Surrender
What is the nature of surrender? Surrender, often recommended in spiritual teachings, can be thought of as a dropping of our defences as an acknowledgement that all of our efforts to make a feeling, behaviour or circumstance go away are at best temporary and inevitably ineffective.
What are our defences? These are any physical, emotional, or mental reactions to a perceived threat. They are our fight/flight/freeze behaviours, our automatic, unconscious, survival programmes. They are reflexive, repetitive, and surprisingly often totally unnoticed. Mention fight/flight and most associate with very definite and obvious physical and emotional responses as if reacting to the tiger in the room scenario.
However, most people's survival behaviour is far more subtle and is often mistaken as a personality trait. Acquiescence for example may, in some circumstances, be regarded as caring or charming behavior, when in fact it may well be rooted in reflexive need for approval, a survival based ceding of sovereignty. This apparently 'charming man' may be setting up an inner turmoil through his denial of self in exchange for a momentary safety provided by apparent approval.
Safety from what?
Our evolution has left us with a survival mechanism designed to protect against physical threats which, thankfully, are extremely rare for most of us. However, in our society most of our perceived threats are emotional. We live in a world where I don't love you or I don't approve of you are as threatening to our subconscious as the tiger is to our conscious mind. The reaction to an emotional threat is not always as obvious as its physical equivalent but can be just as demanding on our system, often longer lasting and always less easy to be aware of.
How is an emotion a threat?
The short answer is that it isn't. If allowed to be felt and experienced without condition it will move through naturally, finding its own resolution and completion. Any emotion met without resistance flows easily through us as the energy in motion it truly is. This movement of energy through us is as natural as the weather, and like the weather it changes with its own rhythm.
Emotion becomes a threat when we resist it or try to hide from it. If we obstruct its flow then it builds like water behind a dam. Each time a wave of the unwelcome emotion arises, we engage in behaviours which we perceive to have been successful in avoiding that feeling in the past, but in reality we are simply adding more energy to the reservoir, hoping that the dam never bursts!
Most lives are limited, not because of physical danger but because of emotional threats, and the majority of people are, unconsciously, constantly in a state of high alert attempting to avoid certain feelings. This takes a huge amount of energy and is as thankless a task as trying to control the weather. It's an awfully bg universe ot control!
The truth is an emotion never killed anyone. The resistance to feeling an emotion however will kill, because it disconnects from the flow of the energy of life and builds a weight of energy which when released (the dam bursts) will overwhelm an exhausted system.
The point of surrender is to stop resisting the flow of life which is after all just energy in motion. To surrender is to allow and experience the feelings which life, in its wisdom and love, continually delivers. No-one resists the good feelings and they have a habit of passing through with ease (and too quickly sometimes!), if we surrender to the bad feelings they will pass in just the same way, and surprisingly energise us is the same way as the good.
When we surrender we no longer have to react in defence against a 'dangerous world', but can respond with awareness to what we feel in each moment. This allows us to discard patterns which have been designed to protect us from an imagined threat. This shift from reaction to response allows us to choose how to behave authentically in any given circumstance rather than wasting energy trying to control the circumstance.
It is a very big universe to try to control, my advice is to surrender.
Love.
Bill