Surrender Like Water
    “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend” by Bruce Lee李小龍.I love this quotation by Bruce Lee. It speaks the essence of water. Water is the most adaptable element. It changes depending on the situations and its surroundings, accepts and embraces the circumstances and the environments. Water teaches us to be flexible and live in the moment. Water doesn’t try to control the uncontrollable. It rather surrenders and allows the transformation to happen. A river surrenders to the Earth’s gravity and becomes a waterfall. Ocean surrenders to the wind and creates waves. A lake surrenders to cold air and becomes ice. Again, water meets heat and becomes vapor. It teaches us that we can’t grow, discover, transform and move forward if we’re only standing in one place refusing any changes.
Further, water is patient, and always finds her way through the smallest cracks. It doesn’t anticipate or plan. It sees the opening and goes through it. It doesn’t question, but trusts and follows. It teaches us that everything is intertwined, interconnected and co-dependent. There is nothing we can control, but it depends on ourselves. How well we can adapt to external and internal circumstances! How much faith to find small openings and to keep on trusting that life will show us the way! And how fearless we follow our paths even though we don’t know where they may lead us.

    Water is about adaptability, spontaneity and living in the moment. And often, in order to connect these qualities, we need to let it go what we can’t control. That is surrender. We need to allow our creativity and spontaneity to take hold of our body, mind and heart. Thus, we follow our surrender. Instead of resisting things and insisting on doing things, we accept the unknown and are OK with them. In other words, we let go of any control of mind, and surrender to the body experiences. Most of the time, we are so mindful to do everything we want or plan. However, things are hard to say. Out there, perhaps, there is nothing we can control. We can only observe, surrender and follow.
    For me, yoga is a path to liberation. A path of awakening, surrender, and living our essence. There are many obstacles along the way, but if we’re willing to learn, the teachings and tools to overcome them are everywhere. We all seek freedom in our own way. In practicing yoga, all we need to do is keep on walking with a light step, clear intention and a fearless, open heart.
Surrender is one of the most fundamental, important aspects of spirituality and integration. It is crucial to our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to others. While surrender is essential for any real attempt at authenticity and integration, it is also one of the most challenging aspects of any spiritual pursuit or endeavor. The inability or unwillingness to surrender is a serious impediment to our relationship with God, with others, and even with ourselves. Paradoxically, there is great freedom and an increased sense of control that is experienced when we are able to surrender. For someone who has spent a lot of time fighting for a more positive, fulfilled life and committing to never give up on attaining mental freedom, surrender wouldn’t have come up as a word. Nevertheless, we’ve now learned to look at surrender differently, in a way that it actually the key to moving forward and ensuring continued freedom and contentment. Surrender is relinquishing resistance. It is the act of truly letting go and accepting. It really opens up the potential for positive change to flow. When we surrender to what is, we let go of the compulsion of control. That means we bypass negative experiences, more earnest for answers than acceptance. Of course, there is so much information out there that can lead us away from where we are, and how we feel about it.
Surrender allows us avoid that materialism and instead, feel, listen and be. When life speaks, control is thinking of what it’s going to reply instead of simply listening. If we surrender to control and choose to accept, we give ourselves a different experience. We get to just be, instead of figuring out what to do because we are human beings, not human doings. In fact, contentment comes when we can fully accept where we’re at, and develop our own learnings from life’s lessons.
In reality, we gain significant inner peace when we surrender to the process of change. Without the need to control, our mind is freed up to be peacefully present. We let go of fear, worries and expectations, and replace them with mental peace and the opportunity for clarity. Peace of mind cannot exist when there’s a relentless resistance to what is. Fighting with our minds focusing on how we should be, and what we must work on is so exhausting. Surrender to the present moment invites us to let go of past and future, and only be fully where we are in the moment. It relieves us the weight of overthinking, and presents the potential for insights to ignite.
Ironically, when we choose to give up our needs to have everything worked out now, we are given the chance to harness trust in our own capabilities, resilience and power. The act of surrender bolsters our belief in both ourselves and the process of personal growth. It also encourages us to value patience. When we stop fighting how long it’s taking, how we think we should be doing, or where we think we’re falling short, we understand that these things take time. When we surrender our perfectionism, our needs to be seen as strong, and our desire to make everything better, we admit ourselves to be imperfect, emotional, and not supposed to know it all. Surrender to the fact that we are humans means, sometimes, we are vulnerable and we make mistakes. As humans, we will get upset, we will do things we wish we didn’t, we can’t do it all, and we can’t know it all. The truth is that the sooner we accept our limitations, the better we embrace what we’ve gratefully got. By surrender to the unpredictable experiences, our compassion grows, our self-acceptance thrives and we become kinder, more loving and more unapologetically authentic.
Living in this world, we really have a lot of “shoulds” for us to perform. We should have achieved so much very early in life, and worked so hard. I should have been rich, happy, and successful. Still, surrender is not giving up on life, but giving up fighting with life. Imagine that, in a totally just world, there are a lot of things that should be. People should be nice to each other. Good things should happen to good people. But, if we take this to its logical conclusion, we’re all born innocent, so shouldn’t everyone just get what he or she wants? Shouldn’t only good things happen to everyone? Beyond the facts that what is good and fairness, all of these good things that should happen are far, far away from our control. By dropping the shoulds, it is definite that we are now able, in the clear-thinking moments, to act without opposition from life, and more quickly move to consider the course of actions. Each day, there are a thousand little victories, all thanks to surrender.
Notwithstanding, as imperfect beings, total, ongoing, and permanent surrender is unrealistic. We still feel negative emotions about experiences not meeting our expectations, and we need to allow ourselves to feel those feelings. Venting of negative emotions is useful insofar as it allows us to liberate ourselves of them. Surrender is saying “yes.” “Yes, I accept that this is a terrible situation, and the way I can make it better is…” This is how surrender becomes the key to taking positive actions, and frees us from so many of the negative emotions that we strengthen by opposing reality. We don’t say that what’s happening is okay, but we accept that it’s happening and move onto what we can do about it.
     Complaint is useless. If we’re just complaining or not accepting the reality, how can we change that reality? That aura of negativity or hopelessness comes with a failure to surrender. Let’s think about some of the most socially impactful figures in the last 100 years: Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Theresa. They are all happy warriors. Their optimism was infectious in winning people to the cause, and this optimism stemmed from accepting reality as it was, and moving on immediately to how we can change this. They began by surrender. When we surrender, we avoid creating all of the negativity that rejection entails. We do not disrupt our own peace. From that place of peace, we affect change, and, eventually, make the journey of life more joyful. Moreover, when we have joy, we are more likely to achieve the end we seek, and find peace in our life journey, regardless of the destination. Again, it all starts with surrender.
 
 

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