SEVEN
Surrender the Need to Control
–1–
As I underwent my own dark night, I wondered whether I would make it through. Everyone was out enjoying the sunshine, but I felt utterly alone and desolate. The laughter of children and the chirping of birds felt jarring. My world was filled with darkness.
Immersed in that state of internal desolation, I wandered into a solitary cemetery on a hill. I wanted to be alone. I wished it were I who was dead. The gravestones, upright and silent, stared at me like impassive monuments of shattered lives. I felt at home here, among the graveyard phantoms, the fragments of dreams, the broken stories and forgotten memories.
But something caught my eye: a bright orange butterfly on a twig. It had just emerged from its glossy skin-like case. Filled with life, the creature disrupted my misery. It felt like a message.
Nature has its own powerful wisdom. The rishis and yogis realized this and looked to nature for inspiration and learning, to help them live in harmony and balance. They considered the natural world to be a teacher, and created yoga poses inspired by animals and plants to imbibe their lessons.34
Nature doesn’t fight its own processes. An acorn transforms into a mighty oak; an embryo morphs into a baby; and a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, following its own internal blueprint. We, by contrast, are continuously fighting our own natural processes, including the natural rite of passage that is the dark night of the soul.
To become a butterfly, a caterpillar undergoes a wondrous transformation, casting off its old self. Inside the cocoon, the creature digests itself, causing its body to die. During this partial death, some of the caterpillar’s old tissues are salvaged, and these remnant cells are used to fashion a new form. The caterpillar’s nibbling jaws become a long tube, and twelve beady eyes meld to become two. Now there are antennae and wings. The exquisite colours of the butterfly begin to manifest.
Its final metamorphosis accomplished, the butterfly emerges from its translucent case. The brown hairy caterpillar has transformed into a new being—one of nature’s most stunning paintings. Rather than spend its life crawling on the ground, this creature can now rise into the sky, and even cross continents. Rather than feed on poisonous milkweed, it will spend the rest of its days drinking nectar.
I learned later that the caterpillar sheds its skin numerous times, whenever it outgrows it. The creature’s transformation into a butterfly is its final and most wondrous metamorphosis.
While animals and plants go through a biological metamorphosis, we experience ours on a spiritual level. In our metamorphosis, all that is false dies away; only the permanent and true can remain.
The universe is self-organizing and self-correcting. It supports life moving forward all the time. The dark night of the soul is a self-correcting mechanism. Like the caterpillar that sheds its skin, we cast away the small human story and identity we’ve been clinging to. It can no longer serve us. We enter a period of incubation, a partial “death”, which allows renewal and growth. Upon our return to the world, we’re no longer limited by the same small narrative we inhabited before.
In the dark night of the soul, we’re “deworlded”. This is frightening to us, naturally. We want to resist the dark night, to avoid it at all costs. But can we learn from the butterfly? The caterpillar has no way of knowing what it will become. The butterfly’s magnificent colours, its ability to visit new continents, its capacity to taste nectar—these are all beyond the imagination of the ungainly caterpillar. Yet during its transition, the caterpillar allows the transformation to take place.
We too have no way of knowing how we will emerge from a dark night experience. The ability to say yes to the dark night of the soul, the ability to allow the transformation to take place, requires a level of trust or faith that the universe will ultimately support us.
I marvelled at the bright orange butterfly on the twig. It was stretching and unfurling its newly formed wings. It seemed perfectly adjusted to the world.
“If nature can handle the death and rebirth of this butterfly,” I thought, “then surely, I too can have faith, and surrender to whatever process I’m undergoing.”
Watching the little creature brought peace into my heart. I would learn from this little friend.
–2–
In the dark night of the soul, we may learn more about ourselves and about the nature of life than in all the combined years of our life. But how do we deal with the initial pain and suffering that comes with the collapse of our perceptual world? It’s easy to say, “Just have faith.” What about our pain? How do we deal with that?
Krishna’s first instruction to Arjuna on pain is to neither react to it nor to run away from it. Pleasure and pain are both a natural and inevitable part of being human. Krishna reminds Arjuna that whatever pain or discomfort he’s experiencing is sure to pass. Like heat and cold, these sensations are impermanent and are born of our engagement with this world. The wise learn to endure these sensations, without being distracted by them.35
This is an important teaching. Krishna is making an implicit distinction here between pain and suffering. Pain is an inevitable part of life. We may not have much control of pain, such as the pain of a wound, but suffering? Suffering is our mental response to our experience of pain.
When I remained in India through the scorching summer months, I learned that the hardest part was not the temperature above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but the insufferable voice of the mind. The heat is a form of pain; the constant resistance of the mind to that pain is suffering. The two are not the same. I learned that while I couldn’t control the summer heat, I could control the relentless nagging and dissatisfaction of my mind.
Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. This is why Krishna advises Arjuna to learn to endure his pain without being distracted, without creating a story around it. Krishna advises Arjuna not to struggle against struggle, but to allow struggle to be, because struggle is an inevitable part of life. We can’t escape it.
As Krishna explains, we can learn to work with pain skilfully. One of the most powerful ways to approach pain is simply to remove our resistance to it and enter a more graceful place of acceptance.
This approach to pain actually releases it, detoxifying us and transforming the energy of our pain. Quick to react to our pain, we often view it as our enemy. We try to banish or suppress it. But what if we looked at our pain as though it were, say, a little child who needs our nurturing? What if we let go of our resistance to it?
The main cause of our suffering is warring with reality: not wanting things to be the way they are. As yoga author Stephen Cope explains:
Through practice I’ve come to see that the deepest source of my misery is not wanting things to be the way they are. Not wanting myself to be the way I am. Not wanting the world to be the way it is. Not wanting others to be the way they are. Whenever I’m suffering, I find this “war with reality” to be at the heart of the problem.36
The ability to annul suffering is an important part of yoga. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna defines yoga in several ways, and one of them is “breaking the connection with suffering”.37 In other words, yoga, the art of living skilfully, is designed to free us from misery associated with the past, present and future.38
Rather than running from pain, the solution is to make a 180-degree turn in graceful acceptance and enter the heart of the experience. This is the only place where there is peace. The practice of saying yes to life, of allowing what is to be, is represented in yoga by Shavasana, the “Corpse Pose”. This is a yoga pose that normally comes at the end of a yoga session. In this pose, the yoga practitioner lies on her back with her arms at her sides in a state of complete acceptance.
While Corpse Pose may look easy, its full benefits come with finding complete release. This yoga pose is extremely beneficial to the psyche. Corpse Pose’s full surrender to the process of death is what we need in the dark night of the soul.
If Corpse Pose could speak, these might be its teachings: “Let go of projection and resistance. Let go of your stories and identities in this world. Be your own best friend. Above all, never forget that you’re a child of the universe, as much as the stars and the trees; you deserve to be here. You’re protected and supported. Die into life.”
–3–
The ancients developed great trust in the self-organizing and self-correcting principle of life. They called such trust sharanagati, “the way of surrender”. This is when we make the Soul of the Universe our protector and maintainer.
The word “surrender” comes from Old French surrendre, which means “to give (something) up”.39 What is it we are called upon to give up in the dark night of the soul? Our story. Our false identity.
We came into this world without anything. We then created a complex story of who we are and what we own and what we must do. Surrender is a return to our naked origin, the recovery of an original state before our story.
Most of our life we take refuge in our small human story. But in the dark night of the soul, this story is shattered. The dark night of the soul puts us in a place where we have no choice but to surrender. This surrender is not about being beaten down or giving up, nor is it about indulging in suffering. Quite the contrary. Surrender opens the doorway of yoga. It allows us to set out on our journey of the soul.40
Surrendered people recognize they can’t control everything. Therefore, they neither attempt nor desire to force situations or other people. Instead, they focus their attention on their own behaviour, and find new, creative ways to overcome obstacles.
Comfortable with uncertainty, they are less fixated on outcomes and are able to go with the flow of life. When an unplanned situation happens, they easily shrug it off. As a result, they tend to be happier, more light-hearted and more resilient, unlike inflexible people, who are far more susceptible to anger, distress and resentment.
Surrendered individuals know how to pause, take a deep breath, and observe. Powerful without dominating, they understand that true power comes from deep listening and being respectful. Those who are surrendered don’t measure themselves by how much they are liked, nor do they feel the need to compete for attention. When they sit quietly in a room, others are drawn to them naturally.
Those who practise surrender tend to be good listeners. They don’t judge, building true and lasting friendships. With the ability to see others beyond temporary stories and circumstances, they engage with others at the level of the soul, the sacred self.
The English word respect comes from respicere, which means “to see or behold”. Since surrendered souls truly see others, they truly respect others. Liberated from their stories, their sense of success isn’t determined by occupation or net worth, nor do they have a driving need for money and power. As a result, they don’t use others for their own advantage. They love people and use things, rather than use people and love things.
Willing to accept when they’re wrong, surrendered people don’t insist on being right. They’re open to new ideas, and they forgive easily. The practice of surrender allows one to be more playful with life. Vibrant, alive, and a real pleasure to be around, surrendered people have a natural spontaneity and vitality that rubs off on others.
The surrender we learn during the dark night of the soul becomes a powerful way of being throughout the rest of our life. No longer desperate to manipulate life, we can allow events to unfold; we can make room for the unexpected. We stop struggling and fighting against life.
Surrender is about relinquishing the need to control, knowing we’ll be guided and protected. We may be pushed down; we may be cast into darkness, unable to see any pathway ahead. But nothing can keep us from taking shelter of Krishna, the Soul of the Universe, seated in our own heart. This connection with a power greater than ourselves is called “yoga”.
At the end of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna: “Relinquishing all forms of dharma, take refuge with me only. I will release you from all misfortune: don’t despair!”41 In other words, sharanagati, the way of surrender, leads to the blossoming of our highest potential. This is because it gives the yoga pilgrim entrance into the temple of yoga. There is no state of being more powerful and helpful than this in the dark night of the soul.
In the Bhakti tradition, sharanagati is made up of six attitudes, which the yogi or yogini cultures in her practice:42
1.     Accept whatever supports your yoga practice.
2.     Let go of whatever harms your yoga practice.
3.     Depend upon the Soul of the Universe as your true protector in all circumstances.
4.     Embrace the Soul of the Universe as your maintainer.
5.     Surrender all false identities, including that of being the doer or controller.
6.     Cultivate humility in life.
Our journey of yoga is a continuous process of accepting what takes us forward on our path and letting go of whatever holds us back. The yogi or yogini relinquishes the imaginary identity she has created in her story, which leads to suffering, and takes shelter of the Soul of the Universe, knowing she will be protected and maintained. With natural humility, she’s able to travel far on her journey.
Sharanagati, the way of surrender, encapsulates the first yoga teaching of the Bhagavad Gita for crossing the dark night: Set out on the journey of the soul.