Get Carried Away

You've tried everything and still aren't where you want to be. So stop struggling and let life move through you.

By Sally Kempton

By nature I'm a struggler, raised in the belief that if what you're doing doesn't work, the solution is to do it harder. So naturally, I had to learn the value of surrender the hard way. About 30 years ago, as a relatively early U.S. adopter of meditation, I was asked by a curious editor at a mainstream magazine to write an article about my spiritual search. Problem was, I couldn't find a voice for it. I spent months, wrote maybe 20 versions, stacked up hundreds of scribbled pages—all for a 3,000-word article. When I finally cobbled together my best paragraphs and sent them off, the magazine shot the piece back to me, saying that they didn't think their readers could identify with it. Then another magazine invited me to write the same story. Knowing I had come to an impasse, I threw myself down on the ground and asked the universe, the inner guru—well, all right, God—for help. Actually, what I said was this: "If you want this to happen, you'll have to do it, because I can't."

Ten minutes later I was sitting in front of the typewriter (we still used typewriters in those days), writing a first paragraph that seemed to have come out of nowhere. The sentences sparkled, and though it was in "my" voice, "I" definitely did not write it. A month later, I told the story to my teacher. He said, "You're very intelligent." He wasn't talking about my IQ. He meant that I had realized the great and mysterious truth of who, or what, is really in charge.

Since then I've had the same experience many times—sometimes when facing the pressure of a deadline, a blank page, and a blank mind, but also when meditating, or when trying to shift some difficult external situation or implacable emotional attachment.

My miracle-of-surrender stories are rarely as dramatic as the tales you hear of scientists who move from impasse to breakthrough discovery or of accident victims who put their lives in the hands of the universe and live to tell the tale. Nonetheless, it's clear to me that each time I genuinely surrender—that is, stop struggling for a certain result, release the holding in my psychic muscles, let go of my control freak's clutch on reality, and place myself in the hands of what is sometimes called a higher power—doors open in both the inner and outer worlds. Tasks I couldn't do become easier. States of peace and intuition that eluded me show up on their own.

Patanjali, in the Yoga Sutra, famously describes the observance of Ishvara pranidhana—literally, surrender to the Lord—as the passport to samadhi, the inner state of oneness that he considers the goal of the yogic path. Among all the practices he recommends, this one, referred to casually in only two places in the Yoga Sutra, is presented as a kind of ultimate trump card. If you can fully surrender to the higher will, he seems to be saying, you basically don't have to do anything else, at least not in terms of mystical practice. You'll be there, however you define "there"—merged in the now, immersed in the light, in the zone, returned to oneness. At the very least, surrender brings a kind of peace that you don't find any other way.

You probably already know this. You may have learned it as a kind of catechism in your first yoga classes. Or you heard it as a piece of practical wisdom from a therapist who pointed out that nobody can get along with anyone else without being willing to practice surrender. But, if you're like most of us, you haven't found this idea easy to embrace.

Why does surrender engender so much resistance, conscious or unconscious? One reason, I believe, is that we tend to confuse the spiritual process of surrender with giving up, or getting a free pass on the issue of social responsibility, or with simply letting other people have their way.

Don't Give Up, Surrender

A few months after I began meditation, a friend invited me to dinner. But we did not agree on where to eat. He wanted sushi. I didn't like sushi. After a few minutes of argument, my friend said, quite seriously, "Since you're doing this spiritual thing, I think you ought to be more surrendered."

I'm embarrassed to admit that I fell for it, giving in partly for the sake of having a nice evening, but mostly so that my friend would continue thinking that I was a spiritual person. Both of us were confusing surrender with submission.

This is not to say there is no value—and sometimes no choice—in learning how to give way, to let go of preferences. All genuinely adult social interactions are based on our shared willingness to give in to one another when appropriate. But the surrender that shifts the platform of your life, that brings a real breakthrough, is something else again. True surrender is never to a person, but always to the higher, deeper will, the life force itself. In fact, the more you investigate surrender as a practice, as a tactic, and as a way of being, the more nuanced it becomes and the more you realize that it isn't what you think.

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