Surrender, especially in American culture, is rarely seen as something positive. It’s seen as giving up or losing. But as I reflect on my faith, what does it mean to surrender to your situation?
Surrender means accepting that the battle has been won not on your terms, and you are willingly giving your life over to a higher power; the authority of God’s wisdom. It means taking a humble position and embracing that the control is not yours. Letting go of the attachment you have in the result.
Pretty much all of our struggles, from frustrations to anxiety, from anger to sadness, from grief to worry, all stem from the same thing …
The struggles come from being too tightly attached to something.
When we’re worried, we are tightly attached to how we want things to be, rather than relaxing into accepting whatever might happen when we put forth our best effort. When we’re frustrated with someone, it’s because we’re attached to how we want them to be, rather than accepting them as the wonderful, flawed human they are. When we procrastinate, we are attached to things being easy and comfortable (like distractions) rather than accepting that to do something important, we have to push into discomfort. And so on.
Well, if you’re ready to accept that being too attached, clinging too tightly, is the cause of our struggles … then the answer is simple, right? Just loosen the attachments. Just let go.
Easier said than done. Any of us who have tried to let go of attachments knows that it’s not so easy in practice. When our minds are clinging tightly, we don’t want to let go. We really, really want things our way.
So what’s the answer, then? In this short blog, I share a few practices I use to help dissolve attachments to things that don’t serve me.
1. Meditation
Meditation is simply sitting still and trying to pay attention to the present moment — whether that’s your breath, your body, or what’s around you right now. What you’ll find is that your mind runs away from the present moment, attaching to worries about the future, planning, remembering things in the past. In meditation, you practice letting go of these mini attachments, by noticing what your mind is doing and letting go, returning to the present moment. This happens again and again, and so you get good at it. It’s like muscle memory after doing it hundreds, thousands of times. You learn that whatever you were attached to is simply a story, a narrative, a dream. It’s not so heavy, just a bit of cloud that can be blown away by a breeze.
2. Compassion
Taking this thought into mind, you ask God for an end to your suffering, or an end to the suffering of others. What happens is that this prayer transforms you from being stuck in your attachment, to plug into God’s power that will melt the attachment and find a way to ease it. You become bigger than your story, when you pray for your own suffering to end. And when you pray for others’ suffering to end, you connect yourself to them, see that your suffering is the same as theirs, understand that you’re in this together. What happens is that your attachments and story become less important, not such a big deal, as you connect with others in this way.
3. Interdependence
Try recalling what you are grateful for and pray for others to be happy as well. All others, whether you like them or not. We all know that hurt people, hurt people. As you do this, you start to see that you’re all connected in your suffering, and in your desire to be happy. You are not so separate from them. You’re not separate, but interdependent. You want happiness, bring more happy.
4. Accepting
At the heart of things, attachment is about not wanting things to be the way they are. You want something different. That’s because there’s something about the present moment, about the person in front of you, about the space you are in , or about yourself, that you don’t like. By praying, meditating, practicing compassion and interdependence, you can start to trust that things are OK just as they are. They might not be “ideal,” but they are as they need to be in this moment. God is getting things ready or prepping you for challenges. Things are beautiful even. And you start to become more aware of your continual rejection of the present moment, and open up to the actuality of this moment instead. Over and over, this is the practice, opening and investigating the moment with curiosity, accepting it as it is.
5. Expansiveness
All of these practices result in a more expansive mind, that is not so narrowly focused on its little story of how things should be, not so focused on its small desires and aversions, but can see those as part of a bigger picture. The mind can hold these little desires, and much more. It’s a wide open space, like a deep blue ocean or dreamy blue sky, and the little attachments are just a part of it. Our minds can also see the suffering of others and their attachments, it can see the present moment in all its flawed glorious beauty and be present with all of this at once. Practice expanding your mind.
This blog isn’t the space to address traumas and I’m not suggestion you can just let them go. What I am sharing are my thoughts on the daily annoyances of woulda, shoulda, couldas. I’m talking about accepting what you can’t change and changing what you can and having the wisdom to know the difference.
Since I have moved to Nigeria in these last eight months, I have had many "I surrender all, let it go" moments. From temperamental electricity to never ending cues at banks and hospitality staff that struggle to be hospitable. I had a client I had been working with for months and her husband lost his tech job unexpectedly. The loss was going to affect my remote income. I encouraged her to suspend her coaching so she could use the money for her house, and I volunteered a couple free sessions with her and one for her husband. I took a deep breath and surrendered my grand plans. I made peace with it and moved on.
It was less than a week and two potential clients hit me up on LinkedIn. I am working with one of them now and scheduled to start with the other during my visit home in the next month. So that reinforced for me this ability to let it go so it could open the door for other spaces to enter for a higher consciousness than our worrisome thoughts. I invite you to do that this week. Whatever is bothering you, worrying you, open the space for something higher than you to enter. And be able to say in the spirit of yourself, “I surrender all. I surrender...all.” Let it go and let it flow.
Comments