MORE SURRENDER. LESS CONTROL

Are you comfortable living in the questions of life or do you always need to have the answers? Do you feel safer when you know everything? When you can plan everything and don’t have any surprises? 

Surrendering to life and releasing control is something I have struggled with forever it seems. I’ve recently been exploring in therapy how it’s a deep trauma response to try to line up things in a way that is predictable and safe. 

Can you relate to feeling like you need to figure it all out, have everything taken care of and then you can relax? And then that never comes. We continue to need to control and have things a certain way and life doesn’t always unfold as such. 

I started a new meditation course on Insight Timer called “A Course In Surrender” by Arielle Margalit Hecht and wanted to summarize some heavy BARS she’s been dropping. 

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to live the questions themselves. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them right away and the point is to live everything”

-Rainer Marie Rilke from the book Letters To A Young Poet 

How can we become comfortable living the question and not needing to have the answer right now? Searching for these answers only creates stress in our bodies, sends our mind in a spin and closes us off to all of the beautiful possibilities of life. 

Surrender. And make peace with the mystery and unknown of life. When we let go fully it feels like taking off a heavy backpack. You don’t just feel it in your body but in your whole being. You feel lighter in your mind, body and spirit. 

Grace’s greatest tactic is surprise. Grace is the unexpected blessing. We close ourselves to grace when we are desperate for the answers. When we force the answers. 

And surrendering is not losing something. It’s not a weakness but rather a beautiful strength and huge gain in our lives. It’s opening and expanding into higher possibility, alignment and peace. 

Think back to a question or something that was unresolved in your heart and think about how you lived your way into the revealed answer in the most perfect way. When the butterfly is still a caterpillar, it doesn’t know all of the details of when it’s going to become the butterfly or what the process entails. It doesn’t know the colors its wings will be or how big. 

So how can you surrender more and release control? I am still in infancy stages with learning but these are some things that are helping me:

PRAYING

I have been stopping myself in mid-stress, mid-extreme planning and in mid-ruminating thoughts and saying this prayer: 

Show me how to surrender

Show me

Lead me

Guide me

Help me to release the need to control this

I breathe in patience with life 

I breathe in fully letting go 

I breathe in presence 

THERAPY 

I have been working with my therapist to identify all the ways I exhibit control in my life. We’re breaking down how this control relates to my childhood and how controlling various things in my life is a trauma response. 

If you need a new therapist, hit me up and I can walk you through a search process that may help. 

MEDITATION 

Try the “Course In Surrender” course on Insight Timer or search “surrender guided meditations” on YouTube or Google. 

LET THEM 

Do you find yourself uncomfortable and suffering by what others are doing? Things that you can’t control and it drives you crazy? Mel Robbins has been going viral all over the internet with her LET THEM THEORY. 

The theory basically just says let people do, feel and think whatever they want. Don’t use your time and energy trying to control other people. Let people be themselves and when they reveal who they truly are, you can then choose what’s best for you, which is something you can control. You release the emotional connection to trying to control and change other people. 

Check out this short video and/or this longer video and she also has a book. 

AFFIRM AND JOURNAL

Affirmation: Today I will embrace the beauty of surrender 

Journal Prompt: How might embracing surrender create more space for grace and beauty in your life?

Surrendering is about trusting that the beauty of life knows what it’s doing. It’s releasing control and opening to the joy of surrender and living the question. Questions are open! They hold an openness to receive the answer and the clarity of direction or guidance. 

Explore the places in your life where you’re closed, try to control or have stress around needing answers to be a certain way and see where and how you can open to living the question.

Have fun with it, be curious and enjoy it without judging it. It’s not about what you’ve done wrong or what has happened in the past. It’s about taking advantage of the right now and creating peace and happiness in your life as you move forward… LIVING. 

SHANI

OH - and for those of you who joined the BLOOM event on 4/13, told someone about it or sent me well wishes - THANK YOU. It was the most beautiful time with about 30 women in Brooklyn. We had an afternoon tea, brunch, discussed how to be more mindful in our lives and took GORGEOUS portraits. I was so full and still am. Be on the lookout for more in person events from me!