Surrender

This meditation practice of ours (Vedic Meditation) is, in many ways: a lesson in learning how to surrender.

It teaches us to let go of our outcome-oriented attempts to control or manufacture a certain kind of experience when we meditate, in favor of a process-oriented perspective in which we allow whatever needs to happen for us during our meditation to happen.

We cannot control the mind into subtler and subtler levels of thought — or stepping beyond thought entirely.
We cannot control the body into initiating the process of stress release.
We cannot control our way into higher consciousness states.

All of these experiences occur as a result of being increasingly effortless within our practice and allowing the ego, with all its controlling tendencies, to get out of the way for a little while.

This is easier said than done — at first. Our culture is obsessed with attempting to control everything. We think that safety lies in our ability to control what’s going on in as many different aspects of our lives as possible, simultaneously. But it always seems that as soon as one part of our life over here is under control, we’re shown that another part over there is definitely not, and then pretty quickly we’re shown that that first part that we had under control a minute ago is also not under control anymore (if it ever really was). And ultimately, despite our most earnest efforts, we know that any experience of control is either illusory or temporary, or both.

And then we come to meditation and we learn about the universe’s prime directive: evolve. Evolution is all that is ever happening. And we come to understand that control is opposed to evolution. Like trying to cling to a rock (or even swim upstream) in a swiftly flowing river. And the more we understand this and the more we’re aligned with this concept and can let go and surrender to the river’s current, the smoother everything becomes.

So, in our twice-daily surrender practice, we spend 20 minutes willingly letting go and trusting Nature’s intelligence to take over and give us the most evolutionary experience we need — and are capable of having — during that particular meditation.

And after we’ve been doing this for a while we find that attitude beginning to show itself in our eyes-open experiences as well. Our need to control everything starts to soften, and we find ourselves trusting, enjoying, and thriving in the experiences life sends our way. Or, more accurately, the experiences life sends us into.