True Surrender

Jokes on me.

Years ago, I had a dream where I saw all the people, trying to heal with doctors, therapists, healers and facilitators. They laid on tables, couches, gurneys and floors with “professionals” standing over them. They were being told to surrender. In the dream I rallied against this. “Don’t give them your power”, I screamed, “They are not the ones with the power to heal you. They are not above you. Don’t roll over and hand them the wheel. Stay with your power. Never surrender.” I said. “This is some sick supremacy, power-over, ego-hippy, stay a baby bullshit. Lay down your body and rest but keep your spirit standing tall” This dream stirred up some big feelings about healing in my culture. Surrender? Maybe, but not like that. Who or what are we surrendering to? What are we surrendering? For what?

Condemnation is a neon sign of my avoidance, an invitation to look deeper.  Righteous adolescent cries of condemnation are my favorite avoidance strategy, but judge and weasel as I may, the wave of true surrender gathers. 

So I begin to peel the deep and weird the onion of my relationship to surrender.

In this moment I am preparing for a big initiation. 

Initiation requires full surrender. Letting go into an unknown metamorphosis. 

This initiation is demanding that I sink my hands deep into the onion, feeling where there is resistance and exploring it. 

I am seeing the way I negotiate with surrender. 

My surrender has been conditional. 

I surrender to experiences that I know will eventually release me into familiarity. 

Finite surrender is not surrender. 

Returning to or grasping the known is not surrender.

My body is reacting to surrender as a war term.  My lineage holds the memory of forced surrender.  My body does not want to give in, I’m still fighting.  I’m time traveling backwards and am caught on the forced surrenders. Looking into the wounds of my warrior ancestors surrendering the lands that were a part of themselves. 

A soldier fights as they’re commanded, a warrior fights for something in their heart, something bigger. 

My Scottish ancestors tell me we fight for our lives and for the land.

A warrior fights only to defend something they have surrendered their heart to.

Forced surrender is not true surrender. 

Time traveling deeper, past the forced surrenders, they show me the surrender they walked with in their hearts, bones, and songs. 

The true surrender.

My ancestors were surrendered to life and land. 

Life and Land are one organism.

I look inside myself, what am I, right now, truly surrendered to? 

I feel myself breathing, the beat of my heart, the buzz of energy in my living cells. 

I feel Life.  

I have been resisting my own surrender, I have been distracted defending the wounds of forced surrender. 

Have I truly surrendered to my life or am I resisting it?

True surrendering to life is letting go all the way into the lovemaking of patterning and chaos, the birth, death, constant change. Letting life animate and unfold inside and around you.  Letting life hold you and live in and through you. Letting go of control and permanence. 

Our resistance to this surrender has built an edifice of attempted permanence. A stasis of plastics, dogma, and hierarchy that is the nexus of our resistance to life. 

Surrendering to life is the shift to support earths healing. We are the earth healing herself.

I’ve been researching my masters thesis about if and how, in the same way they have been shown to support people with terminal diagnoses, psychedelics can guide humanity through our ecological terminal diagnosis.  I’ve been asking how we surrender to certain death.  The joke’s on me, the real question is how do we surrender to life. 

This practice is the deep gnarly work of actually surrendering to life.  Life is relentless. The practice of deconstructing the ways we fight life, fight self, fight change, fight growth, fight each other, fight evolution.

I yearn to imagine the unimagined, to ask questions we do not know yet, to cultivate emergence on the leading edge of paradox.  I know to my core that life force weaves the map and is unstoppable. I yearn and I know and yet I have clung to the promise of familiarity. I’m glimpsing what it means to surrender fully. To let go when there is no promise of a return to familiarity.

We are alive here and now, on this planet, and are not dead right now, I am softening and opening to life, surrendering fully to the river of life, letting it flow in, through, and all around me, that we may be warriors of life for the earth.