Early one morning, I woke up and started thinking about something scary. I was still half asleep and had no idea what time it was, but I think it was hours before my alarm went off. As my thoughts kept racing, I tried listening to the sounds around me and controlling my breathing in a desperate bid to relax and stop feeling afraid. That didn’t seem to work as the fear continued and I felt myself heating up. Somehow, I thought to try surrendering to the feeling of fear and showing it love. I don’t know for sure, but I think that that calmed me down and helped me go back to sleep.
Surrendering to feelings is something I first heard about in The Power of Now. In that book, Eckhart Tolle says that no matter what you’re feeling, surrendering to it will transmute that feeling into peace. This was difficult for me to accept and put into practice. I’ve spent most of my life thinking of some emotions as positive and others as negative; I still often do this, especially when I’m feeling upset. Accordingly, I’m used to fighting against unwanted emotions in an effort to force myself to feel the way I want to feel, which doesn’t work. If anything, it just amplifies the emotions I want to avoid and makes it harder to feel any other way. Remembering those many failures has probably made it easier for me to avoid trying things that don’t work and try something else that could work.
At this point, I usually remember to surrender when I notice that struggling and resisting isn’t working. I almost always begin to feel peaceful within moments of surrendering and that peaceful feeling grows as I give it more attention. It then becomes easy to either find something enjoyable about the situation I’m in or leave to join another situation that I like better. This is a powerful practice and I find it easier to do when I relax my body as much as I can; holding tension makes it harder to surrender. I highly recommend trying this out for yourself. If you do, I hope surrendering works as well for you as it has for me.