Love: Surrender

Posted on | April 21, 2008 |

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.   It will not lead you astray.” ~ Rumi

Surrender is really hard for me. To me, it conjures up images of the loser in a battle. And I don’t like to lose.

Why then do I get all breathy when I think of surrendering to love? Have I watched too much Gone With The Wind?

I believe we battle this paradox in ourselves constantly. We want to give in to the wondrous pleasures of life – be it a lover, a delicious piece of chocolate, a moment to ourselves – but we fight it. We have in our heads sometimes that to surrender to a situation, person or thing we are drawn to that it signifies we are weak in some way…that we lose.

Why?

Oh, there are probably a million reasons why. I think if you think hard enough you find why the beliefs you hold are what they are. But try to welcome a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at surrender…in a good way!

The poet Mary Oliver completely reframed surrender for me in “Wild Geese”. She writes:

“You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body            love what it loves….” 

Surrendering is not suffering. Surrendering does not mean you’ve lost your will. Surrendering is all about loving with complete abandon. And we’re not used to that. It exposes us too much.

Yes, surrendering is hard. Very hard. But you can learn how to surrender if you understand how it works. Author Bill Plotkin, in Nature and the Human Soul, said it best. “What’s involved is actually both a surrender of and a surrender to: first a surrender of your beliefs about how you were supposed to be and how the world was supposed to work, and then a surrender to your deepest and wildest passions.”

Did you get that?

You can’t truly feel the depths of passion until you’ve let go of everything you thought it would be. Then, what comes next is the best part: when you let go of all of yourself, you realize that the real stuff was better than you ever dreamed it could be all along. When you learn to love with quiet surrendering fire in your soul there can be no losing in that. It’s powerful.

If I could whisper in your ear right now, I would say to you something I hope you will learn to do, something worth devoting time and effort in mastering: I’d simply whisper, “Surrender.”

Copyright © by Kelley Taylor

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