Learn to surrender small so you can surrender big
Happy Sunday, Soothers. Let's revisit one of the most important topics that will help you navigate the Portal: Surrender. And let's ground it into micro-examples of surrender, that will help you navigate the bigger surrenders you will need to undergo as you go through your Portal experience.
New here? I'm in the midst of a multi-essay series on Navigating the Portal, or the transition that seems to happen for many people from their late 30s to early 40s.
Here's where we are so far in the essay series:
Navigating The Portal by Looking to the Stars (using the North Node of astrology)
Today, we're going to talk about surrender, which we all KNOW we SHOULD do, but really struggle with actually doing. And I find we really struggle with it, or at least I did, because I had no concrete examples of what surrender actually LOOKED LIKE in a life. Surrender means... just rolling over and accepting whatever comes your way? Refusing to leave your couch?
Not at all.
So what is it then?
Well, I'm going to share three tiny, micro, so small as to be boring, examples of surrender that have happened in my day-to-day life, where I did actually surrender to the outcome, so you might be able to adapt some of the concepts to examples in your own life.
And they're so micro because I want you to play with very small examples of surrender, so that you can learn it is safe to surrender, to release control, to be with what is, so you can eventually surrender to larger things. Because if there's one thing the Portal will ask of you, it's utter surrender, and this time, to big life things. Jobs and relationships falling away. Body changes or health conditions. Home moves or losses. Entire identities shifting and rumbling.
The Portal challenges us to accept the transformation, surrender, and let what needs to crumble, crumble.
So. What did micro-surrender moments look like in my life?
Here's a very tiny and silly but useful example, I think. Back in December AJ and I went to NYC for a holiday trip. I have a lot of clients/students in NYC, so I put together a small meet-up. I knew somewhere between 4-6 people would be joining me. The adorable cafe we had agreed on (that had been suggested by a dear Soother, thank you Daryl!) was quite busy when I arrived. There was only one little table that I snagged as soon as I could. Reader, I fretted. I thought about how I needed to stay hypervigilant and start grabbing and hoarding free chairs around my little table, like a freaked-out squirrel who's worried there's not enough nuts to survive winter, as soon as they became available. I thought about asking people around me to move. I was tense and worried.
Then I realized, this was a moment to surrender to trust. I softened my body, my frantic gripping that was happening internally, my panicked hypervigilance. I said to myself, "We'll figure it out when everybody gets here, and it's all going to work out."
So I moved from frantic hypervigilance, thinking seating would work out only if I, and I alone, handled and controlled it, and instead softened, opened myself up, and said, "Shrug."
What happened? We were a little tight, but we figured it out. The table next to me cleared just as people started showing up. Another Soother grabbed a chair from another table. And we had a merry, delightful, connecting couple of hours, I think in part due to the fact that my energy wasn't all freaked out, and that I let myself understand, whatever happened was gonna be fine.
Here's a second micro-surrender example. My boyfriend AJ and I aren't exactly on the same page about time and punctuality. He's not really horrible at being late, but he'll squish things a bit close, whereas my family motto growing up was, "If you're not 15 minutes early, you're late." As you can imagine, these two energies clash quite a lot. He feels suffocated when I insist we leave half an hour early, I feel panicked when he walks out the door at a time I deem "not early enough." This happened again, during our trip up to NYC. We were driving to a train station in Baltimore, leaving our car, then catching the Amtrak up. I KNEW we were leaving later than I was comfortable with, and in fact when we got in the car I saw that we would have approximately, according to the GPS, 3 minutes to make it from the parking lot to the train, which wasn't feasible due to like, physics. But again, instead of panicking, freaking out on AJ, spending the whole car ride fretting and stressed, I softened. I opened. I said, "If we make it, we make it, if we don't, we'll still be fine and it will have been for good reason." I spent the car ride taking in the countryside we were driving through and we listened to music and a podcast. Miraculously, along the way the traffic lessened and we had a full 10 minutes before our train arrived. We hopped out of our car, hustled down to the tracks, and were totally fine.
Third and final micro-surrender story. This happens every time I launch a course, as I'm doing right now with the Intentional Home: My ego tells me I "should" be able to get a certain number of students in there. That I "have" to sign up a particular amount of people to hit a particular revenue goal. My mind makes up numeric goals based on proving myself, scarcity fears, and more conditioning. And if/when I *don't* hit those goals, I blame and shame myself, or think there's something incompetent about me, my marketing, my offerings. I used to do frantic rituals and manifestation practices around launches, saying, "Oh, I should get EIGHTY STUDENTS in this class, because this other coach did that, and also, that would give me enough money to feel [briefly] safe!" Spoiler alert: NEVER WORKED. So now, I soften. I open. I surrender. Whether 1 person signs up or 1,000, I say to myself, "This is exactly how it's supposed to be, and I am extraordinarily grateful for this, and so proud of myself."
Now, a note on surrender: Inevitably people will ask about horrible conditions in the world, and am I expecting people suffering under them to just "surrender" to those? No. There are genocides happening in Gaza and around the world, we must continue to take action, call reps, demand ceasefire, write letters, stay informed, and no, I don't think anybody suffering the horrors inflicted on them by war and oppressive systems can just "surrender" their way out of them. That'd be a hefty dose of spiritual bypassing.
But I'm talking more here about small examples (and big) in your personal life. Times when your ego says, "Something should be happening THIS way, and because it's not, I will fight it with every fiber of my being."
Because, y'all... The Portal is going to win. Trust me. I tried to fight the Portal a lot. I did not come out on top, and I realized I should have just gone along with its demands, but I didn't have the surrender skills at the time.
The Portal will come at you first, at things that need to be shed and surrendered to, first with a whisper.
Then a feather.
Then a yell.
Then a scream.
Then a sledgehammer.
And the closer and better you can get at surrendering and letting go of what the Portal is asking you to let go of, closer to the whisper/feather stage, the more flow and alignment your life begins to take on.
So my prompt for you this week is:
How can you micro-surrender?
How can you stop screaming, "This SHOULDN'T be like this, this SHOULDN'T be happening," and move to the energy of, "Welp, this is happening, and I am willing to try to be open to its unfolding."
How can you let go, soften, open, trust, and say, "I surrender?"
Try it out this week. Is there a particular situation in your life right now you want to experiment with the energy of surrender around? Let me know about it in the comments, and know that I am deeply rooting you on.