Allowing things to unfold without trying to control or change them is the essence of embracing the word surrender. Imagine a day where you just didn’t worry about anything. You just trusted that everything is going to be ok and it’s all going to work out the way it should. What would your day be like if you went about your daily commitments and tasks with a sense of knowing all is well? Hard to imagine for most of us.
Building a habit of surrendering and letting go will build your inner strength and trust in the universe. When you build this skill when things are not stressful, you will find that when stressful things occur, you will likely be better equipped to take a step back and surrender to the moment and accept that moment as it is before reacting. You will begin to trust that things are unfolding the way they were meant to, even though they don’t seem like it at the time.
Another exercise to help to feel more comfortable in surrendering to the moment is to spend some time reflecting on a series of events in your life. Take some time to reflect on parts of your life and see if you can track how certain things happened for a reason. You may not have understood the reason at the time, but you can clearly see it now.
For example, between graduate school in psychology and medical school I worked at Cisco Systems, a technology company. One of my roles was to help develop an online survey to assess the students that went thru the Cisco Networking Academy. Now this had nothing to do with my next endeavor in medicine, at least that’s what I thought at the moment. But in my second year of medical school I was the Vice President of my medical school class and we needed a tool to communicate the needs of the medical students to the administration So guess what I did….I developed an online survey of the medical students and was able to present comprehensive data to the administrators to make positive changes in our medical school experience. I had never thought I would be using the skills I learned at Cisco in survey development in medical school, but there it was.
There are numerous examples like this throughout my life and yours. What’s so amazing about this is that those events are still unfolding in your life and we may not know yet how they will all fill into the bigger picture. Taking a step back and seeing the bigger tapestry of life and surrounding to the process can bring so much peace.
So I challenge you, to try it…just for five minutes, set a timer, then close your eyes and let go. Let go of all of the “should”, “shouldn’t”s and “have to”s. Allow your mind to be free and open. Not cluttered with pushing so hard. Just let what is, be. Accept what is. Surrender to the moment and all of the events that brought you to this moment in time. Accept where you are now and how you got there. Understand that every twist and turn, every moment of laughter and tears, every moment filled with joy and those filled with heartbreak; they were all perfectly aligned and the way it was supposed to be.
So how did it go? For some this comes easy and is refreshing, for most others you still may be trying to figure out how to do let your mind go of its obligations. Be gentle with yourself and know that surrendering to the moment can be a very challenging task and as you do it more and more and get in the habit of taking time to let go on a regular basis it will get easier.
I challenge you to take a few minutes each day to start to implement the practice of surrender and acceptance of the moment. Reflect and appreciate your path, your journey of how you got to this moment in your life. Surrender to what’s to come and trust that its unfolding perfectly.
