Here’s the three-step equation for deploying surrender meditation or the spirit of surrender in your daily life:
- Admitting the force and the fall.
- Repeatedly surrendering to them.
- Gradually, letting go of the self.
To practice this equation in life, it’s imperative that you understand the concept of The Fall and The Force.
The Fall
Imagine you suddenly find yourself falling through empty space. Various sights and sounds pass you by as you fall. You get occasional vague intimations of when you started falling, and have no idea for how long you are going to fall and what’s going to happen next.
Now, while you fall, you have two options –
- Worry about what’s going on and what happens when you reach the bottom.
- Just relax and enjoy the fall, along with the sights and sounds.
Life is much like this. The only exception is that we engage in various activities while we fall through life instead of just falling without action.
Our activities pertaining to making a good life, fulfilling our desires, and chasing our dreams are what constitute the curtain that bars us from seeing and experiencing the real, raw, and unfiltered free-fall through time.
Here too, we really have those two very options – constantly worry about the next step while we fall or enjoy the ride to the next step with effortless action.
The Force
How did you end up falling this way through space and time? What are the forces behind this weird occurrence?
Okay, so the wind was blowing somehow.
Much before that, the planets were forming somehow. Later on, you and I started to fall, all the while trying to plan and take control of the way we fall – our lives.
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When did our lives begin exactly? You might say that yours began when you came out of your mother’s womb. But in reality, our lives began when all this began – the whirling of the divine dust, forming of the planets, and the blowing of the winds.
How much control did we have over all these?
The answer to this question is pivotal for the answer to the subsequent question of how much control we have over our own lives.
We discover ourselves here out of nowhere and start doing all sorts of things to survive and then to live the best life we possibly can.
We think, we plan, we struggle, and we do all sorts of things to constantly better our lives and find happiness.
But in all this, we leave aside the one key to the equation – the forces before us that made us happen.
The spirit of surrender stems from this very acknowledgment – life began much before our individual lives, through forces much broader and stronger than us.
The forces, whatever may be in play here, are the key to surrender.
We seldom acknowledge the existence of the forces without which we did not exist. Without which nothing would have existed.
The forces that make our hearts beat and keep on beating. The forces that make the wind blow, the blood flow. The forces that make the sun and earth go in the merry-go-round.
The forces that are making us fall; who knows where?
The Surrender
This is the key to understanding the application of surrender meditation in daily life.
“The practice of surrender was actually done in two, very distinct steps: first, you let go of the personal reactions of like and dislike that form inside your mind and heart; and second, with the resultant sense of clarity, you simply look to see what is being asked of you by the situation unfolding in front of you.”
― Mickey A. Singer
[Read more quotes on surrender here – Quotes About Surrendering: To Help Imbue the Spirit of Surrender in Life.]
Understanding that there are forces that are making us fall. We do not know how, and we do not know where we are heading.
The only thing that actually makes sense is surrender. Surrender to the fall. Surrender to the force. Let the force take care of the fall.
Here are a couple of examples to make it a bit clearer in practical terms:
Example of Surrender
The job interview is coming. The natural constitution of your being is brewing worry and anxiety within you. Butterflies are swarming within your belly.
The closer you fall through time to the appointed hour of the interview, the more intense these uncomfortable feelings become.
Most of us try to fight these negative feelings and emotions. We repeatedly try to fend them off. They might even go away for some time but come back again without fail.
Here comes the invaluable efficacy of surrender.
If you just remember that you are falling and you have no control over this fall. Remember that there are forces far greater than you that have brought you here at this point, and they have much greater power to conduct you than you have over yourself.
Remember, these are the forces that are turning the very planet that you inhabit, that’s also falling along with you.
Remember that these are the forces that are making your heart beat. Just surrender yourself, your mind, and your power to talk to these forces. You will see effortless right answers coming out of your mouth at the interview.
Another Example of Surrender
A loved one is sick and suffering. Probably one of the hardest things to endure. Harder even than yourself suffering.
You want to become a superman and hunt down all the planets in the universe for an immediate cure.
The hardest times are the most difficult to surrender because we want to do something so badly. Yet, these are the times that ultimately force us to surrender by making us become completely helpless.
These are the times our individual incapacity and overall dependency on the force become very much apparent. We can see it staring right at our faces only if we can see through our sorrow and suffering.
Here too, we have to let the force take over us. Let it effortlessly make us fall to the solution that might have a chance to cure our loved ones and deliver them from their sufferings.
Otherwise, no matter how much we try to become a superman and turn the hospital upside-down, we are only going to make the doctors and the staff angry at us.
That’s how we have to hold the spirit of surrender meditation in our daily life.
Whenever faced with difficulty, we surrender to the force and let it take care of the difficulties for us. Just state the obvious – we didn’t start falling into this crap on our own. The force made this happen. It better make things fall straight in a beautiful manner without any torment.
And, you will see almost all the time, the force is better equipped to handle our affairs much more gracefully than us. It’s only when we think we are in greater control and we have to do everything by ourselves that things start to get complicated.
Conclusive Thoughts
Please note these existential mechanisms, like how life and surrender works, are infinitely vast and quite impossible to explain using words. The words here in this blog are just attempts to ignite intuitive knowledge within you so that you can have a chance to see things a bit clearer.
Also, two controversial questions are likely to pop up in your mind while thinking about surrender:
What about fate and free will? Does surrender simply mean abandoning free will and resorting to a fatalistic view of life?
Are our impulses good or bad? Should we surrender to bad impulses too? As a rule of thumb, we should surrender everything to the universe to help carry out the good impulses and soothe away the bad ones.
However, these are such subtle issues that the writer here must admit he doesn’t have the proper words to convey the answers properly. These are highly experiential factors. He can only hope you get the answers through your own experiences with surrender.
What he can ascertain for the readers is that surrender meditation and surrender in daily life is going to make life much better and easier to go through or fall through.
“To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action. Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
On the other hand, it must be admitted that surrender can be very difficult. The self keeps coming back with all its anxiety, worry, stress, likes, dislikes, and whatnot. So, we must first give prominence to practicing surrender meditation in actual meditative states, along with always holding the spirit and attitude of surrender in our daily activities. Both of these practices together will work best in case of achieving a sufficient level of surrendered state in life.
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