Surrender

I spend most of my life pretending. Pretending to be happy, pretending to listen, pretending to be successful, ambitious and motivated. Infact, I'm so immersed in the grandeur of my life performance, that I'm actually a pretty happy, invested, successful and driven person. Yesterday I had a conversation with one of my employees that inspired a meditation about the authenticity of my existence. Infact, it launched an evaluation of the authenticity in all of us, and the quality of the world that we produce around us.

My employee had just returned from a challenging week serving as a counselor for a person with physical and intellectual disabilities. We were discovering the powerful, humbling, transformative process of it all as we reflected on the day-to-day of our lives that seem so vacant and insignificant in comparison. We spoke about honesty and open hearts, about innocence and lack of inhibition. We shared the so often unspoken secret of ourselves that in the everyday world we are only shadows and silhouettes of the beings we are inside. We maintain barriers and pretenses that protect us from our own identities, and preserve our anonymity in the world.

On those rare occassions when I've been moved out of my emotional shelter and into the elements of vulnerability and surrender, I have found my fullest and best self. I love stronger, I laugh harder and I understand and absorb the world in a purer and more beautiful way. It is only in that space that I appreciate the sound, smells and essence of the tangible environment. That space makes life palpable and immediate, and it gives me the rare opportunity to collide with the moment, to really live in it, experience it and thrive in it.

The last time I had that feeling was at the end of a four day backpacking trip with one of my closest female friends and 12 of the most dynamic young people I have ever encountered. It was one of those rare and spectacular life moments in which every single breathe creates a memory, the meaning of which you intend to hold on to for the rest of your life. That particular feeling is produced by the sensational collision of complete vulnerability and empowerment, and at the core of it, is the sanctity of surrender. That surrender is to something much greater than the force of all the elements of our lives that keep us from doing it in ordinary existence. That surrender occurs in the moment we stop pretending and give in to the weaknesses and intricacies of our most authentic selves.

I started wondering, what are the social and conditional causes of our failure to be authentic in the everyday world we live in. Is it capitalism, patriarchy or some other form of institutional oppression that I typically identify as the root cause of everything? Or is it a more complex combination of the expectations of our social culture and the limitations of the prescriptive norms we live by? And more importantly than its cause are the consequences of living by highly interpreted and transcribed versions of who we really are.

I've tried to envision a space in which we engage eachother in the purest form of our humanity. Where instead of operating under the demands of the defensive, we reveal compassion, vulnerability and unconditionality. I've also considered that the tools and awareness of critical consciousness would certainly be supported by the elimination of our own self-consciousness. I've grown up in a generation where all forms of communication and interaction are mediated by some form of electronic synthesis, and it seems that the further we get from eachother, the more and more we can occupy social existence without any identification or portrayal of ourselves.

I can't help but think that the further we are removed from eachother, the easier we can generate hate, anger and other destructive forces of difference and misunderstanding. The more we exist in a world dominated by constructed identities, false personas and other mutated forms of self, the more we are isolated from the enrichment and solidarity of the humanity that transcends so many of the barriers that produce ugliness, insecurity, racism, homophobia and the like. The more we see the world through the lens of television, myspace, the iphone and other co-opted tools of capitalism, the more we come to understand the world under the terms and conditions of a marketing license, and the less and less we understand about individual experiences, struggles, opinions and perspectives.

For me, surrender is a mechanism through which space is created. Surrender leads to the type of emotional evocation that spurs dialogue, and there is no doubt that dialogue is a source of hope, and a means by which hierarchies of all kinds are dismantled. There is tremendous power in that. My yoga instructor (whose wisdom I often use in my writing) often jokes about making her class incredibly difficult, with the objective of leaving "no fight left" in anybody so that "when we hit the mat, we will be left with unconditional surrender" When I hit the mat after having my ass thoroughly kicked by my yoga instructor, I am awakened with tremendous clarity and compassion and have the capacity for reflection that I rarely encounter in my everyday life. It is incredible how much energy it requires to relax in our culture, and I can only imagine the beauty that would emerge if we were far less consumed by our insecurity, boundaries and other forms of toxic mutation, and more invested in opening up our humanity to eachother.

Surrender. In a world where inequity, injustice and all sorts of heinousness run rampantly and perpetually beyond our control, it just may be a source of transformation. It may be the source of creative change and understanding, the power of which generates ideas that overcomes the boundaries that our failing to surrender have created. Surrender is access to ourselves and eachother, to solve problems and bridge boundaries on the simplest, most pure, most human level we can reach together.