Surrender.
I've been sitting with discipline and surrender.
It takes discipline to surrender, and you can surrender into discipline. Discipline says, I will show up. I am here. I will stay. I will continue. Surrender softens the brittle and the hard. That is the gentleness that overcomes the rigid. It is the grace in the way. It is how you remember the dance. And creation is both discipline and surrender.
And maybe we can substitute the word discipline if that doesn't resonate with you, if discipline carries some kind of cultural baggage. Guilt, pressure, movement through compensating inadequacies.
“You just need more discipline. Just gotta grind more.”
No. No Thank you.
Devotion may be a more resonant substitute. But does it take discipline to lean into devotion? Can you enter devotion through surrender? Is devotion something you surrender to? How can you place yourself where you want to be before it's comfortable and surrender the parts of you that resist your becoming?
As we continually arrive at new thresholds, we explore inner territory for which we do not yet have a map. We surrender to the unknown, and through that, we discover. Through surrender, we are renewed, restored, reoriented.
Are you in a season of surrender, one of discipline or devotion?
Are you in a season or surrender and discipline?
Or assimilating and integrating?
You go through the flow of surrender and discipline through a 24 hour cycle, through a lunar cycle. What specifically in your life is inviting a greater lean into discipline? And what specifically in your life is inviting your surrender? What can you let go of to become more free? What can you release to become replenished? Or do you cling? Where instead, you could be held.
It is surrender that allows us to see and feel gravity as a force from mother Earth pulling you closer to her. How can you see discipline not as some external force, not as some notion that describes where you're falling short, falling behind, but discipline as that next uncomfortable step into who you are truly?
Discipline doesn't need to be a force that helps you show up for what you don't want to do. Discipline is there to enable you to do what you want to do. Discipline is playful. Discipline says if you just show up, I'll take care of the rest. Discipline says don't overthink it. Discipline says trust in your capacity. Trust in your confidence. Trust in the resonant directionality of your voice. Trust, discipline is trust. Is the trust of showing up and allowing emergence.
Discipline is the trust that says if I show up and I plant the seed and I nurture the seed, it will bloom—not a matter of force, but a matter of presence, attention, channeling your energy where you want to be. Discipline is a portal to who you are, not the walking collection of biases, habits, patterns from the past, the path into your constitution.
Discipline is not rigid. It's not hard. It's just a decision, a commitment, a conviction, possibility perceived, possibility chosen.
Surrender is the way of the current. It is the water on the riverbed. It flows where it flows. It does not resist itself. It's often strong. Directional, flowing. Discipline is the direction. Surrender is the dance. Creation is the extension and contraction between these two states. It's not a matter of control, but attunement. Attuning to what this moment invites. Attuning to what your body seeks. Tuning to the sensitivity of now.
You really can live fully now. No plan, no sequence, no formula. Presence and intention. Attuning.
What is the work of today? Not 9 to fives and KPIs. What is the work of life today? Chop wood and carry water. Do dishes and take out the trash. Make our bed. Cook dinner. Ponder who we are, who we are becoming. Attuning to the place, nature, our aura. Not for who we should be or who we are told we should be.
Do you have the discipline to surrender to creation?
Do you have the discipline to let go of what you need to carry? Do you have the discipline to discern when your heart is becoming hard? Do you have the discipline to surrender into openness? Surrender to receptivity.
Surrender is strength, and discipline can be soft. As the quiet words you may whisper when there is no one there to say you can't. Soft as the intentions that we grow in the shady grove of our hearts.
So what season are you in in this moment? When you think of strength—an integrity that endures—what comes to mind? Who comes to mind? Is it the militant boot camp leader remarking on your bootstraps and how they can be pulled up? Or is it the quiet soul who has found a way to endure without becoming bitter, to be devoted without becoming demanding. To become luminous, not by burning brightly and burning out, but by tending that little flame that illuminates everything within the radius of proximity.
Is it the strength in the field of dandelions who individually may not be loud, noticeable, but when met with a strong breeze, creates clouds of proliferation. A whisper from a wind, carrying seeds to new land. Plant, root, and bloom, and new biospheres, new ecosystems.
How much strength can you reclaim by letting go of what is not yours to hold?
How much strength is reclaimed in surrender.
The heart is strong. Beats quietly in your chest. Is the strength of consistency. Moment by moment, expansion, contraction, spiraling, vortex of energy. Spiraling motion of surrender and discipline. That is the spiraling motion of energy moving through your body. Blood moving through. Breath in, breath out.
If you look at the anatomy of the heart, you find an image of a heart unrolled, unfurled. You would see that it takes the shape of a spiral. Spiral akin to the spiraling strands of double helix DNA. Spiral akin to the shape of a conch shell. Spiral akin to the harmonic structures of the universe.
Your heart is a spiraling vortex of creation, a balance of discipline and surrender, and it beats for you in between.
So what do you offer your heart? Discipline or surrender?
What does surrender look like, and what does surrender feel like?
Surrender looks like allowing someone their own problems, surrendering your gripes, their patterns, because they are not yours to hold or solve. Surrender looks like showing up with your journal, beginning to write without any real direction, allowing whatever comes up to come out.
Surrender looks like sitting outside on a sunny Friday. Allowing the helicopter in the sky with all of its noise to be a part of the sensory landscape without resisting it, without saying, what are you doing up there in that sky when I'm sitting here trying to relax and be soft?
Surrender looks like facing unsolvable dilemmas, approaching the human experience that is riddled with paradox, giving up the part of you that thinks you need to solve it all. Surrendering to the problem of today doesn't mean giving up, accepting. Rendering to the way things are is not a practice of hopelessness, but gathering.
I'm here now, and this is where I need to be. So I surrender to this moment. I surrender to the work of today. And I know each time I surrender, that is not a failure. That is not a sign that I couldn't handle it. It is a sign that I'm attuned with my energy.
The more you attune, discipline and surrender, the more you gather energy like a storm front. Stormfront eventually surrenders, breaks, blankets, land, nourishment, water and current.
Maybe the work of this season is the discipline to say, I've surrendered enough to this vocation, this station, this place, and the people within it, and I wield discipline as the voice of self-advocacy.