Surrender as a Spiritual Practice - what is it, how it feels, and can it work for you?

2018 has called upon me to surrender more times than I'd like to recall. Starting with drama, then heart attacks and a long stint supporting recovery. Not to mention all the mini drama and crisis that domesticity and mother hood breeds... This post is prompted by a new level of Surrender. One decorated with small failings, illness, mistakes and disrespectful technology, that over the course of time start to feel like a boot into something other, some other mysterious next step...

Yet, like many a feisty woman before me, I keep dusting myself off, standing up and then promptly getting knocked back down again. On repeat. Without fail. Like a broken record. In this process I have started to take better note of the spiritual message presenting itself to me. Here is the wisdom I have gleaned from Surrender as a spiritual Practice (so far).

Surrender will tear the illusion of control from you repeatedly. You will accept your surrender to some extent, and soon after that you will attempt to get back up and be the boss of your life again. It doesn't work. Surrender has no time frame. You can't do it for a week, or a month and expect the 'same old same old' to change. Surrender is control totally annihilated. You don't choose when you get back up. It happens,it will. But you don't choose. For now, rest, be still, nurture the present. 

You cannot bargain with or set an intention for your surrender. To do so is not true surrender. It just isn't. That is your ego taking one last grasp at being in charge of your destiny. And when surrender is your spiritual lesson, your destiny, your fate, is no longer in your hands. 

Being in a state of surrender feels deeply unnatural to busy human people. And yet, every plant and creature ion this planet is surrendered to their circumstance. We tend to convince ourselves the sun rises at our whim. But as all plants know, you are only as blossomed as the rain that fell, and as only as strong as the next good frost. aNd to these things, you must surrender. There is no fight to be had. Curl back into your roots and wait. 

So often we battle to find the purpose, the answer to our conundrums of life. Surrender is about folding gently into the flow and letting it carry you. Trusting that it has a better outcome for you and your current dramas than you could possibly ever think up. And if not better, then different. Which may in time, turn out to be better... 

Surrender feels at times like a total lack of life. Nothing goes right, great plans falter, small plans never even make it past your mind, drama encroaches and your usual 'pick me ups' leave you dry. It's a tiresome and empty moment to be in. Yet when you really dig and delve into just being. With all thoughts and plans truly put to the side. There are gems of laughter, play and mini purpose that come rushing in. But you must sweep aside all else to allow them space to play. 

In real every day life Surrender can feel like a crumbling and a breaking away. Things go awry on every level. Stuff breaks and is lost, in a very tangible way, jewellery, clothes, cars. Your mind deserts you and what once was easy, is mired in a devout nothingness and as you urge the thoughts to be clear, so they become more foggy. Your body might ache, and appear, at times to be swollen with hormones, sneezes or mental confusion. This all is made worse, the more your resist. When you give over to Surrender, this stops, the signs and manifestations of it decease. 

Surrender is mystery made manifest. While the space of total surrender, you don't know a damn thing. And for once, you areaway with that.You can give over to the fates or the gods or the cosmic alignments and let life do it's thing with you. Which is a relief is it not, from being the master planner of your own fortunes? Slide into it, trust it, let it take you where it will. For it will. 

Alice Grist is the author of Dirty & Divine and creator of The Cosmic Mother Tarot - both available to buy on this site.

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