I’m going to share a chapter from Conscious Accomplishment every week for the next few weeks on topics I think might be particularly helpful.
If you’ve ever read The Surrender Experiment and felt simultaneously inspired, yet confused on how to actually pull this off, this one’s for you!!!
Chapter 13 - Common Misconceptions About Acceptance And Surrender
In my first meeting with my teacher Carol, she told me, “when you learn to accept reality as it is, you will discover who you are.”
This theme of acceptance was like a thread woven through everything from my repatterning practice to many of the books I was reading. One of my favorite books that I came across during this time was The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. It’s an enchanting story about a meditator turned entrepreneur that, through surrendering to the flow of life, ends up starting a spiritual community and billion-dollar company. This unlikely paradox was catnip for a reformed overachiever like me, because it suggested a new way to create extraordinary outcomes in your life. But as I soon learned, the practical application of acceptance and surrender can be wildly disorienting.
I now view acceptance and surrender as cousins. Acceptance is about acknowledging the reality of a situation, while surrender is about relinquishing the need to control it. Usually acceptance paves the way for surrender. And together, they show us that peace arises not from control, but from releasing our resistance to how life unfolds.
As enchanting as acceptance and surrendering were to me, I was confused about how to practically apply them. Cultural connotations of the words “acceptance” and “surrender” made it seem like they required submission, passivity, and resignation. Was I supposed to abandon my personal will entirely in order to grow spiritually? Was I just supposed to say “yes” to everything? I felt paralyzed. On the one hand, I wanted to reclaim my zeal for creative action that seemed to wither as I redirected most of my focus to exploring my consciousness. On the other hand, I didn’t want to regress to my old patterns of trying to control everything. For so long, I had exerted my willpower to mold life to my desires. And now I was afraid that continuing to behave this way might sabotage my consciousness evolution.