Today I wanted to write about surrender and my current journey with it. I planned to tell you how in the dictionaries surrender is to stop fighting or resisting, and usually referred to in the sense that you’ve given up and are defeated.
If you surrender, you stop fighting or resisting someone and agree that you have been beaten (Collins Dictionary).
Then I was going to use words to show you a snippet of what life’s been like the last couple of months and how I’ve danced my way into an even deeper understanding of surrender. How things have changed so much, yet could look the same.
I realised, though, to do that I need the back-story. The last year really. My relatively new journey with meditation, getting my head around more brain science, committing to embracing the unknown, and so much more. But you know what, that’s part of a book really, not just a quick blog post.
Surrender, day by day
And so, let me rather tell you about my experience with surrender over the past couple of months. It’s different moment to moment and day by day.
Some days it’s looked like getting back into bed after breakfast, fully under the covers and just lying with the emotions that I’m feeling. Sometimes tears, hot down my cheeks, other times a swirling confusion rampaging through my chest. It’s been not fighting their intensity and trying to be positive, but instead letting them fully embody me, so that they can move through me and give me the release of peace on the other side. Half an hour later.
Sometimes an hour later. But always so much sooner than I expect when I surrender and stop pushing through.
Releasing fear, choosing trust
Some moments it’s been the act of releasing the tightness of fear gripping my heart, within minutes of getting off the toilet for the fifth time. Releasing the tumbling, fighting words along the lines of ‘when will this end?’, and instead choosing trust. Standing up, shoulders back and breathing a smile onto my face. Not to by-pass, but to save my body from the chemical stressor of fear. Choosing in the healing power I have within me and within this incredibly wise body when I give her the space to do her thing. Without that fear in the way.
Sometimes it’s been lying down and sleeping, at random times, simply because I can feel that’s what my body is begging for.
It’s also been a knowing that my body needs a break from food and fasting, not out of the past choices sometimes from fear. Instead, choosing fasting out of a deep respect for how our bodies work, and that sometimes rest is all our gut is asking for. A time where it’s not spending energy on digesting but on healing.
Saying no, and yes
Surrender has also been in that space of saying no. Saying no to commitments to others, or to things I thought I should do, or even was really looking forward to. No to things I had booked, but it was best to cancel. Instead choosing to say yes to the commitment I made to myself. The vow I took of honouring this body first and foremost. This home. To do what she needs. My home forever.
And in these spaces and places, I have let go, more than I ever have. I have trusted. More than I ever have, and I am feeling a deeper sense of peace creeping through my being, despite the challenges that my body is experiencing.
Tomorrow surrender will look different, not just once, and I will play with her and see where she takes me. What does surrender look like for you right now?
PS: I found it interesting reading my earlier pieces on fear and surrender, when at that time I was reaching the deepest level of surrender I had yet found. How now surrender feels so different. And how it will feel so different again and again.