Surrender

I don’t remember much from my first yoga class but from what I do remember, it certainly was not easy.

I went in to Flow Yoga with my best friend Dominique. It was all very mysterious and we had no idea what to expect. As athletic 16-year-olds in high school varsity sports, we figured that we could handle anything that was thrown at us. 15 minutes into the 1-hour class, we were dripping sweat, slipping on our matts, out of breath and in awe of how composed the other students in class were. It felt like every 2 minutes, I desperately peaked at the small digital clock at the front of the room wondering when it would finally end. My mind had no idea what to do with the experience.

When we finally found our way to shavasana pose, laying on our backs and catching our breath, I felt an intense joy that followed me through the rest of my evening and into the next day. I was puzzled. How could I have had so many negative thoughts through an experience just to feel so much joy in the end? I had never heard my mind silently protest anything so much in my life. Thanks to my curiosity, I went back to yoga, again and again, to understand why this little voice was so very uncomfortable. How often do we go back to situations in life that made us feel unsettled to explore what exactly was unsettling?

I believe yoga is very good at allowing us to be teachers to ourselves. As we bend, fold, hold, and breath, we learn how to let go, push through, breath through it, and laugh at ourselves. We begin to understand who we are right now, in this moment, in this body and we learn how to accept what is. We learn how to surrender.

The first time I truly experienced surrender was one class when my mind stopped spinning and my body relaxed as a reflex. It is a moment I will never forget. I was sitting with my legs in a double pigeon, the position I hated the most, when all of a sudden, I felt my mind quiet, a feeling of acceptance rush over me, and my knees ease their way down to the ground. I was shocked! Could it be that the mind and body were so connected?

For nearly a year, my hips would not relax and as soon as I let go of the mental resistance, they suddenly did? This experience made me curious further as I began to breath into other postures that brought reluctance and notice where my mind was quiet and where it was loud and where it even gave me the occasional snarky comment. I paid attention to when I felt anxiety or anger rise and where I opened up and suddenly began to cry (almost always in the hips where women carry the most stress).

When I put two and two together, I realized that tension is cased by resistance. This tension can be either in the body or in our energy and this resistance is to the world around us and our experiences. Off the matt, I noticed that the things that made me tense in my body were things that I was having mental or emotional resistance to.

Growing up, I always believed surrender to be too biblical. Something that happened thousands of years ago that involved sacrificing a lamb. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that surrender is something beautiful. Being ale to allow the present moment to be as it is, knowing all the while that there is perfection in the design of every second, is true surrender. Not trying to change things, not being impatient, not checking the time on your phone or looking for distractions from what is happening. This does not mean that we should all be lazy, pushovers, or welcome matts. It means that we simply need to stop the stories that are spinning in our heads that make us resist, deny, or run away from what the moment has to offer. Instead, we should immerse ourselves completely in to the world around us to be able to notice the subtle signs or intuitive feelings so that we can act accordingly and feel our way through our decisions.

In other words, we need to have a clear endpoint in our mind and not worry too much about where we find ourselves on the journey to getting there. We need to have faith in our power and know that in every moment, we have all the tools, skills, and talents within us to achieve that which our desires pull us towards. We need to know that we are more than enough, stop worrying, and surrender to the life that is unfolding around us.

I would like to end with an affirmation on surrender:
I surrender to the present moment
I trust in the perfection of its design
I allow spirit and intuition to guide me
I relax into what is, feeling what needs to be felt and doing what needs to be done
I accept myself, this situation, and the people around me unconditionally