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Surrender turns you upside down, opening your feet to the sky and your head to the earth. Surrender teaches you to rest your mind in the cradle of the earth, and to open your feet to the stars. Every part of you becomes receptive. Your heart opens and fills your mind with grace. The sun shines like diamonds on the soles of your shoes. Each cell sings a song of grace and pure presence. To surrender means emptying your head and filling your heart. You let all of your stories run out of our mind and bring your attention to the music of your heart. Surrender means being open to any possibility. It means learning to listen with each hair on your body to the wisdom of the trees, to practice laughing at sorrow and crying at ecstasy, and to find humor in your worst pain and the pain within your humor. When you take the risk to surrender the comfortable, you begin to live more fully and spontaneously. You create space for your reactions, pain, and old emotions to surface while surrendering any stories or need to understand or know the past, present, or future. You experience this moment, while asking for greater guidance and support from Spirit. One shortcut to surrender lies in the art of myth. Instead of retelling your old stories, become an artist and make up some new ones. Surrender what you think the truth is to make room for a greater vision. First, imagine yourself shaking out all the old stories. Literally shake them out of your body. Next, start doing spontaneous random acts. Do the things you would never do in your old story: Tell someone with whom you are struggling that you respect him or her for a quality you've overlooked until now. Go to a playground and run around like a child. Get in your car and take yourself somewhere you've never been. Be silly; be serious; turn something upside down in your life at least once a day. Now make up a new mythology that amuses you. "I was raised by wolves and met my first human when I was nine." "I am the daughter of the Goddess Athena. My greatest gift is opening people's hearts with my smile." "I am a prince learning to be humble." "I am an alien here to explore what it means to be human." Play with your mythology. Make it a work of art in your mind as a way to break up your stale view of self. Don't use it as another way to hide from yourself. Use your new myth to take you deeper into the Mystery. Know that you will be changing this myth. Try it on, see how it feels, how you change your self-perception as you begin to embody it. By making up your own mythology, you are radically taking back your own life. You have probably been living the mythologies of other people. You can learn to surrender those old mythologies and ways of seeing yourself — or needing to be seen by others — by paying attention to what myths you write from others’ stories. With awareness and surrender of what you think you know to be the truth, any new story becomes possible. Eventually, you learn to live without any myths or stories by embracing and fully surrendering to the unknown. Until then, use mythology and your artistic storytelling ability to consciously surrender your known self. Heather Ash Mackenzie-Gaudet is a certified teacher in the Eagle Knight lineage of don Miguel Ruiz and founder of The Toltec Center of Creative Intent in Berkeley, California. She shares shamanic wisdom throughout the country, and leads journeys to Mexico and Peru. |
Surrender
is one of the greatest acts of courage you can make on your spiritual
journey. There is an art to surrender; it is not the scientific
result of a series of procedures. True surrender brings you beyond
the limitations of your domesticated self, into the wilds of
Mystery.