To Surrender, Or Not To Surrender, That Is The Question.
We need to remember that yoga is about far more than just asana and that there are many, many ways you can make your yoga practice part of your everyday life.
Below Celi shares how sometimes it’s in taking your yoga off your mat and into your world that the biggest shifts and changes take place.
To surrender, or not to surrender, that is the question. Or maybe the question should be, what does surrender really mean? What does it mean to me in this moment, what am I really surrendering to? It this genuine surrender? Are my thoughts surrounding my impending surrender intelligent and present or do they come from a place of ego, conditioning or expectation?
Thats a lot of questions with even more answers.
I have read a lot of spiritual/yoga/self development books in my time and the first one that really created a shift for me was ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckart Tolle. It is a really beautiful book, as are all of his teachings and I felt as though it took me by the hand and led me towards a happier state of being. As I started to, in Eckarts words, “surrender to what is, to say yes to the present moment and release the futile inner resistance to the present moment” I began to experience life in a softer way.
Here I will be sharing some of my experiences and as I do I am not in any way intending this to be a “teaching” but more just a look into the mess that I got myself into and out of, through the practice of surrender. This is a musing on my own past experiences and a way for me to just get some of it out. Who knows, it might help someone, maybe if I had read something like this back in my darker times I might have helped me find a quicker exit.
So grateful to ‘The Power of Now’, I gobbled up so many books and seminars and meditations and such in pursuit of a further deepening to my surrender and the peace I had found there. The practice led me to some really beautiful places and times in my life, it taught me how to let go of a lot of my negative inner conversation and gave me confidence to try new things, to meet new people and I have some wonderful friends in my life now because I got out of my shell and explored the world in a way I previously wouldn’t have done. I don’t think I would have done my yoga teacher training without it to be honest!
My yoga practice and my surrender helped me through separation and divorce and I’m not saying that I floated through it all without a care in the world, but it helped ease the pain and challenge of those difficult times.
It has helped me to make decisions in my business that have paid off beautifully, and it helps me every day to be a better parent to my son. As with everything though, even with a spiritual practice, it has not all been sunshine and rainbows and my practice of surrender led me skipping into a very dark night of the soul. One of the more recent books that I read on this subject (well two books in fact, The surrender experiment, and The untethered soul by Michael Singer, beautiful, wonderful books that I return to every now and then) coupled with some divine (?) timing got me caught up in a real shitshow of a relationship, the actual worst time of my life. Here’s how…
He is now known as Voldemort in my small circle so that is how I shall refer to him here.
I met him online, he seemed like everything I thought I wanted at the time and completely bespelled me with his dark magic. We had some seriously good times at the start, he liked what I liked, was super sweet and kind and the whole thing was a bit of a whirlwind and we (I) “fell in love” pretty quick. And then it started to become challenging. Things he would say, little negs, little niggles, little nudges that started to shift my state from something powerful, to something weak and by the end of it pretty beaten up. Now I had no idea what a narcissist was at the time, and didn’t find out until I had ended the relationship, but with hindsight, he definitely was one, it was textbook. We ended up living together, or rather he moved in with me and lived pretty much rent free in my house for nearly a couple of years. That was when it really started to suck…and by suck I mean the way a Dementor literally sucks the soul out of you. The constant digs coupled with the (in contrast) delicious (but mediocre) acts of love were incredibly hard to navigate. So I dropped into surrender. I even said to my friends that “he was my surrender experiment” that I would just go with it, no matter what to see where the flow of life took me. It turns out it had some really powerful lessons in mind.
I remember saying to one of my dearest confidants, after she suggested for the millionth time that I expelliamus him, that maybe I just wasn’t surrendering enough, that I felt that we weren’t done, that I had something else to learn here. The codependent sad inner child was desperately hoping that he would stop being a massive dickhead and get over whatever trauma was causing him to be so mean and just love me back and make me feel safe and happy. This was clouding my judgement, it was making the bad decisions for me and tricking me into thinking that I was just being so super spiritual and doing the good work for both of us. If you have ever experienced a narcissist you will know that the work will always be one sided, they don’t change. But again and again I surrendered to what was happening, I lost money, I lost precious time, I lost respect for myself, I lost faith in my parenting and my physical health even started to decline. I self diagnosed myself with PMDD and started to look into treating that. The treatment didn’t work though, that wasn’t the problem at all, my emotional problems were influencing my physical body and really messing things up. I cried every day and questioned whether I even deserved to exist. And still I justified it all. Using my surrender as a scapegoat.
Until one evening I finally conjured my patronus. Voldemort was living, part with me and part on a job he was working on at the time so it was easier (catered to my aversion) and I didn’t have to say it to his face, I didn’t have to give in to him like I had done a bunch of times before and I ended it over a phone call with my heart racing and my eyes tearing but somehow with my resolve ironclad and my decision steadfast.
Then came the realisations. This was two years ago and with my 20/20 (or maybe 19/17) hindsight I can see more clearly now how this mess happened. Not from him being what he was, but from me allowing it all to happen. So many big red flags that I transmuted into white ones of my own.
We can analyse our behaviour in many different ways but in this case I am looking at it through the lens of the Kleshas. The Kleshas are considered to be the five causes of suffering in Buddhist and yogic teachings and if we can stay present enough and reflect regularly on our lives we can be active in the path to overcoming these afflictions. I was not doing that at the time, although I thought was oh so present, I was actually ignorant as f***.
The five Kleshas are as follows:
Avidya - ignorance
Asmita - egoism or I-am ness
Raga - attachment
Dvesha - aversion/repulsion
Abhinivesha - fear of death and the will to live
I scored a solid four out of five…
Ignorant of the truth of the situation and what was actually happening (probably because I was scared to look at it honestly and subconsciously chose the ignorance is bliss method).
Convinced that I was the problem, that I was the one that needed to change, that I could fix everything and that if I couldn’t it was MY fault. This links easily in with my aversions. So very attached to the memories of the good times we had had and the feeling of having someone to love (regardless of how they were treating me). Attached (we can also call it trauma bonded) to the breadcrumbs of affection he left me, however few and far between. Attached to the idea of being a good partner to someone no matter what they were going through even if that dealt me a really bad hand. So averse to the idea of confrontation. Hence why I dumped him over the phone. This is still something I am working on, I hate to create waves and be a pain and feel as though I am putting anyone out in any way. My blood pressure instantly goes up if I have to have a difficult conversation and I would much rather just let stuff go…but sometimes that’s not the best way is it? Sometimes we have to be more selfish, but I’d like to use a different word, selfish sounds really negative, which looking out for yourself definitely isn’t. And all of these elements tie in with each other, we can reflect and uncover so many truths if we just take the time and give ourselves the space to do so.
But for all of the shit I went through I am grateful. If not then, when? I feel like this all had to happen to lead me into deeper understanding and strength and actually for the first time a real sense of happiness in my own skin (at least most of the time) either with company or completely on my own.
Without all of this I wouldn’t have unburied this long lost sense of connection to myself and to what and who, I will and won’t accept in my life, family, friends, partners and strangers alike. From the ashes of that relationship I have continued to make some other changes in my life that I otherwise wouldn’t entertain. It’s ok to surrender, but we have to look deeper than just giving into something or someone, we have to examine the real reasons why we are choosing to do what we are doing, and if this reflection is through the lens of hindsight then cool, every surrender is genuine, even if the lesson isn’t apparent at the time, sometimes it’s a bit of a long-con, a shedding of many skins before the deepest truth can shine. And even then we keep going. We practice and we keep coming back. Horcrux after horcrux. And we still surrender. Voldemort was my surrender experiment, and he was a successful one at that, perhaps my biggest evolutionary triumph to date and without this test I wouldn’t have graduated this semester of my own personal Hogwarts. And so now I surrender to everything that happened and to everything I learned. I look back not with pain or regret or anger (well maybe once a month I do) but I instead try to focus on what precious gifts those lessons are.
“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”
“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”
I wonder what the next great undoing will teach me.
- Written by Celi Summers