Relationships Thursdays [Surrendering]

¡Hola! Everybody…
I touched on the spiritual principle of surrender earlier in the week. This is one way of applying that principle to other areas of your life...

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-=[ Surrender ]=-

“[A relationship] takes time and deeds, and this involves trust, it involves making ourselves naked, to become sitting ducks for each other.”

-- Eldridge Cleaver

Surrender gets a bum rap in our society. It is often culturally interpreted as giving up, as weakness, as admitting defeat. And certainly this is one way the word can be used. When I speak of surrender, however I use it to mean letting go of your resistance to the total openness of who you are. For me, surrendering is an expression of one of the cornerstones to genuine and lasting change: willingness. It means putting aside the little war of the mini whirlpool of who you perceive yourself to be and embracing the realization of yourself as a powerful wave -- as limitless and deep as the ocean.

To surrender is to love without limits, in the process bringing down the walls of fear and shame so that your lover can feel the very core of you -- genuine, precious, fearless, and unhidden. In surrender your muscles relax, your breath becomes soft and full. In surrender, you present your body and heart as a sacred offering. Yes, there is pain in life, but if you are hurt, surrendering means you make the commitment to stay open and full like the ocean – as limitless space.

Surrender isn’t an act; it’s a state of being often called “grace.”

Believe me, there’s a lot of surrendering that we all do. Too often we practice surrendering to our fears or to the demands of others. And while this may be a gateway toward genuine surrender, it’s only a beginning. If you’re going to surrender to anything, it should be love. Surrender into love, as one of my teachers is fond of saying. The entire purpose of surrender is to break through the resistance and tension of your small sense of self. Beyond that mass of tension and neurosis you call your self is a vast ground of being known as love. Undergirding all the drama, all the hurt and anger, lies the desire to give and receive love.

To surrender is to practice being with whatever emotion -- anger, fear, whatever -- and committing to see through it, to breathe through it, and to relax into the love that lies behind it. And then, when in the presence of that light, committing to surrender to that love. To surrender is to open as love. Surrender magnifies love by loving.

True sexual and spiritual surrender is not merely adapting yourself in order to please your partner or master. Nor is it about surrendering to momentary emotional needs. Genuine surrender is about relaxing through these secondary needs, both yours and your partner’s, and channeling and magnifying the primal desire to give and receive love...

Pure unbounded, limitless love.

Love,

Eddie