How To Surrender Without Giving Up

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How To Surrender Without Giving Up? Essential Advices

Challenges in life can often feels overwhelming, but did you know that you can surrender without giving up? Read more to discover resilience in uncertain times.

Optimism eluded me, but I found something better.

So, How To Surrender Without Giving Up?

Iโ€™m a late bloomer, which means I experienced a very uncomfortable โ€œpre-bloomโ€ stageโ€”a time in my mid-thirties when my peers were blossoming into stunning sunflowers and exquisite orchids, while I remained a tight, hard bud.

My life was in a state of aspirationโ€”writing and revising a novel I could never manage to finish, going on tepid dates with perfectly nice men, feeling rising panic at the growing number of book-party and baby-shower invitations in my mailbox.

Read More Here: How To Talk To Anyone With Confidence? 14 Psychological Hacks For Any Situation

I did have a pretty good career writing self-help stories for magazines and websites, and the work paid well enough to cover necessities like rent and groceries (in other words, a fortune by todayโ€™s standards), but I still couldnโ€™t do the kinds of things I thought a woman my age should be able to do, like go on vacation or purchase furniture from anywhere other than IKEA. My life wasnโ€™t bad; I just felt too old for it.

I was fortunate to be on the self-improvement beat, since I was too vain to ever read a self-help book without the excuse of work. As it was, I dove in. The authors and experts I interviewed said they knew how a person could attain the life they wanted, and I happily filled out their workbooks and road-tested their action plans.

Two pieces of advice came up repeatedly: I needed to be confident (which Iโ€™ve written about here), and I needed to cultivate a positive attitude. Developing these qualities would propel both my career and my love life. Confidence and positivity would whisk me out of my current situationโ€”which too often meant spending my Saturday nights alone eating mac-and-cheese on my Glรธstรคd.

It made sense to me that taking a sunnier view of things would help move my life forward. But optimism has never been my strength becauseโ€ฆ I read the news. It was one thing to believe my own life would turn out nicely, but an informed person has to face the fact that overall things do not necessarily work out for the better.

Still, I tried. It was research! But pushing myself to be more hopeful and optimistic didnโ€™t make me happier. Instead, it made me long for the things I didnโ€™t have even more. It made me even more impatient for the future to hurry up and bring me what I wanted.

On the plus side, self-help led me to yoga, which is where I first heard the teachings of a Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron.

Chodronโ€™s wildly popular books, like The Wisdom of No Escape and When Things Fall Apart, have a self-help aspect to them in that she gives advice for how to live, but her message is fundamentally different from the other books I was reading at the time.

For one thing, Chodron isnโ€™t really into hope. Sheโ€™s actually kind of down on it.

โ€œWeโ€™re all addicted to hopeโ€”hope that doubt and mystery will go away,โ€ she writes in When Things Fall Apart.

Chodron explains that hope is the flip side of fear:

In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for the alternatives.

How To Surrender Without Giving Up
you can surrender without giving up

Chodronโ€™s instruction is to stay. Stay with the fear and the longing, the anger and the anxiety. Let those feelings seep into your bones and see what happens.

So I tried it. On a lonely winter Saturday night, I sat quietly in the middle of my living-room floor for twenty minutes, feeling my pain.

I relaxed into the tight sensation in my chest, and dove into the pangs in my heartโ€”dread, loneliness, and the overall sense that I wasnโ€™t good enough. I tried to observe these emotions with the detachment of a scientist.

Elevated heart rate. Check

Shallow breathing. Check.

Clammy hands. Check.

When the timer went off, I made an important discovery: I didnโ€™t die. A major part of my pain was my judgment of itโ€”Iโ€™m envious, therefore Iโ€™m a terrible person; Iโ€™m lonely, therefore Iโ€™m a loser. When I dropped the judgment partโ€”when I recognized that everyone feels envy and loneliness sometimesโ€”I realized that the pain itself wasnโ€™t that bad. I called fearโ€™s bluff; by letting it in, I defanged it.

It was a wonderful moment of discovery, and from there I developed a regular meditation practice. At first, I was very excited about this new way of approaching my life. After a while though, things flatlined. Oh great, another Saturday night of feeling my pain. But I kept at it because it was making me feel calmer, and because I didnโ€™t have anything better to do.

Those years felt very static, especially as I witnessed friends ticking through their life milestones. But that time turned out to be one of the most important and transformative periods of my life.

I started re-reading When Things Fall Apart this monthโ€”for all the obvious reasons.

Iโ€™m in a different place now. Today my problem isnโ€™t that I fear Iโ€™m a failure; itโ€™s the realization that I live in a failed state. When I was younger, the future was a shiny castle I could never quite reach. Now the future is a distant tropical storm, gathering strength and heading to my village.

Before, creating a better future meant working on myself. Now, personal development seems laughably irrelevant. Before, relaxing into my pain was the whole game. Now, that seems woefully inadequate to meet this moment.

Things have fallen apart in a way my mid-thirties self could not have fathomed, and the efforts of countless good people couldnโ€™t stop it. Millions of postcards and phone calls and door knocks couldnโ€™t stop it. Truckloads of money couldnโ€™t stop it. The U.S. justice system couldnโ€™t stop it. Rhodes Scholars and Harvard PhDs couldnโ€™t stop it. George Clooney and Taylor Swift couldnโ€™t stop it.

Weโ€™ve been humbled, and not in an โ€œI just won an Oscarโ€ kind of way.

We lost, but accepting this loss feels wrong. Too many people are going to be hurt.

Iโ€™ve been struggling with how to work with all this and was glad to find this recent episode of Dan Harrisโ€™ 10% Happier podcast, where former Buddhist nun Kaira Jewel Lingo explains that you can surrender without giving up:

Weโ€™re still caught when we give up. The situation still has us somehow. Whereas when we surrender and say, โ€œLook, this is how it is. There is no way for me to change this,โ€ we free ourselves.

We free our energy up to then relate to it differently. But when we give up, weโ€™re still somehow trapped in the story that this could be different. And I think the surrender piece is actually a power place; itโ€™s a place of power when we simply open to โ€œthis is how things are.โ€

When we drop the resistance and soften into the situation, we can find peace even when life is really hard. We can start to deal with reality, rather than wishing for things to be different. Giving up means pulling down the shades and getting under the covers. Surrendering means accepting the situation as it is and working from there.

Producer DJ Cashmere, who conducted the interview, adds that Lingo says sometimes itโ€™s OK to give up:

There are moments in our lives where giving up really is the best we can do. Circumstances are so overwhelming that our best bet is to just shut down. Our best bet is to just walk away, and we might just need to be done with something at least for the time being. And she says that can also be healed, that can also be worked with.

In other words, you can surrender to the fact that you canโ€™t surrender right now.

That podcast helped me make the connection between the very personal work I was doing when I was younger and the current, much graver situation weโ€™re all in now.

Iโ€™m staying with the fear because denying it or pushing it away wonโ€™t help. Iโ€™m relaxing into the situation as it is not because I condone it, but because I want to understand how to best engage it.

I donโ€™t think itโ€™s giving up. I think itโ€™s preparing for whatโ€™s next, even if we donโ€™t yet know what that is.

Whatโ€™s your best strategy for handling this moment?

Read More Here: 4 Steps To Have Hope In Hard Times

Now that you know that you can surrendering without giving up. What are your thoughts on surrendering?

If you want more information Sara Eckel is the author of  Itโ€™s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons Youโ€™re Single and the creator of the newsletter Itโ€™s Not Us.


Written by Sara Eckel
Originally appeared on:  Itโ€™s Not Us
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