Exploring the Discipline of Surrender 🧎🏻♂️
An alternative Way of Being as the New Year blooms before us.
With the New Year in seasonal bloom, so too are the personal discipline movements.
The 30 day challenges. The 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' tribe. The suffer-fests.
I would like to offer an alternative mode as this year begins. That of deep surrender. Below is a journal entry I wrote during a week-long DIY retreat a few weeks ago, of which I will discuss in my next article.
Welcome to all who have joined us here the past few weeks, I’m honoured and excited to have you here! Things are going to get spicy this year, mark my words.
Now, let’s begin! Happy New Years, I love you. 💛
Surrender is not the passive failure it’s commonly portrayed as...
… indeed, quite the opposite!
Surrender requires great strength, courage, and commitment.
It is an arduous and challenging process because unlike nearly any other course of action, surrender is a direct path to relinquishing control.
And it is control—or at least the illusion of it—that is the final battle of the heart.
A battle that many never win, nor begin.
Whether it is anger, optimism, grit, humour, discipline, or otherwise, all other modes of relating to experience maintain this illusion of control. But when your foot is strapped to the proverbial ox-cart bounding through city streets, you can either get in, or be dragged.
“When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don't want to, they will be compelled to follow what is destined.” ―Zeno of Citium
Control is an illusion, and the most direct path to "getting in" is through surrendering to reality. Releasing into the flow of Life.
The process of 'getting onboard' with life requires Trust. Trust is paramount, and inextricably weaved into the process of surrender.
Trust and desire for control are inversely correlated.
The less trust you have in a person, outcome, or experience — the more you seek to control it. But just as you cannot calm rough water by patting it down, you cannot influence life nor its future through greater degrees of control.
Instead of control, you must work on trust.
By increasing trust in yourself, others, and reality, you accomplish two things:
You reclaim massive amounts of vital life force that was previously pissed away on futile efforts to control and micro-manage reality.
You begin to see—increasingly clearly—that in spite of your lack of intervention, everything magically works out.
Seeing clearly that you are not required to be the grand architect of the future increases trust further. This lets you surrender more deeply. Which increases your trust over time. Which lets you surrender even more deeply. Ad infinitum…
Trust is a virtuous cycle, while control is a vicious circle, doomed from the beginning.
When you finally admit your ignorance about something—say dentistry, for example—you willingly relinquish your control and trust in an expert: a dentist.
This is true of all domains. You relinquish control, due to lack of expertise, to experts.
Now tell me: where did you acquire your expertise in the orchestration of entire ecosystems? In the management of planetary forces? At what school did you study the flawless operation of the innumerable bodily processes that govern your moment-to-moment existence? Which job taught you to wield the gravitational forces influencing the atomic processes underneath all material things?
Do you even know, truly and honestly, how it is you go about opening and closing your hand? How to shine the sun? How do you possibly know for certain what is best for your own life and your own future if you can't even tell me what will happen 5 minutes from now?
When confronted with overwhelming ignorance in the domain of life, willingly relinquish control to the expert: Life!
Like I said at the beginning: this is no passive failure. This is a step that requires great confidence, trust, strength, and ongoing commitment.
Most never make this step and spend their lives thrashing about like dogs, dragged along by the cart, doing more and more to accomplish less and less. All because they think they know best.
The next move requires deference, trust, and surrender to the infinite intelligence of nature.
Nature is the archetypal genius.
Life, Nature, Reality, God, whatever word you prefer – is in fact the very expert who not only can manage all of these things, but has been doing so, successfully, since before Time existed.
This natural force, the Great River of Being, has stewarded humanity alongside countless other complex species and ecosystems for longer than it is feasibly possible for you to imagine.
Surrender into this.
But when attempting to do so, you're likely to run into a problem...
Surrendering is a skill, you see. It's more like a muscle you train than a light switch you flick on. And most of us have never trained this muscle.
The act of surrender does not require discipline like a fuel source, the act of surrender is a discipline, like a martial art.
It is a path, a process, and a practice. It is a Way of Being.
You can live a miraculous, beautiful, powerful existence simply by following the question “what is most difficult for me to surrender to right now?” and acting immediately on the answer.
Sometimes the answer will be hard work. Sometimes rest. Sometimes laughter. Sometimes art. Sometimes sadness.
Surrender nonetheless.
Surrendering into life is taking a courageous step to trust in the ancient wisdom of Existence. To make an unshakeable commitment to act on the guidance you receive in the form of emotion and intuition, the language of nature. It requires belief in the fundamental benevolence of Life. It requires courage, strength, love, trust, and wisdom.
This is the Discipline of Surrender.
With love,
EB. 💛
Beautiful post. Surrender is home. ❤️🔥
Loved this post, was a great reminder for the New Years. Now I’m noticing all the ways I try to excessively control everything about my life, such a wonderful gift to be confronted with this reminder at this moment.