I’m learning more and more about surrender.  About letting go of the things that hurt us, or we perceive as hurt.  I’m learning to try and see the lessons in it all.  It’s confusing because it simultaneously feels like losing pieces of myself while releasing a weight that needed to be dropped a long time ago.  I know we’ve talked a lot about surrender here and I’ve never hidden my feelings that I physically, mentally, in every way hated that word—and yes, I do mean hate.  I looked at it as one of the most defeatist words in the dictionary and I believed it was a complete stripping of power.  My brain still grapples with it, but I understand now the other challenge deals with our interpretation of the word and our expectations.  How can we be powerful and take ownership of our lives if we are giving in to anything?  I don’t know if it’s because surrender implies there’s a winner and it seems like a fight.  To some degree there is: there is a right and a wrong in many situations.  But not everything needs to be a fight.    

In dealing with surrender, it helped to look at the idea of acceptance because that was more of an implication of taking stock of things as they are and operating from there. That’s helpful because we’re simply looking at what is and then trying to close the gap to what it needs to be. After time that bothered me too because in my mind it suggested complacency.  I realized that I had this constant urge to fix things, to make them be a certain way.  But we can’t make things a certain way and there are times we need to reconcile what is with what we feel and we need to understand that what we feel isn’t always correct.  Those emotions can become skewed so we need a way to reconcile what is real versus our interpretation.  Our interpretation isn’t always correct and we need to be able to discern what is best for us and there are times simply letting go is exactly what we need to do. 

I’ve learned something else about surrender: it isn’t so much about giving up or in or anything else, it’s really about allowing.  The truth is there are things in this world that none of us can control and we will never be able to control.  That means we need to be able to make decisions about where we expend our energy.  Do we want to spend our time fighting against things that will never change?  Fighting against things we aren’t meant to fight?  We can’t do that—it’s exhausting and will rarely get us anywhere.  But what we can do is come to terms (accept) what is and make the decision to engage with that or not.  Surrender is about what we choose to allow in our lives and what we choose to engage with.  And while it can feel like giving up at times, it’s really about accepting what we are able to do. That is an powerful place to operate from because it is real, solid ground.  Surrender is a tool for progressing and releasing the weight of the things we carry but can do nothing about.  Surrender is about letting go, not giving in.  It’s easier to move without the things we hold onto.