My flirtation with surrender began in 2016 after reading Michael Singer’s, The Surrender Experiment.
In the book, Michael Singer shares his radical experiment in saying yes to everything life brought to him, regardless of his personal preferences. That yes led him from a secluded life in the woods to leading a thriving spiritual community and co-founding a billion dollar software company.
Saying yes to everything life sent me didn’t quite resonate, but still, something about surrender was calling me.
“What surrender can I be?” I wondered.
In March of 2017, I attended a weeklong Kundalini yoga training called Dragonlines. We practiced kriyas and worked with acupressure points to heal the mind, body and spirit.
One morning during the Sa Ta Na Ma mantra meditation, I suddenly knew:
It’s time to leave your marriage. Your agreement is done.
I freaked out.
I loved my husband. We owned two houses and ran a successful business together. We’d been a team for twenty-two years.
Fear, dread, excitement, sadness, despair, even fury – every emotion rushed in.
But none of it changed what I knew. It was time to go.
Still, I didn’t leave right away. I wasn’t confident enough in this knowing to dissolve my marriage overnight. I talked with coaches, friends, even a psychic. It wasn’t until the very end of my NLP certification training in Las Vegas that I finally surrendered to what I knew and told my husband I was leaving.
It took a full year from that moment of knowing until I finally packed up and began an adventure of travel, pet sitting and self-discovery.
What I didn’t realize then was that surrender had opened the gateway to awakening.
At the time, surrender felt like giving myself over to something bigger – God, the Universe, Life. I saw myself as a pitiful mess of a human, longing to be consumed (and hopefully redeemed) by the divine. If only I knew what Life wanted from me, I’d do anything.
Surrender was a way of asking to be undone, letting go of who I thought I was to become something true.
I began noticing the inner knowing. It was clear, neutral, sometimes firm. It kept nudging me into difficult actions and conversations, disrupting the comfortable mediocrity of my life. Even as I resisted, I was surrendering and asking to go deeper.
That knowing led me to sign up for Michael Neill’s very first Advanced Course in The Three Principles, which I’d never heard of. Soon I was exploring Existential Kink, Access Consciousness, energy healing. I was hungry, chasing something I couldn’t name.
I was waking up.
It wasn’t a burning bush. It felt more like slowly waking up from a dream, waking up to me – the real me – and remembering who I was.
A second Great Surrender came in 2022.
I was living in Florida with my partner and our cat, the happiest I’d ever been. Life was good. I’d seen the power of thought and how I’d been using it to create anxiety, and it brought freedom.
But I wanted more from our relationship. I’d seen enough to know that the change I wanted wouldn’t come by asking him to be different. It had to happen within me.
It was then that I read a passage in Clare Dimond’s book, Sane: Getting Real With Reality. She explains that if you don’t have what you want in life, it’s because you think it’s separate from you. You’ll never find what you’re looking for while chasing it, because it’s already yours.
“The promotion, the new business, the money, the good health are revealed – not obtained.”
It made no sense. How could something external already be within me?
For weeks I wrestled with the idea, and in spite of my protests, looked within and wondered, What if I already have what I’m looking for?
Then one day something shifted.
I’d been waiting for something outside myself to change my life – a person, an opportunity, an event. But what I needed was already mine.
And in that moment I knew: I was leaving my life and relationship in Florida and moving to Portugal. A new life and love awaited me.
I didn’t want to go. This wasn’t what I’d been asking for!
And yet, once again, I surrendered.
And now, I’m an ex-pat in Portugal, living four minutes from the beach with a new love and a life that finally feels like mine.
In the beginning, awakening felt like giving myself over to something greater. To let go of the suffering caused by my individual identity and be consumed by a god that would create beauty from my mess.
But as I kept surrendering, something else was revealed.
The One I was surrendering to wasn’t outside me. It was me. I was it.
I wasn’t alone, and never could be. The Oneness I longed to be wasn’t separate; I was made of it.
And I’m still awakening.
My little mind cannot comprehend the glory of Oneness. It continues to recreate itself as separate, chasing feelings through external things. It clings and suffers.
Bit by bit, the illusion of separation becomes more transparent. The truth of Oneness is more obvious with every thought I release.
I am awakening to being in the flow of life as life itself.
Yours in love and play,
Steph
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