I loved this one so much Sasha. Thank you for generosity and sass. It reminds me a lot of Oliver Burkeman's thoughts. It gets at this idea that part of surrendering - or maybe what precedes it - involves choice-making and sacrifice. It's like often we don't want to make choices or sacrifices, we want to trick ourselves into trying to do it all or have it all, usually by way of imagining better scenarios than the ones we are currently in, or through senseless over-productivity. Alternatively, if the road to doing and having it all hasn't yet revealed itself to us, we "wait it out" or hold off, some bullshit mental placating, which I see as just another way to avoid the painful truth of our mortality, finitude, and limited time to make choices which ultimately lead to sacrifices. No way around it.
"There is a small, young part of me that is terrified of letting even a single solitary second luminesce on its own. It says: the world is not a safe place, so we have to do something about that."
Surrender takes courage. Sometimes more than we can muster. For some reason this post reminded me a bit of Tillich. Perfect to read before bed. Thank you.
I’ve found the more I surrender, the more life works out even better than I’d hoped. Though I’ve found that as I go along this way, the choices become fewer as what I must do is obvious - like the ground has been prepared and I step onto it.
This is the best description of what in my traditions (T'ai Chi martial arts and Taoist meditation) we call 'yielding' that I have read for years. Thank you! Surrendering is such a loaded word (especially for some women, who may have been physically bullied...) but it is a good one. When teaching I usually now say 'allowing' or 'yielding' for this reason. But everything you say is true. Good luck with your practices. Showing up in the present moment, in reality, without all the mental machinations you describe, is probably the least popular activity on the planet, at least amongst city-dwelling people. But it solves 9/10 of quandaries in an instant. If a 'problem' is still there after practice, then I know it's worth attending to. Surrender is the greatest bullshit sieve.
> You can’t sit around saying, “I shouldn’t be writing vague spiritually-inflected emails on Substack, I should be a literary genius funded by European grant money.”
Whew, done! The rest of surrender is ughhh *more complicated*.
In a world with incredible access to an abundance of information and potential pathways, I do think finding the courage to simply (with great challenge) let go of or surrender those parts of our being that are not truly and authentically us. Now, it's a matter of being genuine, authentic, and true to ourselves and our hearts as to who we really are. Thank you for the perspective.
> What I have learned, through this variety of practice, is that reality is astonishingly beautiful if you don’t attack it with your mind constantly, and your mind is organized such that its default stance is “always attack.”
I'm not sure my default stance is always attack. But I'm not sure, because I didn't quite understand this part.
Apart from that part which I wasn't sure I understood, I loved the essay.
I think there's an interesting experiment you can do here: sit down quietly, and ask your mind to just not fuck with things or judge them, like anything in your awareness, leave it all alone in crystalline luminosity, for, say, five minutes
How does your mind deal with that instruction? If you genuinely do not have a problem with it, congratulations, you are unironically a person with a great deal of spiritual insight
I think being a seasoned meditator would contaminate the results. My current results would be “mixed”. But if I go back to my pre-meditator days, I don’t think of what I did as attack-y most of the time. It felt more avoid-y. But perhaps that’s not the disjuncture here. I did have a problem with reality as it was, which is why I started meditating.
I am having problems with reality too, and in my case, avoiding destroyed my life completely untill now, because I now know what to do and what not to do.
But...I think it is going to be an immense ivestigation to my real inner self to learn who I am before I can even start my process of surrendering to my current situation, be able to fully and really see what I am doing, so I can stop doing that and chance it for whatever behavior that is of helpfull kind.
Sasha and your comment combined made me
aware of a to me shocking picture: the picture of my life while realising what is my part in the events of my life is not that what is going to lead to a life that is worthwhile living for me, and why exactly that is the reason for things in my life not getting better by taking my responsability and work hard on solutions for still growing problems. In amount as well as size.
So....thank you both so much..I am going to sit down and try to get rid of my judgments.
If I will succeed on doing that, I am afraid I don't have any thoughts left. And that would be great! In 2027 or so, it does look like really really difficult, but I can learn by consequently trying, I know that because I changed a lot before and I still did, but my train isn't on his rails anymore.
I am going to put it back on, by surrendering and choosing my own way when I am
able to do so. Thanks again...so much thanks again!
it can be gradual. and surrender can be a tool in itself for discovering your inner self. because if you let go, you’ll find that your more authentic self will start telling you what it wants, and you can take that information as an input to your intuition and your analyzing.
"surrender requires a non-effort that is slightly effortful, in that it must be mindfully chosen over the default, which is flailing and self-deception."
love this! It is a a kind of Wu Wei, a doing through non-doing, the action on in-action.
“...consent to the humiliations of my existence” - thank you for this one, I’ve been rolling it around in my head for a few days and finding that it puts words to something important for me (that I’d have taken much longer to give language to, if left to my own means)
I loved this one so much Sasha. Thank you for generosity and sass. It reminds me a lot of Oliver Burkeman's thoughts. It gets at this idea that part of surrendering - or maybe what precedes it - involves choice-making and sacrifice. It's like often we don't want to make choices or sacrifices, we want to trick ourselves into trying to do it all or have it all, usually by way of imagining better scenarios than the ones we are currently in, or through senseless over-productivity. Alternatively, if the road to doing and having it all hasn't yet revealed itself to us, we "wait it out" or hold off, some bullshit mental placating, which I see as just another way to avoid the painful truth of our mortality, finitude, and limited time to make choices which ultimately lead to sacrifices. No way around it.
"There is a small, young part of me that is terrified of letting even a single solitary second luminesce on its own. It says: the world is not a safe place, so we have to do something about that."
Surrender takes courage. Sometimes more than we can muster. For some reason this post reminded me a bit of Tillich. Perfect to read before bed. Thank you.
I’ve found the more I surrender, the more life works out even better than I’d hoped. Though I’ve found that as I go along this way, the choices become fewer as what I must do is obvious - like the ground has been prepared and I step onto it.
This beautiful essay is exactly what I needed to read this morning. Thank you.
This is the best description of what in my traditions (T'ai Chi martial arts and Taoist meditation) we call 'yielding' that I have read for years. Thank you! Surrendering is such a loaded word (especially for some women, who may have been physically bullied...) but it is a good one. When teaching I usually now say 'allowing' or 'yielding' for this reason. But everything you say is true. Good luck with your practices. Showing up in the present moment, in reality, without all the mental machinations you describe, is probably the least popular activity on the planet, at least amongst city-dwelling people. But it solves 9/10 of quandaries in an instant. If a 'problem' is still there after practice, then I know it's worth attending to. Surrender is the greatest bullshit sieve.
or sometimes i'm already in the ditch but it can help to surrender to a restorative ditch-nap
if i don't wake up i can be a bog person of the future!
> You can’t sit around saying, “I shouldn’t be writing vague spiritually-inflected emails on Substack, I should be a literary genius funded by European grant money.”
Whew, done! The rest of surrender is ughhh *more complicated*.
A wonderful piece. Thank you for sharing.
In a world with incredible access to an abundance of information and potential pathways, I do think finding the courage to simply (with great challenge) let go of or surrender those parts of our being that are not truly and authentically us. Now, it's a matter of being genuine, authentic, and true to ourselves and our hearts as to who we really are. Thank you for the perspective.
“...I should be a literary genius funded by European grant money.”
”There is a small, young part of me that is terrified of letting even a single solitary second luminesce on its own.”
So good
> What I have learned, through this variety of practice, is that reality is astonishingly beautiful if you don’t attack it with your mind constantly, and your mind is organized such that its default stance is “always attack.”
I'm not sure my default stance is always attack. But I'm not sure, because I didn't quite understand this part.
Apart from that part which I wasn't sure I understood, I loved the essay.
I think there's an interesting experiment you can do here: sit down quietly, and ask your mind to just not fuck with things or judge them, like anything in your awareness, leave it all alone in crystalline luminosity, for, say, five minutes
How does your mind deal with that instruction? If you genuinely do not have a problem with it, congratulations, you are unironically a person with a great deal of spiritual insight
I think being a seasoned meditator would contaminate the results. My current results would be “mixed”. But if I go back to my pre-meditator days, I don’t think of what I did as attack-y most of the time. It felt more avoid-y. But perhaps that’s not the disjuncture here. I did have a problem with reality as it was, which is why I started meditating.
sick
i think the gesture of attack and avoid are kind of similar for me, or similar in nature
fight or flight, baby
Or freeze
I am having problems with reality too, and in my case, avoiding destroyed my life completely untill now, because I now know what to do and what not to do.
But...I think it is going to be an immense ivestigation to my real inner self to learn who I am before I can even start my process of surrendering to my current situation, be able to fully and really see what I am doing, so I can stop doing that and chance it for whatever behavior that is of helpfull kind.
Sasha and your comment combined made me
aware of a to me shocking picture: the picture of my life while realising what is my part in the events of my life is not that what is going to lead to a life that is worthwhile living for me, and why exactly that is the reason for things in my life not getting better by taking my responsability and work hard on solutions for still growing problems. In amount as well as size.
So....thank you both so much..I am going to sit down and try to get rid of my judgments.
If I will succeed on doing that, I am afraid I don't have any thoughts left. And that would be great! In 2027 or so, it does look like really really difficult, but I can learn by consequently trying, I know that because I changed a lot before and I still did, but my train isn't on his rails anymore.
I am going to put it back on, by surrendering and choosing my own way when I am
able to do so. Thanks again...so much thanks again!
it can be gradual. and surrender can be a tool in itself for discovering your inner self. because if you let go, you’ll find that your more authentic self will start telling you what it wants, and you can take that information as an input to your intuition and your analyzing.
Well-received. thank you!
Wonderfully wise. Thank you.
"surrender requires a non-effort that is slightly effortful, in that it must be mindfully chosen over the default, which is flailing and self-deception."
love this! It is a a kind of Wu Wei, a doing through non-doing, the action on in-action.
“...consent to the humiliations of my existence” - thank you for this one, I’ve been rolling it around in my head for a few days and finding that it puts words to something important for me (that I’d have taken much longer to give language to, if left to my own means)