You lose your grip, and then you slip Into the masterpiece.
—LEONARD COHEN
You lose your grip, and then you slip Into the masterpiece.
—LEONARD COHEN
I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE: I LOST CONTROL TODAY—BUT IN the most wonderful way. Before work, before the holy hours of seeing patients, before writing these pages, I just danced. During this secret time before the day began, my body moved to Bob Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Spontaneous movements, nothing planned, nothing known or predictable. Venus rising in the predawn summer sky. Morning waves breaking at a distance: the Pacific Ocean, in its light and darkness, my companion for so long now. I did not hold back. I did not resist, argue, distrust, or overthink. I simply let go. This is the ecstasy of surrender.
In this book, I invite you to explore the sublime state of surrender: how to increasingly achieve it each day to improve the quality of your life, reduce stress, and have much more fun by lifting the curse of being overly serious. You’ll learn to surrender in a world that relentlessly conspires to interrupt flow with instant messaging, texting, and emails at every turn. You’ll also discover how to conquer fears and other resistances that stop you from letting go or keep you stuck in reverse. In Sanskrit, surrender is samprada—to give completely or deliver wholly over. I’m defining it as the grace of letting go at the right moment—the ability to accept what is, to exhale, and to flow downstream with the cycles of life instead of battling them, obsessively attaching to people and outcomes, and anxiously brooding.
I’m intrigued with the idea of surrender not as defeat or loss, as it is frequently thought of, but as a positive, intuitive way of living, a power that grows as you develop trust in the moment as well as in change and the unknown. Contrary to common stereotypes that equate surrender with weakness, I’m presenting it as a way to gain mastery of your life, not give up power. Surrender doesn’t mean always saying yes to everything—this can be dangerous and unwise—but it does mean going fully with a decision even if it makes you withdraw from someone or say no to anger or fear. Nor does surrender mean being a pushover or allowing yourself to be taken advantage of. Quite the opposite. By knowing when to assert yourself and when to let go, you’re actually taking back control of your life. Plus you get more of your needs met by being a smarter communicator. Throughout the book I’ll show you how to put this liberating approach into action so you can flourish.
Though surrender may seem counterintuitive to making your goals happen, it can actually be the magical factor that facilitates this and relieves gridlock in relationships, work, and every other area, especially when it seems as though things couldn’t get any worse. Life becomes easier when you’re able to let go. Burdens will lift or lessen. Without wanting to, we may become overly defensive or controlling and hold our hearts back way too much. But surrender frees you from these cages so it’ll feel safer to love. It also offers release when you’re tired, stressed, overwhelmed or just want to close your eyes and not think about anything for a while. I’m fascinated by how hard it is for most of us to let go. Surrender is essential to delight in, say, the bliss of orgasm or a belly laugh, or to drift off to sleep. But we also need to learn how surrender is necessary to experience the subtler ecstasies in the rest of life.
The new take on surrender I’m proposing involves expanding your consciousness about how best to approach the world and yourself so that you can live more effortlessly and joyfully. We’re all taught the virtues of being in control so surrendering may take getting used to. Unless we had extraordinary parents or teachers, most of us didn’t learn the merits of letting go. There are so many clenchings that happen to us each day and throughout a lifetime that we end up shouldering chronic tension. It’s difficult to be powerful and tense at the same time. To lighten your load, surrendering involves reprogramming old habits and being willing to let go of the drama.
As with any new relationship, begin gradually to establish trust and feel safe. See how surrender feels, note the advantages, and remember to appreciate the enjoyment, even ecstasy, often linked with the release. Start by drinking a glass of water very slowly, savoring every drop. Take a deep breath when you’re caught in traffic (a necessity in Los Angeles, where many people would drive from their living room to the kitchen if possible) or when your computer malfunctions. With the pressure off, notice if you start hitting green lights more frequently or if technological snafus resolve more quickly. Surrender is especially useful in what astrologers call “Mercury-in-retrograde phases,” when everything backfires or goes wrong. As you start to gain trust in the act of surrendering, challenge yourself with other levels we’ll discuss too. For instance: How can surrender benefit you when you’re arguing with your spouse? When your kids leave for college? During periods when finances are hard? When you’re overly possessive or clingy with a partner who needs space? Or when you can’t lose weight despite dieting? In each situation you’ll see where surrender fits in and ways it can bring breakthroughs.
Try stretching past the border of your resistance, toward the degrees of trust you’ve never experienced, the serenity you’ve never allowed in. Then reach further. The practice of letting go will empower you to get through difficult periods and also to celebrate joy because both require a surrender. Ironically, surrendering to joy—really relishing it—may be the most unfamiliar act of all.
I’ll address surrender step by step, offering a range of strategies to put into action. For instance, the art of knowing when to do and when not to do is a unifying theme of this book. Surrender doesn’t mean being passive or impotent. It means leaving no stone unturned in manifesting your goals or solving a dilemma—but not letting the death grip of over-efforting or being too obsessive sabotage you or stop magic from intervening. As you’ll see, sometimes it’s better to “be the mountain,” to let things come to you. You’ll learn to discern the correct balance between trying to make things happen and letting go, between doing all the work yourself and delegating responsibility. And, at the right moment, even surrendering the outcome itself can optimize the chance of achieving a goal as well as impart a merciful knowing that all is well even if that goal doesn’t materialize. Of course, no one likes losing a friend or a partner or being uemployed, but you’ll be able to accept these changes with more equanimity, without torturing yourself. As compassion grows, surrender becomes easier because you’ll become gentler with your own journey and less tight-fisted with others. Still, what most tests my heart are those times when, despite the intensity of my desires, something is just not meant to be. Then and always, the basis of surrender is “to bloom right where we’re planted,” as St. Francis de Sales wrote. We must do our best to accept both satisfactions and letdowns in the spirit of growth.
What I adore about surrender is that it helps me attune to the natural rhythm of things. This is invaluable, for example, when I feel a project isn’t moving “fast enough,” when I’m without a lover but am longing for that connection, or when I’m working too hard or I’m creatively stuck and require a “reset” day to go inward and “sharpen the ax,” as Abraham Lincoln said. Each instance trains me to honor proper timing and self-care, to stop worrying, and to enjoy what’s good today. Getting to this state can be easier at some times, harder at others but it’s where I want to be and what I continually strive for.
My passion for writing this book comes from witnessing the transformative effects of surrender on my patients’ health and mood as well as on my own. I’m an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and have had a private practice for more than twenty years. In that time I’ve seen a vast array of people benefit: overbearing spouses, hyperstressed parents, insomniac money managers, love addicts, and out-of-work actors. Surrender is a secret to health and beauty. It makes you feel good and look good instead of becoming tight, tense, obsessive, and burned out by adrenaline and cortisol, stress hormones that cause you to age faster, die sooner, and develop a greater risk of heart disease, cancer, and inflammation. In contrast, the relaxation of surrender boosts your brain’s endorphins—euphoric, opiate-like painkillers—and serotonin, which is a natural antidepressant. Think of how staggeringly different people of the same age can look and act. Our ability to be flexible with life plays a large role in this. As a psychiatrist, I’ve seen the repercussions when patients don’t surrender—how their career dreams self-destruct when they push too hard, how they fight their children to the point of alienating them, how clenching around conflict can aggravate depression and pain. I understand and strongly empathize with people who are cornered in these dead-end places where nobody wants to wind up, but my message of hope to you is that there is a better way to be.
This book is so crucial to me because I work in a mainstream medical system that typically worships the intellect, equates statistics with reality, and views surrender as counterintuitive since it means giving up the fight or failing. This can apply to everything from how you communicate with your opinionated mother to how you deal with job stress or make health care decisions. Plus many doctors have a truly phobic, if unconscious, fear of death—they dread our final surrender because they’re unable to sense that there’s anything other than this material world, and they compensate by being overly controlled and technical. This compromises patient care and the compassion we medical practitioners must provide. During my psychiatric training, I was taught to help patients take control of their lives. This is essential but the counterbalancing advantages of letting go weren’t equally emphasized. Though I have nothing but awe for the wonders of modern science and take enormous pride in being a physician, I intend to keep expanding the paradigm of conventional medical thinking, which has been my mission for the past two decades.
My basic job as a psychiatrist is to help patients deal with their problems so that they can lead happier lives. However, my approach combines mainstream medicine with the complementary fields of intuitive and energy medicine as well as spirituality to show how surrender can foster well-being and reduce suffering. Using this blended wisdom, I’ve been privileged to assist my patients in achieving balance during periods of both abundance and loss. My role isn’t to fix their discomfort or to protect them. Rather, it’s to use my intuition along with traditional psychiatric skills to catalyze each person’s inner resources, helping him or her navigate life’s passages with more ease, instinct, and love. The trick to this—a skill we all must learn—is to surrender to what each day brings, just as a surfer both navigates and yields to a great wave. You don’t want to go too slow and resist the wave, nor do you want to go too fast or push because both lead only to pain and confusion. I teach patients to ride the momentum, to stay centered with open eyes and open hearts.
A key to surrender is that it comes from your intuition, not just the linear mind. The more surrendered you are, the more intuitive and open to a deeper flow of knowledge you will be. As you’ll see in upcoming chapters, intuition lets you tap your inner genius, giving you access to solutions outside the bounds of ordinary reason and letting you travel in realms where time does not exist. Creative people know this well. The legendary musician, composer, and producer Quincy Jones says in my book Positive Energy: “Jazz people really trust intuition. They have to. They live off it. They exist because of it.” My patients in the arts are quite familiar with surrendering to intuition—it’s central to the creative process. However, with many of my analytical attorney patients who are always poised for the next clever chess move, it’s often a huge operation to get them out of their heads, though it can be done. You can’t think your way to surrender.
I’ll teach you to access intuition, the inner voice that tells you the uncensored truth about things and provides flashes of insight both while you are awake and in your dreams. Intuition doesn’t cater to what you want to hear, nor is it politically correct. It simply offers information; you can choose to act on it or not. When you slow down enough to listen, you can connect to your intuition which means listening to your gut instincts and your body’s signals when you need to make a decision. It’s heeding the goose bumps that convey what feels right and what feels off. It’s watching for signs and synchronicities, those moments of perfect timing when you’re shown a direction or when a situation suddenly falls into place. Most important, though, intuition lets you sense the vast domain of your heart and draw on that sustenance. You’ll tap that intuition by remaining receptive and playful, not mentally straining to figure something out. I invite you to stay open. People with closed minds cannot experience expanded states of consciousness.
When working with patients, I always tune in to intuition, then weigh my intellect’s input. First I ask myself, “How does this person or the decisions he or she is facing feel in my gut?” I’m also aware of any sensations and knowings that register about the issues a patient raises. Then I ask, “What does my mind think about the situation?” Especially thrilling are electric instants when intuition compels my mind to ask a particular question rather than pursuing a different line of reasoning simply because it seems logical to do so. The beauty of an intuition-propelled intellect is that the insights I’m moved toward are rich and alive compared to those I get from a purely rational assessment which can feel more constricted and superficial. I love what Albert Einstein said: “We must take care to not make the intellect our god.… It cannot lead; it can only serve.”
The linear mind may be an astute analyzer and sparring partner, but it can’t do what intuition and the heart can. It can’t feel anything or expand beyond logic. It can’t fully know love, compassion, or unrestrained creative flow. It cannot experience a spiritual connection resonant in every fiber. Nor can it intuit that death is not an end. Our mind’s tendency is to clench, to calculate, to protect, to fear the unknown and what’s “unproven.”
A profound influence on my work with surrender has been my Daoist teacher with whom I’ve studied for over twenty years. Our practice entails cultivating the power of the heart, intuition, and meditation to hear inner stillness. It emphasizes harmonizing as the basis of surrender: with nature, with yourself, and with others. Especially during conflict, most people expect you to butt heads. But the strength of harmonizing is that it puts you in sync with people. By getting on their wavelength, you can intuitively size them up, then make informed, centered choices on how to proceed. It’s similar to the ancient martial arts discipline of jujitsu which uses the art of softness and yielding (rather than brute force) to neutralize an opponent. I’ll describe how harmonizing is the ultimate success strategy because you own the moment in a disarming way.
In this book, I’ll ask you to think of surrender in specific terms so that you can pinpoint what it feels like in a range of circumstances from noisy neighbors to delayed flights, getting along with family, and excelling in your career. Over the years I’ve discovered there are four main types of surrender: intellectual, emotional, physical/sensual, and spiritual. As we go on, I’ll discuss practical ways to apply these different facets of letting go. They’ll work together to enhance your complete experience of letting go.
• Intellectual surrender. Your mind needs to understand the benefits of letting go so that it doesn’t fight you. Give it some good reasons, such as “You’ll feel relieved when you stop obsessing about that man” or “If you keep pressuring your boss about a promotion, he’ll resent it.” You want your intellect on your side.
• Emotional surrender. You’ll allow yourself to feel and observe (not spew) your emotions instead of tightening around fear and worry or only partially allowing pleasure in. As you let go on an emotional level, you’ll be able to release resentments and pass through difficulties more smoothly.
• Physical/sensual surrender. Breathing fully counteracts stiffness and buildup of stress or chronic pain, especially if you’re glued to a computer all day. Regular movement such as stretching, yoga, walking, or aerobics expels tension and loosens you up. Also, this surrender includes exploring sexuality as well as the primal sensuality of nature, weather, and the elements. Gazing at the moon, a body of water, or a shooting star helps you realize that a natural universe surrounds you, instilling wonder and tranquility.
• Spiritual surrender. This involves opening to a compassionate force, a great kindness larger than your smaller “I-me-mine” identities (such as “I’m a good wife” or “I’m a hard worker”). This could be God, Goddess, nature, love, or something nameless. Through this connection, you begin to trust that something beautiful exists beyond the mundane. The sensation of having a hole in your gut can only be filled by spirit—no person, job, food, or drug can heal it. Surrender isn’t about giving up or giving in; it’s about giving over. You’re not alone—never have been. Knowing this allows you to become more comfortable with uncertainty and makes letting go easier.
We’ll also identify what inhibits you from surrendering so that you can remove these obstacles. Frequent fears include losing control or the upper hand, getting hurt, feeling vulnerable, not getting what you want, or lacking faith in a spiritual force that can assist you during turmoil. As you’ll see, the answers may involve reprogramming negative, untrue conditioning from family such as “You can’t trust anyone” or “Only wealthy people are successful.” You’ll also examine your resistance to joy in many areas. What stops you from madly loving someone? Being sexy? Applying for a daring job? Taking dance classes? Wearing a bathing suit? Each chapter of this book illustrates how surrender informs issues such as money, love, play, work, your body, and your health. Lifting fear facilitates surrender so you can create a life of joy and grace.
In my role as a physician, I’ve also seen that fear of death is a factor that contributes to my patients’ reluctance to let go. They may not even be aware of this fear but when it is left unaddressed, it constricts their capacity to fully surrender to all aspects of life. I want to help you candidly address and make peace with your fear of death too. Only then will you know the solace that we are more than our bodies, that our spirits endure.
Talk about anxiety relief! I appreciate the Buddhist teaching of impermanence—that change is constant and nothing material lasts forever, yet there is still a “groundless ground.” In other words, an invisible spiritual matrix exists everywhere at all times and it ensures that you’ll always be supported. To Buddhists, everything we do is in preparation for our moment of death—the luminous appointment we all must keep, our ultimate surrender. This is meant not to be morbid but to be hopeful.
Most people in our culture are in denial about death and fear it. I’ve seen my physician colleagues, lovely, intelligent people, stop looking in the eyes of the dying and resort to icy technicalities when talking to a terminal patient’s relatives. Even with my own mother’s oncologist, who was also her close friend, I had to broach her need for hospice care when it was clear she was soon to pass. He said, “It’s just too painful to admit. I feel like a failure that I couldn’t keep Maxine alive and cure her cancer.” Accepting the surrender of death crystallizes the here-and-now importance of love. (No one has ever told me on his or her deathbed, “I wish I’d worked more” or “If only I had more money or a larger stock portfolio.”) Acknowledging death lets you live fully in every moment and love every person as if each encounter were your last. Then there won’t always be a part of us holding back with our intimates, with our work, or with ourselves.
Each of us becomes ready to surrender for different reasons and the accompanying change is sometimes painful. Just as a seed starts in the darkness and then splits apart to become something larger and more alive, surrender impels our consciousness to grow—a worthy struggle that reaps amazing results. Often patients enter psychotherapy with me after undergoing the trial-by-fire version of surrender, their egos so beaten down that they’ve finally reached the point of saying, “I can’t take it anymore—I have to change.” A marketing executive, battling drugs at forty, said, “Lying unconscious and alone in an emergency room after a massive cocaine overdose forced me to surrender to getting sober. I knew it was surrender or die.” A highly independent college professor who felt powerful by being “in control” told me, “My wife getting diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease let me realize that asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness.” A workaholic computer consultant said, “I took on so many clients that I started getting constant, excruciating back pain. This forced me to lighten up and say no to doing too much.”
Crises can be a fierce motivator and surrender is invaluable when life is overwhelming or you’re so upset it’s hard to make it through the day. To my patients in this state I say, “Come sit next to me. Let’s start over again. In each new moment there is a new beginning.” I’m also dedicated to helping them—and you—benefit from miraculous but less dramatic everyday surrenders. Changing jobs, beginning a new relationship, and simply remembering to exhale before a meeting are all chances to let go and surrender to new adventures.
Some surrenders are critical to your immediate sanity if a situation is out of your hands. One patient who feared flying but had to do it monthly for work could really get freaked out on a plane, especially during turbulence. She’d keep telling herself, “I’m thirty thousand feet off the ground in a small metal capsule. Nothing’s supporting us except thin air. This is nuts. If humans were meant to fly, God would’ve given us wings. We’re going down.” Then she’d break out in a cold sweat. That’s where our work together could intervene. She had to surrender to the fact that for everyone it’s an act of faith to get on a plane. True, she wasn’t the pilot, but she could control one thing: her attitude. So instead of fixating on her anxieties, she surrendered by shifting her attention to positive thoughts, including faith in the pilot’s skill. First she focused on the statistic that flying is actually a thousand times safer than driving in a car. That helped. Second, she lost herself in reading instead of obsessing over being confined in a plane. These strategies, along with breathing exercises and praying, enabled her to be less tense when she flew.
Over the years, my own surrenders have been many. I keep learning to trust the process, including facing my resistances and fears, as I melt more deeply into letting go. Particularly freeing has been my surrender to always feeling different from everyone else, like a sister from another planet. When I was a girl I never understood why I could accurately predict unnerving events such as earthquakes or the unexpected suicide of my parents’ friend, or how I could feel someone’s pain in my own body. I came from a lineage of physicians, including my parents, who were all rigorous scientific thinkers. My ongoing fascination for what is unseen, mysterious, and inexplicable seemed to clash with that. I lacked support for my childhood intuitions (they upset Mother and Dad so I was forbidden to mention them) or the subtle sensitivity of my constitution which is much like a wire without insulation. “You need a thicker skin,” grown-ups told me over and over again. Today, my outsider spirit—I identify with rebels and misfits on the fringe—feels gratifying and real. These are my people, my tribe. I’m happiest in a jean skirt with turquoise toenails, watching the sun set with friends in the Santa Monica beach parking lot by the Ferris wheel. But in my early life I was desperately torn between wanting to fit in at those endless country club dinners that my Armani-clad parents herded me to and knowing I never would. Some people are born with the gene to make small talk but not me. Then as now, I have no idea how to do it. I’m still a bit unsocialized in conventional terms—I’m not wild about dressing up or going to cocktail parties. All this and more is me: the me I continue to discover and surrender to, and who I pray my loved ones will keep embracing as I evolve.
Some surrenders happen quickly. They immediately feel right and it’s easy to let go. More often, though, I’ve observed that there are three common stages. As you practice the different surrenders in each chapter, keep a journal of the stages you go through, to log your progress. Be aware that resistance, a form of fear, is natural and to be expected. So don’t be put off or discouraged by this aspect of yourself. It’s simply one stage of the process that we all go through.
• Stage 1: Resistance. Initially, a part of you doesn’t want to let go. Fears such as “I’ll get hurt if I fall in love again,” “I’ll be a failure if I don’t get promoted” or “Why start a diet? I’ll never lose weight” stop you. Discuss your resistances with a friend or therapist to help you release them.
• Stage 2: Acceptance. Next, you become practical and use common sense to see the situation clearly. For instance, you realize, “My behavior isn’t working so I’m willing to risk trying something new” or “I’ve done as much as I can for now. Pushing isn’t helping. It’s better to back off.”
• Stage 3: Letting go. This may be a partial or full surrender. You don’t have to feel completely ready. A little willingness is enough. Take it slow. Let go of a fear or counterproductive reaction just for a minute, an hour, a day. See how it feels to stop pushing. Do things differently. The benefits will motivate you to continue.
Be aware of these stages as you explore each topic in the book, from success to money and love. Above all, be patient with yourself, even if surrendering doesn’t come immediately. You will get the hang of it. Don’t let resistance stop you!
In praise of embracing surrender in daily life, I’ve divided my book into six parts. I’ll describe how surrender can improve your relationships, health, and communication skills. I’ll examine some tender, highly charged areas including sex and death, where, as I’ve noted, many of us get trapped in unenlightened mind-sets. You’ll learn to view all of these in new, affirming ways so that you’ll feel more at ease as you practice surrender. I’ll clarify what forces not to surrender to such as fear and impatience. I’ll also share my personal journey with each area, including my resistances and victories, because I want to use my life to lift yours, to make your path to letting go easier.
Every chapter has specific tools for surrender and quizzes to guide you with simple how-to exercises that give results. But this book doesn’t have to be read in any particular order—you can go straight to the topic that’s most relevant to you.
In “An Introduction to Letting Go,” you’ll learn what stops you and how you can surrender anything that prevents your happiness.
Part One, “Power and Money,” describes how true power is intimately related to surrender. From this perspective, you’ll redefine the meaning of success and prosperity, going beyond just the kind based on material accumulation or outer achievements. It involves surrendering to the power of a heart-based and intuitive intelligence to establish a “new normal.” This lets us break the trance of the primitive “reptilian brain” which is programmed for survival through dominating others, aggression, and staying on top of the food chain.
You’ll also take a self-assessment test to determine your relationship with power and letting go. This will establish a baseline of where you’re at now so that you can record your progress as you apply surrender to different topics in this book. Furthermore, I’ll help you see beyond the material seduction of money to tap its spirit of abundance. This entails viewing money as a conduit for the power of good and discarding the cockeyed notion of equating self-worth with net worth.
In Part Two, “Reading People and Communication,” I’ll teach you the art of reading people, not just with your mind but also with the secret weapon of intuition. In my work, reading people gives me particular joy since deeper forms of relating let us get down to the business of loving one another. I’ll describe methods to tune in to someone’s voice, body language, priorities, and thinking. Reading people can stop you from getting drawn into drama. It lets you be more empathic and a better communicator. Then we’ll discuss types of difficult people, including the anger addict, the gossip, and the narcissist, and how to successfully deal with them.
Part Three, “Relationships, Love, and Sensuality,” will help you explore surrendering to the divinity of the body and sexual pleasure, even if you may feel out of contact with those aspects of yourself now. I’ll share simple, comfortable techniques for opening sensuality (including stretching and touch) that you can try on your own or with a partner. I’ll also discuss the vulnerable area of intimacy. When is it right to surrender to another? What if you’re afraid of losing yourself in a lover? What is a soul mate, a soul friend, or déjà vu? How can you be attracted to someone and stay centered? What if your body is telling you yes about someone but your intuition is saying no? Why are you drawn to unavailable people? You’ll see how karma, intuition, and common sense converge to reveal an inspired path for when and how to surrender to those with whom we feel kindred. We’ll also return to the ancients’ appreciation of nature, the elements, and animals as teachers and healers to rekindle your sensuality and your bond to sentient life forces. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in the universe by mistake. Aligning yourself with the flow of nature ensures that you’ll be headed in the right direction.
Part Four, “Mortality and Immortality: Cycles of Light,” describes the surrenders involved in the mysteries of illness, aging, death, and thereafter. We’ve been duped by society’s fear-based attitudes. To surrender, it’s essential to let go of fear, which is a form of resistance. You’ll learn the Daoist practice of harmonizing with illness to heal instead of making “dis-ease” the enemy. You’ll experience the radiance and passion of aging instead of feeling remorse or shame. You’ll realize that death as an end is an illusion so you can examine other possibilities.
Part Five, “Embracing Ecstasy,” conveys that the great reward of surrender is that you can celebrate joy as it continues to blossom throughout your life. The more you can surrender, the more joy you’ll experience.
Writing this book has been a devotional for me, a prayer about deeply trusting the time I’m allotted and shedding my inhibitions and fear. For years I’ve been edging closer to surrender but now my longing for this state, for the tenderness of bowing to the deities of flow, has grown so compelling that everything else seems contingent on it—my relationships, my work, my embrace of goodness and the heart.
I want my life to be on fire. I want to inhabit the moment as much as I can and have a great time just being Judith. I want to trust intuition, instant by instant so that I can sense perfect timing—when to move ahead and when to wait. This is so appealing because it places me in the center of passion, attuning to what feels most true. Sometimes, I know I can be stubborn, willful, and impatient. Seeing this in me, my Daoist teacher has said, “You can be like a child in the backseat who keeps asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ ” I know how small and frantic it feels to come from these spots. As much as anyone, I don’t like it when I am denied what I want or when things go slower than my timetable. And I have strong appetites. I’m not just an angel. I am fascinated by all of life, light and dark. My interests have a wide range. In every experience, however, I’m an indefatigable explorer of better ways to live that are more in sync with intuition than with willfulness, fear, or desire. I specialize in pondering the imponderable to arrive at solutions that appeal to common sense by heeding the larger voices calling. I can’t tolerate stagnating in old behaviors that are not spurring the evolution of my own growth as well as collective consciousness. Thus, being an apprentice of surrender has intense attraction for me. It offers me an opportunity to refine myself so that I’m not perpetrating my own suffering by oppressively clinging to things.
I am drawn to ecstasy and choose it as a friend rather than seeing it as a mysterious fluke that no one can replicate. Ecstasy is so enticing and rare because it comes from letting go, from trusting. I’m not talking about some blissed-out state that blinds you to discernment. Rather, it’s the sweet clarity of surrender, the pleasure of connecting intimately to friends, family, lovers, work, the earth, and a primal current of knowledge untainted by fear. It’s a revery for the moment—a realization that the person in front of you is your spiritual experience and you are his or hers! As I’ve said, nothing in this universe happens by mistake. Surrendering to the integrity of life’s flow—really trusting it—is my ongoing practice and it can be yours too. Don’t take my recommendations on blind faith. Try the strategies I’m suggesting. Evaluate the results. Allow this book to draw you into your own experience of surrender and your own capacity for ecstasy.