The Art of Surrender

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.

Surrender is a word that has been echoing in my life, and I wondered if it was there in yours too, obvious or hidden. I looked it up, and to surrender means to yield power, control, or possession of something, typically under pressure or demand.

As I reflect on my life, I realize that I generally don’t like to surrender, to give up control. But it’s been coming up more and more for me, helping me to see when to keep fighting and when surrendering is smarter, more graceful, and sometimes the best way to get what you really want.

When Things Just Want to Stick

Let’s begin with frying pans. I always use nonstick frying pans but pay attention to the problems with their coating. This time, I tried one with a ceramic surface, given its superb reviews. I expect food in nonstick pans to start to stick when their finish starts to go, usually in a year or two. But this one started to stick after just three months.

I wrote a complaint to the company, but got no answer. So, for some weird reason, I gave that one away and bought another of the same kind. This time, I was going to treat it really well. Same story: after about three months, it started to stick when I was frying eggs or tofu, the very things for which I want a nonstick pan.

I had to ask myself, could I still use it, but more carefully? I tried using a little more oil, keeping the heat lower, and keeping the contents moving, sliding around. This is working. I feel like I kind of surrendered to the pan’s needs, and it is giving back what I want.

When Parts of Me Want to Get Old

I am realizing that aging is also about trying to figure out when to fight and when to surrender. The doctors are certainly not into surrendering. I do seem to spend more time with them, discussing how to fight this or that.

I do all I can to stay healthy and fit, but as I get older, I seem to have less energy, more problems. The increasing amount of time I spend on health stuff suggests that I am going to lose in the long run. Is that called death? I think so.

No, nothing is looking like death yet. But, for example, during the last few years at night, I have had pain on my right side, down near my spine. MRIs say my lower spine has degenerated. That’s common and usually due to aging.

To reduce the pain, I only sleep on my left side, but the pain often arrives anyway every few hours, and so I get up and do things that stop it for another few hours. My spine doctor has tried various shots and nerve ablations. Not much is helping in a permanent way.

Long hikes and swims are how I stay fit, but they cause more pain at night. I am thinking more about ‘just living with it the rest of my life.’ I think that is called surrender.

When Something Wants to Pound in My Head

A slightly trickier issue is that I have developed for the third time what is called pulsatile tinnitus. You hear your pulse, or the pounding of your blood vessels, in your ear. It only bothers me when I meditate, but that is a major ‘only’ for me.

The first time I got it was during my 2016 ‘pilgrimage to nowhere,’ which I talked about in Spirituality through a Highly Sensitive Lens. For six months, we traveled around North America and Europe, staying in each place for one month at a time, and one week of that was spent in extra hours of meditation.

In the second month, walking in Sweden in a national park, I got both toes caught under a root and fell hard, face down, knocking my two front teeth in. During the process of getting that fixed, a Swiss dentist put a gadget in my mouth for a long time, which later set off the pulsatile tinnitus.

Given the importance of meditation to this trip, this loud constant pounding in my head really upset me. Transcending into silence seemed impossible. Every meditation was a struggle instead of being effortless.

But good things happened. In France a few months later, I found an osteopath who cured it. Maybe five years later it came back. This time, there was a clinic in San Francisco that tried to treat it.

First, they needed to know the cause, so they did MRIs. On the Friday night before Memorial Day Weekend, I was informed by the radiologist reading my MRIs that I have a ‘dissected carotid artery’ and should go immediately to the emergency room.

Well, do not follow my example, but I did not go. I knew it would mean being up most of the night, and I knew there was nothing immediately wrong with me. Indeed, over the years they keep imaging that carotid artery and it just gets increasingly ‘dissected.’

That MRI, however, ended the treatment plan, as they assumed the dissection was the cause of the pulsatile tinnitus and that could not be easily treated. So, I had to surrender. I got better at dealing with the sound, using white noise to drown it out, and much later—I do not even know when—it stopped.

Surrendering worked, I guess. This third time, I have contacted that clinic again and am starting in on the MRIs. They say these days that it is important to find out the cause. So, we will look again, though I have little faith that they can treat it.

But this third time I am totally surrendering to it, because of this next way that surrendering has entered my life.

When I Consider That I Am Not Really My Body/Mind

I am always interested in new ways of looking at awakening or enlightenment, even though my just-finished book on the topic is now published and cannot be updated. The latest view about it that I have given attention to (if you are curious, check out awakeningworld.net) is that ‘witnessing,’ which is always involved in awakening, can arise in stages.

First, you notice a silent, unbounded awareness more and more. (I will write about this in a future post.) In the final stage, you identify with this infinite silent awareness as your real Self, so that this Self is the witness of your mind, body, emotions, and everything else in the world.

So in a way, the small self or ego surrenders to the unbounded Self. As it is said, ‘I am That, thou art That, all this is That.’ Pulsatile tinnitus is also That. This perspective really does make it possible to surrender to that pounding inside the head.

Although I will still let the doctors try to figure out the cause and treat it.

When Do You Surrender?

Consider where you might need to surrender or even want to surrender. It is part of living, I think, but it especially can arise on a spiritual path. Just be careful not to surrender to anyone like a spiritual teacher or group.

Surrender to the highest goal, and trust that you will arrive with the help of the highest helper.