THE POWER OF SURRENDER

I would like to share an inspiring extract from Practicing the Power of Now, from Eckhart Tolle, that resonates a lot with my heart. It is about surrender, unconditional acceptance of the present moment and enhancing the quality of our consciousness.

“One of the most powerful spiritual practices is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called “die before you die”. Go into it deeply. Your physical form is dissolving, is no more. Then, the moment comes when all mind forms or thoughts also die, yet you are still there, the divine presence that you are radian, fully awake. Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms and illusions.

At this deep level, compassion becomes healing in the widest sense.

In that state, your healing influence is primarily based not on doing but on being.

Everybody you come in contact with will be touched by your presence and affected by the peace that you emanate, whether they are conscious of it or not.

When you are fully present and people around you manifest unconscious behavior, you won't feel the need to react to it, so you don't give it any reality. Your peace is so vast and deep that anything that is not peace disappears into it, as if it had never existed. This breaks the karmic cycle of action and reaction.

Animals, trees, flowers will feel your peace and respond to it.

You teach through being, through demonstrating the peace of God.

You become the light of the world, an emanation of pure consciousness and so you eliminate suffering on the level of cause. You eliminate unconsciousness from the world.

The wisdom of surrender

It is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that is the main determinant of what kind of future you will experience.

So to surrender is the most important thing you can do to bring about positive change.

Any action you take is secondary. No truly positive action can arise out of an unsurrendered state of consciousness.

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 seize making plans or initiating positive action.

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to, rather than opposing, the flow of life.

The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now.

So, to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation.

It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is.

Inner resistance is to say “no” to “what is”, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when “things go wrong”, which means that there's a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and “what is”. That is the pain gap.

If you have lived long enough, you will know that things go wrong quite often. It is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life.

Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with being.

Resistance is the mind.

Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon.

It does not mean that on the outer level, you cannot take action or change the situation.

In fact, it is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you surrender, but just the tiny segment called the now.

For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn't say “okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud”.

Resignation is not surrender. You don't need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation, nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there's nothing wrong with it.

No, you recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way.

This means that there's no judgment of the now, therefore there's no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the is-ness of this moment. Then, you take action and do all that you can to get out of the situation.

Such action, I call “positive action”. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair or frustration.

Until you achieve the desired result, you continue to practice surrender by refraining from labeling the now.

Let me give you a visual analogy to illustrate the point I'm making:

You're walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow clear space in front of you.

The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future.

The flashlight is your conscious presence.

The clear space is the now.

Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear.

The mental disease that we call “paranoia” is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness. Not only your psychological form but also your physical form, your body, becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted. Body work and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief, since the cause, the resistance pattern, has not been dissolved.

There's something within you that remains unaffected by the transient circumstances that make up your life situation, and only through surrender, do you have access to it.

It is your life, your very being, which exists, eternally in the timeless realm of the present.

If you find your life situation unsatisfactory or even intolerable, it is only by surrendering first that you can break the unconscious resistance pattern that perpetuates that situation.

Surrender is perfectly compatible with taking action, initiating change or achieving goals.

But in the surrendered state, a totally different energy a different quality flows into your doing.  Surrender reconnects you with the source energy of being, and if your doing is infused with being, it becomes a joyful celebration of life energy that takes you more deeply into the Now.

Through non-resistance, the quality of your consciousness and therefore the quality of whatever you are doing or creating is enhanced immeasurably.

The results will then look after themselves and reflect that quality.

We could call this “surrendered action”.

In the state of surrender, you see very clearly what needs to be done and you take action, doing one thing at a time and focusing on one thing at a time.

Learn from nature, see how everything gets accomplished and how the miracle of life unfolds without dissatisfaction or unhappiness.

That's why Jesus said “look at the lilas, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin”.

If your overall situation is unsatisfactory or unpleasant, separate out this instant and surrender to what-is. That's the flashlight cutting through the fog. Your state of consciousness then ceases to be controlled by external conditions.

You are no longer coming from reaction and resistance.

Then look at the specifics of the situation. Ask yourself: “Is there anything I can do to change the situation, improve it or remove myself from it?”

If so, take appropriate action.

Focus not on the 100 things that you will or may have to do, at some future time, but on the one thing that you can do now. This doesn't mean you should not do any planning. It may well be that planning is the one thing you can do now. But make sure you don't keep running mental movies that continually

Project yourself into the future and so lose the now.

Any action you take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does, do not resist what is.

If there's no action you can take, and you cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to make you go more deeply into surrender, more deeply into the now, more deeply into Being.

When you enter this timeless dimension of the present, change often comes about in strange ways, without the need for a great deal of doing on your part.

Life becomes helpful and cooperative. If inner factors such as fear, guilt or inertia prevented you from taking action, they will dissolve in the light of your conscious presence.

Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of “I can't be bothered anymore” or “I just don't care anymore”.

If you look at it closely, you will find that such an attitude is tainted with negativity, in the form of hidden resentment and so is not surrender at all, but masked resistance.

As you surrender, direct your attention inward to check if there's any trace of resistance left inside you.

Be very alert when you do so, otherwise a pocket of resistance may continue to hide in some dark corner, in the form of a thought or an unacknowledged emotion.

From mind energy to spiritual energy

Start by acknowledging that there is resistance.

Be there when it happens, when the resistance arises.

Observe how your mind creates it, how it labels the situation, yourself or others.

Look at the thought process involved.

Feel the energy of the emotion.

By witnessing the resistance, you will see that it serves no purpose.

By focusing all your attention on the now, the unconscious resistance is made conscious and that is the end of it.

You cannot be conscious and unhappy, conscious and in negativity.

Negativity, unhappiness or suffering in whatever form means that there is resistance and resistance is always unconscious.

Would you choose unhappiness? If you did not choose it, how did it arise? What is its purpose? Who is keeping it alive?

Even if you are conscious of your unhappy feelings, the truth is that you are identified with them and keep the process alive through compulsive thinking. All that is unconscious.

If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.

Even the pain body cannot survive for long in your presence. You keep your unhappiness alive by giving it time. That is its lifeblood.

Remove time through intense present moment awareness, and it dies.

But do you want it to die? Have you truly had enough? Who would you be without it?

Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in, or don't, as the case may be. It makes no difference.

Not until you surrender does the spiritual dimension become a living reality in your life.

When you do, the energy that you emanate and that then runs your life is of a much higher vibrational frequency than the mind energy that still runs our world.

Through surrender, spiritual energy comes into this world. It creates no suffering for yourself, for other humans or any other life form on the planet.

Surrender in personal relationships

 It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others.

But it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated.

If you resist or fight unconscious behavior in others, you become unconscious yourself.

But surrender doesn't mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all.

It is perfectly possible to say “no” firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner non-resistance at the same time.

When you say “no” to a person or situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment.

Let it be a non-reactive “no”, a high quality “no”, a “no” that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.

If you cannot surrender, take action immediately.

Speak up or do something to bring about a change in the situation or remove yourself from it.

Take responsibility for your life. Do not pollute your beautiful radiant inner being nor the Earth with negativity.

Do not give unhappiness in any form whatsoever, a dwelling place inside you.

If you cannot take action, if you're in prison for example, then you have two choices left: resistance or surrender, ondage or inner freedom from external conditions, suffering or inner peace.

Your relationships will be changed profoundly by surrender.

If you can never accept what is, by implication you will not be able to accept anybody the way they are. You will judge, criticize, label, reject or attempt to change people.

Furthermore, if you continuously make the now into a means to an end in the future, you will also make every person you encounter or relate with into a means to an end.

The relationship, the human being, is then of secondary importance to you or of no importance at all.

What you can get out of the relationship is primary, be it material gain, a sense of power,  physical pleasure, or some form of ego gratification.

Let me illustrate how surrender can work in relationships.

When you become involved in an argument or some conflict situation, perhaps with a partner or someone close to you, start by observing how defensive you become as your own position is attacked or feel the force of your own aggression as you attack the other person's position.

Observe the attachment to your views and opinions, feel the mental-emotional energy behind your need to be right and make the other person wrong.

That's the energy of the egoic mind. You make it conscious by acknowledging it, by feeling it as fully as possible. Then, one day in the middle of an argument, you will suddenly realize that you have a choice and you may decide to drop your own reaction, just to see what happens. You surrender.

I don't mean dropping the reaction just verbally by saying “okay, you are right”, with a look on your face that says “I'm above all this childish unconsciousness”. That's just displacing the resistance to another level with the egoic mind still in charge, claiming superiority.

I'm speaking of letting go of the entire mental emotional energy field inside you that was fighting for power. The ego is cunning, so you have to be very alert, very present, and totally honest with yourself to see whether you have truly relinquished your identification with the mental position and so freed yourself from your mind.”

If the above resonates with you, I highly encourage you to go deeper with the following books from Eckhart Tolle:

Practicing the Power of Now | Eckhart Teachings

The Power of Now | Eckhart Teachings

A New Earth - Awakening to Your Life's Purpose | Eckhart Teachings