Reframing Surrender

In my Alchemy Lab group this week, the theme of the discussion and the take home “experiment” was all about surrender. Curious, I asked them, “What comes up when I say that word?” Immediately, members started popping off answers like white flag, giving up, not persevering, not trying hard enough…  Surrender, on some level, has come to mean we’ve failed.

In our discussion, we realized that so many of these definitions are tied up in the symbolism of war and power. They smack of patriarchal domination–if we surrender, we are abdicating our power in some way. We are less than. We lose. It’s not surprising, really. We use that war and domination lens for so many words. Words are just symbols, after all. There’s no meaning to them unless we give them a frame of reference, and for so long the reference associated with surrender has been dominance and control (i.e., the giving up of…)

But what if we reframe…

 

Surrender: from the Anglo Norman French–to give back over

 

There’s a scene in the movie Contact, when the crew builds a spaceship based on some plans decoded from a signal from the star system Vega. Ultimately, Dr. Ellie Arroway is allowed to pilot it. The catch is that the crew refused to built the ship the way it was designed. To them, it appeared unsafe, so they added a chair with straps and other safety harnesses. During flight, Ellie’s seat shakes uncontrollably. She zips through wormholes and can barely talk due to the vibrations. It’s then when she notices the compass (a keepsake she wears around her neck) is floating with ease. She unstraps herself, and she, too, floats, gliding eventually to her destination.

When I think of surrender, I always think of that scene. Coming from a mindset of fear and control, we disrupt the flow of things and try to make them our way. We fasten ourselves so tightly that surrender is the enemy. Surrender would get us killed, we think. But what if our lens was that of the compass? What if we accepted the world (or plans) as it is? What if surrender meant unbuckling that grip and simply floating, trusting?

 

To give back over

 

Surrender comes from the Anglo Norman French roots for “to give back over.”  Of course, if we look at it through the lens of control and dominance, then we would assume that what we give back over is, indeed, our power. But suppose for a moment that we put on different lenses–ones that reflect connectedness and respect for self and others. What, then, would we give back over?

Let’s think of  a common scenario in which we might want to practice the art of surrender. Imagine Clarissa is frustrated that her daughter won’t do her chores. She’s tried talking about it to no avail. And she’s now resentful at feeling like she’s always the one to step in and compensate, to do all the work, while her daughter half-asses it. Her motto has always been, “If I don’t do it, no one will,” and here’s another example to prove it. From a control lens, Clarissa might scoff at the idea of surrender here because it would feel like giving up. She’s invested too much of herself  trying to convince her daughter to step it up. Surrendering means that the chores may not get done AND on top of it, she feels like a failure as a mother.

Let’s reframe from a lens of connectedness and respect. In this light, Clarissa realizes that the more she overcompensates, the less her daughter has to do. Surrender, then, means giving back over the responsibility to her daughter (the one whose responsibility it actually is). She lets go of her tight grip on control and allows her daughter to fail, to experience the consequences of that failing. She lets her struggle. And then Clarissa’s focus can be on how she responds to what her daughter does or doesn’t do. Yes, it requires being uncomfortable (she has to explain to her daughter that when you don’t take care of something, you lose the privilege of having it), but the mess won’t last forever.

 

The solo surrender

That idea works well and good when it involves delegation, but what about those moments when we’re all alone and nothing seems to be going the way we intended. What about those dreaded moments when we feel like we are in a dark night of the soul?

There’s a misattributed quote to Einstein that encourages us to think about whether we see the Universe as friendly or hostile. Your answer to that question informs your lens around the idea of surrender. If you think of the world you inhabit (or a Higher Power) as hostile, your mindset will be similar to that of the warlike/dominant frame of reference we spoke of earlier. If you’ve spent your whole life protecting yourself from hostility, surrender can feel dangerous, especially in moments where we feel a lack of clarity and are swimming in the goo of the unknown.

But if we view the world through a friendly lens (one of connectedness), we feel less alone. We know that something or someone has our back if we fall, and we are better able to give back (to God, to the Universe, to our Higher Selves) that which is out of our control. We can be like Ellie, flowing rather than gripping. Surrender, then, is simply the unclench of a tight grip that didn’t have to be there in the first place.

It’s not easy. It’s a practice like anything else. But reframing surrender as friendly, rather than hostile, is a good first start.