Why surrendering control is the biggest life upgrade you can make
Learn about how living from a place of surrender can unlock greater peace and fulfillment in your life.
I’ve noticed that the word “surrender” carries a strong negative connotation to it. When I talk about the need to surrender—both in coaching sessions and in the yoga studio—I expect that I will see some raised eyebrows?
“Why’s this weird guy asking me to surrender? Isn’t life all about embracing my power and fighting for what I want?”
Yes; and no.
The law of surrender is a paradox, like most of the greatest truths out there. It both does and does not make sense depending on specific contexts. In some cases, it can in fact be ludicrous. Like if a bear is charging at you, or your rights are being actively taken from you. If that’s the situation you find yourself in, please don’t surrender—go fight, or run!
But there are also many contexts in which surrendering is actually the most powerful thing to do, but we overlook it due to our obsession with personal doership.
Intrigued? Let’s talk about it more.
What even is surrender?
When I talk about the term surrender, I am really talking about surrendering your attachment to specific outcomes in your life. We all naturally have desires (things we want) and aversions (things we do not want) and I’m not suggesting they should be eliminated. In fact, life would be quite boring without anything to want!
But desire and aversion in their most dramatic form become attachment or need. And these are almost always a recipe for disaster because, actually, you have no control over the outcomes in your life. [Mic drop].
A quick example is a worker who has a healthy desire for a promotion, and a worker who is attached to getting promoted. The former carries this desire lightly and takes actions that set them on the right path. The latter likely sees their promotion as an obsession (it’s a thing they need, remember?) and therefore their actions begin to become laser-focused on making sure that promotion happens. There’s likely to be a fair bit of stress, anxiety, and burnout along the way.
And the grand irony in all of this is neither worker has control over getting their promotion or not. It’s ultimately at the whim of their manager and the perceptions of an internal promotion board.
Perhaps the person attached to promotion gets it faster because they took more actions that influenced (more on that later) their chances of getting the promo. But neither person was ever in a state to actually control the outcome, and that’s frankly the way it is for us all the time. So who lived the better life in the meantime? The person who was attached, or the person who held their desire lightly?
And if you ask me, we tend to make our best decisions and do our best work when we feel peaceful and content inside. I wouldn’t be surprised if, actually, the person not attached to their promotion ended up getting it before the person who was attached simply because they were able to do better work in their peaceful state of mind.
Control vs influence
People debate me fiercely on the presence of control for two reasons. 1). It’s just really hard to accept and 2). We are attached to the idea of ourselves as an autonomous, independent “do-er” in our lives.
I’ll come back to point 1 in the next paragraph. But just know that if not having control sounds like an absolute anxious nightmare to you, I promise, it’s actually quite freeing and empowering.
But let’s talk about point 2 with another example--a person going in for a job interview.
Imagine you’re that person for a second. You might wake up the morning of the interview and believe something like “whether or not I get this job depends entirely on me!” And on the surface it certainly seems that way, right? You’re the one showing up, answering the questions, and doing all the prep, so how could it not be on you?
Well, it’s actually not. What if:
You get stuck on the train you were planning to take to the interview?
There’s another candidate with 5 more years of experience than you?
The company decides to move the job across the country?
These are all somewhat probable possibilities and you have no way to control any of them. This is what I mean about peering behind the illusion of personal doership. We imagine ourselves as independent doers in charge of our own destinies, but this is ultimately a delusion. We exist in a complicated, constantly changing, interdependent system over which we have absolutely no control. When you see this truth, you see that the idea of a personal controller is ludicrous.
But—I’m not saying that you should just lay down and do nothing, either. I’m asking you to shift your focus from control to influence. You can’t control if you get the job, but you can certainly take actions that increase the probability of you getting said job. Things like prepping for the interview and studying up on the interviewers really do help your chances and you should absolutely do them!
But again—if you let your mind reach for the illusion of control over the outcome (getting the job!) you will unnecessarily suffer a lot more along the way.
Surrender as power
I remember when I first saw through the illusion of being an independent controller. My overachieving, type-A little ego had a full-blown existential panic attack. What do you mean I can’t control anything? How am I supposed to live? How am I supposed to feel safe ever?
If you’re like me and going through that while reading this, let me save you some suffering. You have already existed without control for this long, and you are here, reading this, doing just fine. It’s not that you’ve lost control, you’re just realizing you never had it!
Remember that complicated, interdependent system I spoke about earlier? Yes, that thing has actually been carrying you and taking care of you this entire time because you are here, alive, reading these words. In fact, you are actually one with that system itself, like a drop of water in a vast ocean. You might be a drop, but you’re made of the same stuff the ocean is!
Anyway, enough waxing poetic and back to paradox. The perspective of surrender is, paradoxically, the most powerful position you can hold in life.
Control says: “I need things/life to be a certain way and I’m going to do whatever I need to in order to make that happen!” I promise you, this is a recipe to become anxious, burnt out, stressed, and miserable. Reality will quite literally laugh in your face. And if you think that you have identified a situation in which you have full control over some outcome, I sincerely promise you that you do not. Please email it to me at mresti02@gmail.com if you don’t believe me and want direct input.
Surrender says: “I want this thing, and I’m going to put in the work for it. But I’m open to it not actually happening at all, or not actually happening in the way that I planned. But I trust that reality/the universe is going to set me on the path that I need to be on, and I can trust that because I am here, alive, now, to read these words!”
That my friends is a position of power. That’s you opening yourself up to co-create with what reality gives you. That’s your path to peace, contentment, and joy.
And I totally understand if you still think it’s all a giant crock of shit.
Pain is a part of the process
If you think surrender is a crock of shit, I’m sure you’re someone who has been hurt by life before. Perhaps some awful tragedy befell you or a loved one. Or maybe you’re just looking at the state of the world, with war, dictators, and genocide and asking yourself how in the sweet fuck you are supposed to just “trust” a reality that seems at times brutal and unfair?
These are all important questions! And I’m going to hold your hand while I give you my answer.
Whether we like it or not, pain—at times, brutal, searing pain—is part of the program. And so too, is death. Part of the deal in this entire life thing is that you will get hurt while you’re here, and you will also eventually die.
If you look at the course of human history, you may notice something interesting. It’s a long series of tragedies that become expansions that become tragedies that become expansions again. Like your own beating heart, the nature of how reality (and all of us) evolve is through expansion and contraction.
But if you ask me, I’d actually say that we, as humanity, are moving slowly up and to the right on a chart for “progress of human consciousness.” Even though it may not seem like it in the short-term, in the very long, long term, I believe that we are becoming better. Kinder, more understanding, more open and loving.
And we as little drops of water play a very tiny, temporary role in helping the entire collective ocean move to that more loving, expansive position of consciousness. For some of us, the duration of that role is far briefer than for others.
You do not have to agree with that point, or accept my perspective on humanity. Because ultimately, I can’t tell you why mass tragedies happen, shit hits the fan, and some people get the Olympics of pain while others only seem to get the preliminaries. All of that is operating on a level of reality far, far above my paygrade.
But what I can tell you is—you will never be able to control reality or get your ultimate answers to the big questions. And that’s good news, because you actually don’t need to in order to live a peaceful and joyous life.
You just need to show up with intention. Go after what you want for the journey itself rather than the outcome. If you can surrender the outcome, you may be surprised by all the cool places life can take you. And I promise you will enjoy that journey a lot more when you let go of the delusion of being a special, independent doer who shapes reality as they see fit.
And all the pain you will inevitably experience along the way—from the minor inconveniences to the major crash outs— is the temporary contraction that’s the cost of your greater expansion.
Maybe you still don’t believe me on that last point. What I want to offer to you is—what if you just can’t see it yet? What if, in fact, you weren’t able to see the “point” of any of your pain until the very end of this entire adventure? What if a decade or three down-the-line, suddenly, it all makes sense in a way you never expected?
Be open to surprises and see what reality has to show you. I promise, it’s worth a look.
