Surrender Dorothy!

I've been thinking a lot about surrender lately. Surrender seems to be a recurring theme in my life. And, after all, getting lost does involve surrendering to the unknown and I've had lots of experience at that.

But lately what's been popping up for me in my life is the idea of creating your own reality through intention and positive thinking. It's showing up everywhere, and frankly I'm getting a little tired of it. I do believe in it to a certain extent and I'll probably even write a little on that possibility at a later date. But what about the possibility of surrendering to the reality that's already out there? What would it be like to just ride that wave?

In yoga there exists the idea of flowing evenly back and forth between will and surrender. You approach each moment intentionally, then you surrender to what the moment brings. And part of that philosophy is that will and intention are not actually goal-oriented which is a challenging idea for a lot of us.

A new friend was recently talking about how she feels when she reaches a certain state of bliss on her mountain bike. She talked about getting into that groove where she no longer thinks or calculates, she has no connection to past or future; she is simply riding in the moment, responding perfectly to each event which appears in her moment simply by being present with it.

I've had experience with that feeling she's describing. It's almost a feeling of the personality submerging into a larger field. I've often described myself as a chameleon because there are times that I feel like a field of potential energy shifting to take the form that is required of me. I have been asked if this makes me somehow less myself, or if it makes me a fake or a liar somehow. But what I feel when this happens is that it is the most perfect expression of what I truly am. You've heard the saying "We are spiritual beings having a human experience"? Well, I think maybe what we are is an energy field having a physical experience. And that, as in physics, our own observation of ourselves is creating the physical experience that we have; in other words, the moment we observe ourselves we drop from a state of potential, of possibility, of probability into a state of actuality.

Oh crap. There we are right back at creating our own reality. But...are we willful or are we willing in our approach? If we observe with attachment or judgment we've already limited our possibilities. But if we surrender as we observe, what might we be allowed to see without the limits of human thought?

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles