Surrender vs Letting Go: Why It Feels So Hard, and Why It Isn't Giving Up

When Anthony and I began looking at schools for our daughters, we did what most people do with a big decision: we visited, we compared, and we sat down with a pen and made a list of pros and cons. A few of the schools looked like a good fit on paper, and I think we both hoped that if we laid everything out clearly enough, the list would simply tell us what to do.

It didn't, because one feeling in my gut refused to be argued away, and in the end that was what I followed, even though it meant stepping towards a childcare setup that was far from clear. I had to let go of the outcome I'd been picturing and trust what my body seemed to know. I'm still in the middle of that process, and it has had me thinking a great deal about surrender, why it feels so difficult, and why it can be frightening too.

Many of us carry a picture of surrender that makes it sound either humiliating or magical. In the first, surrender means throwing ourselves at someone's feet and handing over our sense of self. In the second, it's a kind of bargain with life, in which we announce that we've surrendered and wait for everything to be fixed (if only it were that simple). Neither is what I mean by it. In the tradition I practice, surrender is a yielding to our own nature, the part of us that was never lost, and it asks us to stay awake and involved rather than to disappear.

It helps to separate three words that often get muddled together. Giving up is the passive one, a way of stepping back from responsibility for our own lives and hoping someone else will carry it. Letting go is more active, the release of whatever we've been gripping, which for me was my idea of the 'right' school. Surrender is what follows that release, a trust in how things unfold next, even when we can't see where they're going. I've come to think letting go and surrender need each other, since releasing our grip means very little if we then spend every waking hour trying to steer what happens next.

What makes surrender difficult for most of us is what's often called the watcher, the vigilant part of the mind that stands a little to one side, analysing, weighing every option against its own ideas and trying to keep things under control. It's usually the most highly trained part of us, and often the place where we feel safest, which is exactly why it's so hard to put down. It's also where the shoulda woulda couldas come from whenever things don't turn out the way it planned.

The watcher is excellent at lists, but surrender doesn't happen there. It happens through the senses, through touch, taste, smell, sight and sound, and through a mind that's curious rather than busy planning and organising. It's the kind of knowing we point to when we talk about trusting your gut or listening to your heart, a knowledge that is felt rather than calculated. However much modern life encourages us to live from the neck up, we are not simply a brain on a stick.

More often than we admit, we already know which way to go. My gut knew about that school long before I was ready to listen. What we tend to do instead is build a wall of confusion, gathering more options, doing more research, writing another list, because as long as we're confused we don't have to step onto a path whose outcome we can neither control nor know in advance. I sometimes wonder whether what we're really afraid of is that flutter in the chest, the aliveness that tells us which way is ours.

For years I related to my body as a stage to move through on the way to a more spiritual life, as though the real practice happened somewhere above it. What I trust now is that the body is the ground everything else rests on, and that surrender only becomes possible, and restful rather than frightening, once that ground has been felt rather than only imagined.

Without that ground, letting go can feel uncomfortably close to collapse, which is perhaps why so many of us keep holding on so tightly. With it, we can let our weight sink into the floor and the earth beneath it, and find that we're held by the ground we stand on, and made of it too. Autumn, with everything outside letting go of its leaves and drawing down into its roots, seems a natural time to practice this.

If you'd like to explore it with me, Down to Earth is a five week online series on Wednesday evenings from 7 October, where we find the ground of the body and the earth beneath us before we come to what falls away. Find out more and join here.