Whenever I hear the words, I surrender, a mental picture pops into my mind. The beaten foe in a Looney Tunes cartoon waving a stick with a white cloth attached to it. The white flag meant, “stop the attack, you win, I’m done fighting”.
Many Christian songwriters have written numerous choruses and hymns with surrendering as the main theme. A person acknowledges God and relinquishes control over their life to God. In yoga, Ishvara Pranidhana is surrender. It is an attitude and a realization that there is a Higher Power or God at play in a person’s life. It is a desire to let go of control.
Arguments are squelched, fights are halted, and victories are won with these words, “I surrender”. The white flag is waved and the battle is ended. Surrender doesn’t mean we give up in defeat. Surrender means we acknowledge the situation, stop fighting it and allow it to change over time. We yield. We resign to the fact that we cannot manage the situation nor should we be able to.
We utter those words when we live with grief in our lives. Surrendering to grief doesn’t defeat it and we are not giving up. Surrendering to grief is realizing something big is happening in our lives and we are going to allow the situation to evolve and change in its own time. We pay attention to what we are feeling, what emotions we are having and what our response is to what others say. We listen to our bodies and make sure we are getting the rest and the nourishment we need. We incorporate movement into our daily lives. We sit in stillness when stillness is good for our souls.
When we surrender, we stop trying to manipulate our grief into our own preconceived notion as to what it should be like. We stop fighting against it. We live it and watch and learn. We don’t ignore all that makes up our grief, we acknowledge it.
“Surrender asks us to be strong enough to engage each moment with integrity while being soft enough to flow with the current of life.” – Deborah Adele,( The Yamas & Niyamas, 2009 On-Word Bound Books LLC) p172.
Living with grief in life isn’t easy. It takes strength to live the many changing emotions and feelings of grief. Becoming soft enough to live each moment takes practice. Most of us want the pain to go away and we want to go back to our previous normal lives. Soft enough to live grief may be the most difficult thing we will ever do.
When we wave the little white flag in surrender, know that we are not defeated nor are we giving up. Our little white flag says, “I am done fighting”. We are yielding to grief and resigning to the fact that we are being changed due to living with grief in life.
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