The Elevator of Surrender
What to do when life pushes your buttons
Listen to this article:
One of the most enlightened beings I ever met was on an airport shuttle. In fact, he was the driver. He was at the helm for both my arrival and departure in Ottawa, Canada, about 14 years ago.
As someone who has suffered from bad bouts of road rage over the years (I am much better now, thanks), I found him amazing. Nothing bothered him. Cars sped by him, cut him off, got in front of him and braked hard, and made him swerve out of their way. Nothing fazed him. He simply did his job. He drove the shuttle and got us to our destination safely and with a smile.
He reminded me of a quote from Michael Singer's book "The Surrender Experiment": "My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself – because it was."
This man did the work before him, without complaint, without a regard for personal results. He drove like his job had been given to him by the universe. I believe that it was.
This, Singer says, is the key to surrender – learning to do what is before you, what life took 13.8 billion years to put in front of you without judging it as either good or bad, and not trying to manipulate it to keep it from triggering your old wounds.
Have I mastered this skill? Nope. I still get triggered. I still have personal preferences and I still try to make the world outside of me behave in a way that never upsets me or requires me to think about patterns or areas of my life that need healing. I dare say I am among the majority of humans.
But I want to surrender. I want more than anything to be like Michael Singer – able to be with every moment as it is, experience it, and let it go – whether that moment is seeing a beautiful sunset, or attending a funeral of someone I love dearly. Life is always inviting us to dance with it – to not judge it or manipulate it – but let it pass through us.
I am beginning to get an inkling of what surrender truly means. Since leaving Jubilee! Circle, the spiritual community I founded 14 years ago, I've been on a journey of surrender. I spent the first few months wondering what to "do" next. I panicked because I didn't have another "dream" to pursue. I have now arrived at a point where my "doer" has gone silent. I am realizing that the ultimate question is not "What do I do?" but "Who do I need to become?" The heart of that question is one of surrender – to simply allow life to move you along, to do what is before you with all your heart and soul, and not be attached to any outcome. You live not for the world's approval, but to please the Universe.
Boarding the elevator of surrender
In a recent podcast, Singer gave a great explanation of how to move into surrender, using the example of how one might react in a crowded elevator.
At first, there are about 6 people on the elevator, but at each floor the guy closest to the door keeps holding the door open so more can board. Eventually, there are about 20 people in there and it's crowded. Now, you're uncomfortable. Your claustrophobia is kicking in. What do you do?
The first level of reaction is purely egoic. You project your discomfort outside of you. You may become irritable, snapping at the guy to stop letting people on until others get off. You may exit the elevator at the next floor, even if it's not where you're going, just to escape the discomfort. However you react, Singer says, you're trying to manipulate the outside world, so it won't make you uncomfortable or hit your stuff.
This choice though, creates karma, Singer says. "In other words, if you're taking this garbage that's inside of you that's uncomfortable, and you're manifesting outside of you, you're laying a trip on other people's heads, and it will leave impressions out there."
That karma can come back to bite you, Singer says. Perhaps you're headed up the elevator to a job interview, and you discover that the guy you snapped at for letting people on is the one conducting the interview. D'oh!
There's another way to react, though. You could just silently seethe at the situation. Singer says this is marginally better since you're not creating new bad karma by lashing out at others. While you may not be polluting the world outside of you, though, this reaction causes an emotional garbage buildup within, resulting in the suffering of your body, mind, and spirit. At some point, you may blow your top and create that new karma that you'll need to then burn off.
In the next level, you are conscious enough to be rational about things. You know the irritation is because you're feeling triggered by the situation, so you tell yourself it's not a problem, it's not personal. The guy at the door is just being nice and there's enough room for everyone. This is a higher state since you're finding a way to accept what's going on and be okay with it, Singer says. "But the part of you that made you so disturbed, that caused the whole problem did not go away," he points out.
Surrender, though, is different from all of these. When you truly surrender, you're no longer seeking to make the world conform to your likes and dislikes. You're no longer silently angry at all the things that irritate you. You're no longer even rationalizing them and accepting that this is the way things are or will be. Instead, surrender means giving up that part of yourself that wants to arrange the world a certain way, that ego part that has likes and dislikes. Surrender means letting go of all the egoic trappings of preference and stepping into the observer role – that higher divine part of you that has no preferences, but simply sees the world for what it is – an illusion that you believe to be true.
You have to engage with the world because you're a spirit living in a body. But when you refuse to hold on to irritations – and even joys – and simply allow yourself to experience them and let them go, you will live in a state of true surrender.
Surrender your right to be right
What's the key to achieving this state of surrender? According to Singer, it's giving up the right to your personal feelings. It's giving up the right to say, "I see it this way, but I understand others see it differently." It sounds reasonable, enlightened even. In reality, though, insisting that you have a right to your opinion keeps you stuck in ego. Only egos can have opinions. Your higher divine self is made only of love, an infinite, ever increasing, every joyful Love that has no opinion. It simply loves, whether the moment before it is judged by our ego to be a hellish nightmare or heaven on earth.
An attitude of surrender will not prevent tragedy from striking in your life. It will not keep your body safe from harm or even death. It will not pay your bills or bring love, fame, and fortune to your life. But it will bring you peace. It will bring you lasting joy. It will bring you oneness with everyone and the Divine. It certainly may also bring you some manner of physical comfort and success in the world (Michael Singer isn't a destitute or unknown person, after all), but that will not be what's important to you. What will be important is that you don't want to hold on to anything that prevents you from feeling that oneness with the Divine and those around you (who are all just the Divine in bodily form, anyway). Every temptation to judge, to try to arrange the world to make you happy, will hold no allure. You'll use whatever situation arises as simply another chance to relax, to take those disturbances to God and ask that they be taken from you. You surrender them – you surrender your identification with the body and seek only your true identification with spirit.
As A Course in Miracles says in Chapter 16 (in a quote that is misattributed to Rumi): "Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
This is the essence of surrender – removing the barriers to Love. Those barriers are the preferences of the ego. You remove them by relaxing in the face of your anxieties, desires, and fears. You're not trying to relax the anxieties, desires, and fears themselves. They will never relax. What relaxes is YOU – the eternal spirit that is incarnated in this body at this time.
Will you always get it right? Not unless you're already a God-realized being, which I'm certainly not and I suspect you aren't either. But watching that driver do nothing but relax every time a car darted in front of him or delayed our progress gave me a taste of what it's like to fully surrender, to simply do the job that is before you in the moment, letting go of the ego's judgment of whether you like it or not.
If you can get to this level, letting go of your right to even have a preference, you'll find that this elevator of surrender only goes up.
Your turn: Where are you in Singer's elevator example? Are you lashing out at the world, trying to make it conform to how you think it should be, so it won't hit your stuff and make you uncomfortable? Are you repressing your feelings, only to have them come out in other, less constructive, ways later on? Are you rationalizing situations around you and getting to the point where you're okay with everyone having their own views, but you reserve the right to your own? Or are you finally able to surrender – to give up even a right to hold a preference? Can you simply let life come to you and welcome it, no matter what it brings? This is what it means to surrender.
Let’s talk about it!
Music for the Journey:
“Moment” of Surrender - U2
My body's now a begging bowl
That's begging to get back, begging to get back
To my heart
And to the rhythm of my soul
And to the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control
Upcoming Speaking Gigs:
June 2, 2024: Clayton Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church - Newberry, SC (in-person only)
June 23, 2024: The Unitarian Church in Charleston, SC. (Livestream and recording available)
Sermon title: “Pink Paradise: How Barbie Can Renew Our Hope for the Future”
Past Guest Speaking Gigs:
This is the sermon I delivered at the Jubilee! Community in Asheville, NC, on May 12, 2024. The sermon was “Renewing through Lullabies” (Stick around at the end to hear my original song, “Native Word,” performed with The World Beat Band.)
Looking for a guest speaker at your spiritual community? Contact me!
About the Motley Mystic:
The Motley Mystic is an online community for people who have realized that the truth speaks with many voices. There is no one religion, philosophy, institution, or dogma that captures the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth. No one needs to swear allegiance to one line of thought or belief to discern Truth, because Love is the only thing that’s real. That’s what we explore at the Motley Mystic - all the tools and strategies we need to remove our barriers to Love and live fully as our true Divine Self.
Candace Chellew is the founder of Motley Mystic as well as Jubilee! Circle, an interfaith spiritual community in Columbia, S.C. She is also the author of Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians published in 2008 by Jossey-Bass and the founder and senior editor emeritus of Whosoever: An Online Magazine for LGBTQ People of Faith. She is also a musician and avid animal lover.
Thanks for reading Motley Mystic! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.