Surrender – What it is. What is isn’t. Or is it?

 

There are so many definitions for surrender. My favorite because it fits my personal experiences the best is “ceases to resist”. Think about that for a bit. Chew on it mentally. Ceases to resist. Even a white flag thrown up in the middle of a war can be defined as “ceasing to resist” for isn’t a war a resistance? The French call it “Le Resistance”, among other things.

I polled some friends before I wrote this post. I asked them their personal definitions of surrender, for I didn’t want a bunch of rehashing of the dictionary entries. Several of them mentioned “giving up” or “giving in” as their definition. Why is it so many people define surrender as giving up? None of the definitions I found for surrender included “giving up”. Why do we correlate these words? In my early years, I did the same thing. Fast forward 20 years, throw in some serious desperation and some spiritual teaching and now, I have a whole new thinking. Turns out, surrender is a necessary & delightful thing.

Surrender is being able to admit not knowing. It is the ability to realize I don’t know all the answers. Surrender is being able to accept imperfection – to embrace it. Surrender, boiled down, is giving up all control, every single tiny bit of it. Surrender is being able to accept give myself to the moment, no matter what is happening in it, without trying to control it.

Not an easy matter, but that is surrender. In order to change, we have to admit we don’t know everything. We don’t know all the answers. What we’ve done in the past isn’t working. The great paradox of life is we must surrender to win.

Several people have asked me to help them in their spiritual journey. A few of these people I’ve spoken to, given solutions, given reading materials, even helped them through specific situations at their request. They were surprised later why they got no relief.

Why do they get no relief? Because they refuse to surrender. They hold onto their old patterns, their beliefs, and their old behaviors. They don’t practice anything they read & they refuse to see any of the things pointed out to them. They have the blinders of denial on. It’s not them, it’s everyone else’s fault. They will continue on in this way until they’ve reached their time of desperation. At this point, I can’t help them, no one can. Only a person who is ready to surrender & be willing to learn can be helped.

Surrender is pivotal to spiritual growth. If you can't get to a place you can give up completely, then you will never be able to truly learn & adopt a new way of thinking and living. Without beginning to think and act differently, the spiritual teachings in books, blogs & videos will be just that - teachings. They will mean very little in the long run. All they will be is fuel for an information junkie.

So surrender if you haven't already!!! It's a powerful step.

What Does it Mean to Be Offended?

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There are many spiritual quotes out there that encourage the reader to not be offended, no matter what. When I first read about being offended, I came at it via all my conditioning & thought it meant to take something personal to the extreme. I didn’t look up the word in the dictionary. I thought I knew what it meant. Some friends of mine have expressed a similar translation of the term, so I thought I’d take a few moments to define it.

From the online dictionaries:

A.) Dictionary.com:  offend – to irritate, annoy or anger.

B.) Merriam-Webster:  offend – to cause dislike, anger, or vexation.

C.) Oxford: offend - caused to feel upset, annoyed, or resentful.

With this exercise, I also found the reason why so many of us have a much more serious definition of the word than is accurate. There is one of Biblical origin meaning to transgress moral or divine law, or in other words, to SIN. No wonder we took it to such far extremes before.

By using the first few definitions of non-Biblical origin, this means to get offended is the same as getting upset, flustered, aggravated, irritated, and the like. It does not mean you have to be so angry you are ready to kill someone or think someone has personally come up and cursed your mom. It simply means something caused you to become off kilter.

Why does this happen? We choose to get offended. It’s a reaction taken when someone/something does something we perceive to be personal, such as wasting our time, slowing us down, invading/crowding our space, polluting our air, ignoring us, endangering our lives, etc. We get angry, indignant, self-righteous, irritated, hateful, argumentative, etc. – all offensive reactions. Most of us think the other party’s at fault, when in reality it’s OUR problem, not theirs. We chose to react to them. They didn’t do what they did TO us, they just did it, no matter what our head might want us to believe.

Every situation is completely & utterly neutral. Our thoughts surrounding it tell us a story about it. Our egos tell us something like “How dare they drive so slow!” or “Don’t they see how busy I am?”.  Or our egos will tell us a story about our partner’s intentions, like “He meant to ignore me all day.” These stories are all untrue egoic reactions stemming from taking something personally & then getting offended by it. Until we become willing to believe every situation is neutral, we will continue causing harm by walking around being offended by things. Mostly, that harm is in the form of harsh treatment of others, which then comes back to us as harsh treatment. We then wonder why people treat us badly. Well, there ya go! But, I digress.

If you’ve never tried NOT being offended, I challenge you to do it. For one full day, don’t react by taking offense of any kind to a person, place, thing or event. It’s that easy. Choose to have no reaction. Choose to be calm both inside & out. It’s not personal, so don’t make it that way. Do it & report back. It's a challenge.

"Become a person who refuses to be offended by anyone, anything, or any set of circumstances." - Wayne Dyer