​Bottom line up front: If you’re surrendering from a place of alignment, it will not feel bad.

It will not feel like giving up. Not on yourself, not on your dreams, not on your becoming—which means your evolution, your greater expression of all that you are, your getting more of what you want.

It will not feel like defeat—and you will not feel like a loser or a failure.

It will not feel like a wet blanket, a rained-on parade, a burst bubble.

It won’t even feel like losing your agency.

The right kind of surrender, in fact, feels GOOD. It feels like RELIEF, like relaxation. Like contracted muscles softening, opening, dropping down.

It feels like the blessed end of unnecessary striving—most often, letting go of what you can’t possibly control, what was never yours to control in the first place.

It feels like a welcome-home, like coming back to yourself, back to your business. Back to what’s actually yours to manage, to control, to choose.

That’s why SURRENDER—the good kind—cannot be all-or-nothing. Be careful with questions like, Should I hold on (to this WHOLE THING) or surrender (this WHOLE THING)? In that great ball of wax, there are disparate bits to sort through: weighty bits that you could put down and lighter bits with your name on them that you could hold onto firmly with (at least some semblance of) competence and ease.

​In the aligned surrender, you still get to have choices.

In fact, you’ll have some decisions to make.

The decision-making gets way, way easier once you’re deciding from a place of sanity, not trying to manage the unmanageable. When you’re not arguing with reality (as Byron Katie puts it), not pushing against anything (as Abraham-Hicks repeatedly reminds us NOT to do to have the best life and greatest ease and fullest power to create), then you can stand solid, relaxed and aligned, on a firm foundation of seeing and accepting reality as it is.

From that foundation, you’re free to manage what’s yours to manage, and you simply keep letting go of the rest.

I chose the phrase keep letting go very intentionally. It’s important, even crucial.

I so often see super-smart human beings thinking in terms of pulling some plug to be done with something once and for all. Usually, their language betrays that they thought that would (or should) happen, as they speak especially in terms of still—as in, I’m still trying to convince the doctors to listen to me. I typically have my coaching clients reframe that in a heartbeat in session.

Just BRING IT TO NOW. Just be with your impulse to grab the reins of someone else’s horse again, and get really good at putting them back down as quickly as you catch yourself. Correct it in the moment, not in the whole of how you operate.

Hey, you do get to have a plug pulled sometimes, maybe from a powerful healing process or ritual; maybe through an epiphany or stroke of insight; maybe from a peak experience or some hellacious unwanted event that floors you and rocks your world, leaving you forever altered. But most of the time, the undoing, the reprogramming, the unraveling and rewiring—all involves what you notice now, pause with now, accept right now because it’s here right now.

In that conscious pause, you can find where to surrender and where to assert or simply choose. In the now-moment, you make your best choice within your control toward what you want and who you want to be, now and now and now. and now and now and …

So love, please don’t surrender out of a sense that you’re screwed and have lost all capacity to choose. In every situation or relationship or moment, there are areas of letting go and areas of holding fast. Let yourself feel the RELIEF of what you appropriately stop trying to control and the POWER and SATISFACTION of making all kinds of choices where they’re yours to make.

In fact, don’t abdicate the choices that are yours to make.

In a moment when you come close to where you do have agency, tune in: What’s important to you here? What do you want? (Not, what do others around you want or even want for you?)

This is your life. What you can’t control in it is not your business, so do surrender that. But that surrender will not be absolute; most absolute surrenders involve giving up and failing to locate your right agency. Locate your business here and now and find your power to choose, to act, to stay true to yourself. My dear one, be(come) someone who knows when and how to surrender and be(come) the one who chooses your life.

Love & blessings, Jaya
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Did you notice this post has an audio version? See button just under the title.​

Still-life image of a jar glass jar full of blueberries with stray berries on the coarse wooden tabletop it stands on. From Margaret Jaszowska on Unsplash.

I thought about naming this Still Life with No Fruit Flies. That piece would begin, “You are not a bowl of bananas, apples, grapes, and clementines, so do not allow a swarm of fruit flies to quietly, almost invisibly, certainly peskily, swarm and hover untended.” You see why I chose not to do that.

This piece begins with a story about a puppy who was starting to gnaw on a colorful, green-minded reusable grocery bag while a woman was working on a computer and harboring a strong preference to stay on the computer and focus. She didn't want to get up and deal with a puppy. And that fuzzy wiggle-worm of a puppy, with all that adorable cutlery in its mouth, had gotten its paws on that bag and was all over it. But the computer task … But the puppy, the bag …

Add to this that the woman was working hard on not being irritated by things in her day-to-day life, with the greater goal of not feeling victimized by all the small and large things that happened to her while she struggled with what anyone would agree was a tricky set of circumstances. She wanted, in fact, to stop living a struggle.

That's why—since change happens only now, and now, and now—she decided to make a decision. While she was half-annoyed, half trying to push through and keep working, her energy was divided. Part of her was swatting the fruit flies, and the fruit flies were swarming right back in, as they do. So she stopped for a moment.

She stopped typing just long enough to say to herself, What matters more to me now is completing this task and feeling good about that. I'm going to sacrifice the bag to that endeavor. While I know this officially makes it a no-longer reusable bag, it also cost something like a dollar, and I'll get another one. The puppy will be blissfully busy destroying it and lying around in the rubble for probably just enough time that I can do what I want to do. And that was that.

Before that moment, she was trapped in a swarm of fruit flies, and there was little to do in that scene but feel irritated and victimized (by a cute little puppy!—oh, the jailers we choose!).

There there was the man running a new business who hadn't yet worked out that he wasn't the doer and hadn't yet mastered surrendering what's not his to deal with (like outcomes and timing and how much money will come in when). He didn't know how to feel great or good enough about managing only what was fully his and trusting that the rest is held, supported, and orchestrated by Universal intelligence. It's so liberating to simply show up for the next conversation, calculation, communication, or bit of research). What troubled our businessman was that he found himself carrying the business around everywhere he went, so that he forgets to be present in other realms of life and have real relationships with the people he loved.

So work would come to mind constantly when he wasn't working. He would engage mentally then swat it away, then engage, then swat, the engage, then swat ... The fruit flies don't just go away no matter how much swatting you do.

This man and I cooked up an experiment in which he stopped what he was doing when he found himself mentally riffling through work stuff off-hours. The new plan was to get up and just go work for a brief time. Quit swatting the fruit flies, and go be in actuality where he was mentally. Attend to some bit he wanted to (or thought he must) attend to, surrender the rest (again), then come back to presence in his home life.

I invite you to run your own experiments. What could it look like to pause with the thing you're swatting at and choose to take a clear action toward addressing or releasing it?

People feel guilty equally for not doing some odious task (pushing it away and continuing not to deal) or for engaging with some activity they love. I would love for everyone to DROP ALL GUILT. Don't allow the guilt to swarm around like fruit flies. Choose to give time to the things you love and get life-giving pleasure from. Choose it fully—no guilt. Or choose to do the task (in the kindest, most non-resistant way, most easeful way) and feel good about doing it. Or set yourself up to do the task at another, better time: carve out a slot for that on your calendar; take a moment to communicate with someone who can help or support you in the task—getting started, moving forward, or bringing it to completion. We can get stuck at any phase of a project, and there's no problem. No hovering guilt needed to get unstuck! Just the right action here and now (which could be just acknowledging this isn't the time and getting behind that), then a release back into the flow.

Are you taking in the recurring theme of choice? When you let things hang there untended, like fruit flies, you're not in choice. You're not choosing what you want to do, what you want to give your energy to, what's calling you to pay attention and take action—something. What is it?

Pause when you notice pesky, bad-feeling mental pests and make a choice. Your fruit flies could be pertinent to that moment or day, or they might point to never-ending bugaboos like clutter or taxes or that gizmo that doesn't reliably work—you might actually fix it or throw the thing out. Ah, but the fruit flies could also be in your face about the cherished dream you keep not getting to. Whatever it is, pay attention. Pause. Attend. Quit swatting the fruit flies and make a choice that actually moves them along.

Love and blessings, Jaya

This article appears in July of 2012 in the (amazing) Ithaca food co-op's newspaper, GreenLeaf. Because I wrote it for the co-op, the focus is on making dietary changes or dealing with dietary restrictions. Every one of the 20 points (even the one about snacks!) applies to anyone making or wishing to make any life change.

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Whether you've received some diagnosis (say, hypoglycemia, diabetes, or celiac disease) that requires a change in your eating habits, or you simply decide to experiment with food choices to see if a change of diet might give you a different experience (as I did — successfully! — with trying an anti-inflammatory diet to reduce pain levels), you may find the prospect of radical dietary change a daunting one. You may feel ill-equipped to face it.

The concepts that follow can be applied to any realm of life, to any place where life invites you to step into change that scares you ... even as you see the greater well-being and better life such change may offer.

1. It's empowering to hold a consciousness of choice. Even if it's life-and-death (as with diabetes, for instance), changing your diet is still a choice. Dying is an option. So if you choose to live, choose it with gusto and conviction. Choose the diet that will give you a vibrant life.
   
   
2. Having chosen, get 100 percent behind your choice. I never stand in front of a case of pastries wondering if I should have one because the decision's already been made; there's nothing to debate. (If you've made the choice to be monogamous, isn't it insanity to walk around checking out others? You'll only feel a constant dissatisfaction and bring a flimsy presence to your relationship.)
   
   
3. Remember what you're up to. Have clear intentions around health and well-being. Write them down. Post them. Read them often. Remind yourself every day what you're doing and why. Be in a grand experiment!
   
   
4. If dietary changes mean misery and deprivation to you, you'll feel miserable and deprived. Focus instead on how lucky you are to have this information, to have the option to control your own diet. Try on a spirit of exploration and curiosity, a conviction that if this change is what most serves you, you'll figure it out and life will support you in the process.
   
   
5. Don't expect yourself to have a great attitude all the time, but do catch yourself when you're in misery and deprivation and shift to something else. There's hardly anything in life we just turn on and it stays on. Your conviction will likely waver. Just keep coming back to your intention as quickly as you catch your mind straying.
   
   
6. Remember that others on the planet have it worse than you. Consider those who would gladly trade their food (or lack thereof) for your dietary restrictions. I don't mean you should access the vicious inner parent and hiss reminders about children in Ethiopia. But if you can always think of someone who's worse off than you are, this can bring you back to appreciating what you've got (which is empowering).
   
   
7. Stay open. Keep learning, keep experimenting, keep talking to people to get their ideas and suggestions. If something tastes off or incomplete, then you're probably not done — spicing can be corrected; ingredients can be added. For me, giving up dairy has meant creamy avocados, flavorful fresh herbs, the clean crunch of sauerkraut.
   
   
8. Get comfortable with your discomfort. You can't get through a human life without it, and if your m.o. is to prevent all discomforts, this only leads to more! So when life brings up unavoidable discomfort, why not sit squarely in it and get okay with where you are? You're there anyway. Comfort and pleasure will surely cycle back around, and discomfort has gifts to offer while it's here. (You may grow some muscles you didn't have before, and muscles of any kind are totally appealing.)
   
   
9. Consider giving up snacks, especially if finding snack foods seems problematic. Snacks are one of the ways we comfort ourselves as quickly as discomforts come up. They can also keep us from hydrating properly — why not reach for a glass of water when your body needs something between meals?
   
   
10. If dietary restrictions make you feel like all pleasure has been drained from your life, this is a sure sign it's time to redefine. Has food always been your primary source of pleasure? What's gotten lost that you need to get back to? What have you never yet sampled? Pleasure comes from many arenas: it may be time to explore.
    
    
11. Stay aware of cause-and-effect. If I'm thinking I'd like to put cheese on something just this once, I ask myself, Do I want to be a constellation of pain centers tomorrow? I love my job, and it's important to me to be fully present to my clients; I do this more effortlessly when my body feels good.
    
    
12. When you feel discouraged, don't do anything that actually harms you, and do anything you see to do, however small, that helps you. With food, this may simply mean eating to feed yourself within your dietary restrictions whether it's a great delight or not. Sometimes food is just fuel — can your inner gourmet live with that? And courage is a renewable resource, so go to bed with the idea you'll find your creativity and tenacity in the morning and get more information and support.
    
    
13. Don't talk to anyone who treats you like a victim of dietary restrictions. If you let him, Eeyore will gladly join you for breakfast and you can both sag glumly over your gluten-free, sugarless, hold-the-cream cream of buckwheat. Find true allies instead. Find people who inspire you because they've made successful changes, people who have great recipes, people who say “You can do it” and “How can I help?” instead of “Poor you — I could never do that.”
    
    
14. Have mini-goals that you can actually meet and set up a reward system that doesn't sabotage your process and truly feels rewarding. (In my twenties I used to reward myself for not eating sugar with a major chocolate binge that happened to coincide with the full moon and disorienting hormonal shifts. Yep, total looney tunes.)
    
    
15. There's a lot of wisdom in the 12 Steps' one-day-at-a-time mindset. Giving something up forever, especially if you love it and can hardly imagine life without it, is very hard to do. Giving it up for today is completely doable. Bring it to NOW. One day, one meal, one moment at a time.
    
    
16. Think of when you've navigated major change: When you took some higher education or training program? Got into a serious relationship? Had children? Started a new job, your own business, some creative endeavor that blasted your prior efforts out of the water? Was it stressful? Yes. And was it worth it? Yes, yes, and yes again. Make a list of all you've already changed or given up. Honor your own strength. Believe in your capacity for change.
    
    
17. Don't tell yourself lies. “I can't do this.” “This is terrible.” “I don't have time for this.” “I could do this if only … [something were happening, or something else weren't].” Recognize such thoughts as lies, and recognize their power to undermine your efforts. Acknowledge you don't know how, acknowledge it feels hard right now, but do not tell yourself, as if it's a fact, that you can't do what most any human on the planet can do.
    
    
18. Remember you never have to know how. The how always reveals itself in the process. Just be clear about what you mean to do, and let the how take care of itself.
    
    
19. Believe that the Universe is conspiring in your favor. List every benefit you can find to making these changes. This challenge is here to grow you, not to thwart you; it's here to move you toward greater thriving. List the benefits again in six months, because you'll be amazed by how the list has grown. Life is not against you. Life is for you, and this change will bring in something you needed in order to step more fully into the next highest version of yourself.
    
    
20. Start now. Don't wait till some event has come and gone or you've had one more chance to have your favorite sundae in that cute little shop in Provincetown. Why prolong decision or action? Do you really need more evidence or more preparation? Once you have clear intentions, the only thing that can stop you is your own movement in another direction. Proceed toward your intention, today.

Love & blessings, Jaya

Here's another post on 6 tips for conscious eating.
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Here's a post with a cool process for leveraging changes made before to fuel the next change you'd like to implement into your life. I used food mindsets I changed to provide an illustration.