The Art of Surrender (and how to do it gracefully)
Susan Grandfield • 13 September 2021
“It’s 3 am and I should be asleep” “I’m exhausted, why oh why am I still awake?”
“I’ve been meditating for years, why can’t relax enough to sleep?”
These are words you will never hear my husband utter because he is one of the lucky people who falls asleep the instant his head touches the pillow. I have spent many a restless night cursing his natural ability to surrender to sleep over the years and secretly resenting him for it.
I am very happy to say that the cursing and resenting has eased off and there is now peace in our house at night! And it’s in part because I have been practicing the
graceful art of surrender.
Let me be honest, it hasn’t felt very graceful a lot of the time. There have been tears, frustration, internal battles and a lot of self-criticism! But my desire to be able to experience more of the ease and letting go my husband experiences in the sleep department that I have been prepared to put in the effort to discover how to surrender.
Surrender can sound like giving up, throwing in the towel, walking away. And to a great extent that is true. Surrender is about putting down our (metaphorical) weapons, letting go of the fight and giving in.
After all, who are we fighting with? Ourselves!
What would we be giving in to? Sleep!
When put in the context of sleep, surrender makes a lot of sense. When put in another context it might not feel so logical, for example, a broken relationship, a difficult boss, worries about our finances, an illness.
We are programmed to fight in these situations. To put more effort in to making them the way we want them to be but that is just like trying really really really hard to sleep and finding ourselves more and more awake. The effort, push and force gives us the exact opposite of what we desire.
Where do you experience that happening in your life?
Maybe you are working really hard to be who you feel you need to be to make a relationship work only to find yourself more unhappy and disconnected in the process. Maybe you are bending over backwards to please a demanding boss or customer and finding that they just become more demanding. Or it be may that you are sticking with a job that you hate, not spending money on things you enjoy and keep looking at your bank balance hoping to feel less worried about your finance and instead of feeling reassured you feel fear and dread.
In these and countless other situations the human mind is programmed to “fix the problem”, to be strategic in tackling the situation so that we feel in control and most of all it drives us to DO SOMETHING!
And therein lies the real problem.
The paradox of life is that it is when we stop trying to control things and allow life to unfold, we uncover the wisdom that leads us to the experience we are seeking.
Just as when we stop trying to get to sleep and stop focusing on being awake that sleep washes over us. This is the art of surrender and what makes it graceful is if we stop the struggle, get out of the way and allow nature to take its course in ALL things.
It is that simple.
It is not necessarily that easy, but it is simple.
So, where can you surrender in your life to create the space for things to unfold naturally?
What do you need help with?
Part 4 - the way forward In this final part of the series, we are looking at the way forward. What does this awakening mean and how do we stay on the path that we’ve started to walk down?
This is an invitation to be curious about the freedom that comes from finally letting go of the need to fit in, to embrace how you see the world and how you want to approach life and the ripple effect that can have on the lives of those around you. It is all about self-acceptance and allowing.
The struggle of an idealist in a world of pessimists, pragmatists and realists is that at times it can feel very lonely, like we’re sitting on the edge of the crowd not being invited into the conversation. Everyone is looking in one direction and when we point out that there is another direction they could look in we feel dismissed, not heard and ridiculed for romantic notions about the world. But it doesn't have to feel that way.
Idealist: “Someone who believes that very good things can be achieved, often when this does not seem likely to others”. Rather than hiding away, agreeing with others, making myself wrong for holding a more hopeful view of the world or criticising myself for being naïve I backed myself and stood behind my beliefs.
We are under the misapprehension that we need to push ourselves outside our comfort zone if we really want to experience life and be successful. But that is not true. Finding our way back to our comfort zone is a vital part of experiencing life with more ease, enjoyment and freedom.
The reality of life is that we forget and fall into the predictable traps of the ego and its susceptibility to the outside world but that finding our way back to inner peace and stability comes from remembering that our experience is created from the inside.
We are incredibly talented at creating fictitious stories about ourselves and going through life without editing them, updating them or realising we can actually re-write them. Discovering how quickly life can change when you start to pay attention to your stories.
We begin this adventure of a lifetime as wide open, expansive, creative, loving, curious and innately wise little beings full of possibility, potential and optimism. But through our experience of interacting with others and the world around us we, unconsciously, wrap ourselves up in patterns of behaving and thinking which serve to protect us from the perceived risk of following that childlike energy. Now is the time to "unwrap" those protective layers and reconnect with who we really are.
Experimenting is fundamentally about trying things out and not being attached to a particular outcome. It is about giving things a go and learning from whatever happens. There is a real freedom in approaching things with an experimental mindset and I believe it can be brought to all aspects of our lives.
Like me, are you also someone who tends to plan moments of bliss rather than allow them to happen?
Ridiculous as that may sound, I realise that when I am in my familiar environment doing familiar and routine activities I tend to plan for moments of bliss or joy to happen sometime in the future, when all of the things I need to do have been done. I am discovering the possibility of experiencing moments of bliss at any time and without the preplanning.
