a switch of gears.
So when something arises in your experience that your mind tells you shouldn’t be happening, take a breath and know that it absolutely should be happening. Why? Because it’s happening.
It’s so simple.
It’s right here.
Come in and rest a while.