Surrender Dori

I grew up with an overblown sense of responsibility. I was afraid that if I didn’t take care of my surroundings, myself, and everyone around me, bad things would happen. I perceived that life was generally threatening and I had better be on your toes at all times. Be the thinker, the solver, the implementer. 

I can analyze why this was, and I have, but for the purpose of going forward in the process of personal growth, the story only matters insofar as it points me back to myself. 

I became demoralized as I grew older because I retained a perspective that all my scheming to keep proverbial ships from sinking would be thwarted by the chaos of everyday life and the folly of others. I developed this running worldview that no matter how much logic and affirmative action I used, it would be sabotaged by absurdity and negativity. 

Notice how I say “logic and affirmative action.” I thought it was. I used my best thinking to come up with what I thought was the best way to save everybody and make myself a winner. But where was I getting this definition of right behavior? From the same surroundings and the same paradigm I started with in the first place.  

I tried to being a pretty, smart, sane, capable, hard-working, problem-solver to put right my life along with everyone else’s. I had a drug and I knew how to get lost in it. My drug was being God for other people whether they liked it or not, and being an over-achiever. I was looking for external salvation.

Many years of living in a state of perpetual expectations led to me finally hitting bottom with exhaustion and disenchantment. I came to the point where I was willing to surrender. 

Many spiritual traditions offer the concept of surrender as the cornerstone of their particular path, for good reason. To give up is to stop pretending we have something that we never possessed in the first place: power. Our limited, finite, individual identity does not have it. 

I can have the intention to surrender, and I can comprehend intellectually that I should, but I’m not in charge of making that happen. There is a bit of surrender in just asking for help, for sure. But when I’m actually experiencing it, I get this feeling of defeat and relief at the same time. 

I’ve had to surrender over and over on my journey of inner discovery. I used to get disheartened when I realized that I needed to come to terms with my powerlessness again, but eventually I found that surrender is never a step back. It’s always a step ahead into reality and humility. 

In the beginning, the things that helped me start to accept my lack of control was to say to myself, “Nothing you can say or do will make any difference.” I didn’t like it, but I knew it pulled me back from trying to take unbridled action without outside help. If my own mind had created the pickle, it was not the device I needed to get me out of it. 

I’m not a fan of the saying Let it Go. Yeah, if you can do that, great, do it. But I’ve never found that I can snap my fingers and release things from my mind. Detachment is an advanced skill, and it’s learned over time. Occasionally Grace steps in and frees us in a moment, but I’m not in charge of when that happens. Usually Grace gives me time to obsess and get in touch with humility before I find release. 

I prefer Let it Be. Unlike Let it Go, which implies it’s going to be gone (and then I can be mad at myself if I haven’t done a good job of forgetting about it) Let it Be means it’s still there, being as annoying or disturbing as it ever was, but at least I’m not poking that skunk. I’m sitting on my hands and succumbing to the assumption that this isn’t my job. 

There’s a natural corollary to surrender and that is, if I’m not in charge, who is? It’s got to be something other than me. At the place where I’ve freshly surrendered I get rid of established concepts of a higher power. If I’ve ended up confused and exhausted, how well was my Christian or New Age or Buddhist or agnostic thoughts working anyway?

Concepts get in the way of the one thing I need to know when I surrender. There is something other than me that does have the power, and that power is good. It’s that simple. 

These days my mind is blown on a regular basis by the abundance, freedom, and joy that keep surfacing with little effort on my part. 

That’s probably the point. Little effort. It’s effort still, but not the scheming and scraping kind I had growing up. This new effort is made and then surrendered, to a Higher Power who can certainly handle the rest. Lucky me to have been brought to my knees in the first place, so I could access the guidance and love I couldn’t have found any other way.