The good kind of surrender

Photo of dog not even thinking about letting go from Barnabas Davoti on Unsplash. Pic is linked to a blog post on finding an easy way into alignment.

​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.

Photo of person floating in natural waters from Lia Bekyan on Unsplash. Linked to the blog post FEEL BETTER.

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.

Photo of horse’s neck and head with bridle from Tim Schmidbauer on Unsplash. Pic is linked to a blog post on Byron Katie’s 3 kinds of business.

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 …

Photo of person wearing CHOOSE LIFE tee-shirt from Steve Harris on Unsplash. Pic is linked to a blog post on EASY DECISIONS made from your best self & all 3 centers (body, heart, head).

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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