How To Get Your Mind To Surrender Especially When You're Reaching Burnout

Knowing how to get your mind to surrender is an incredibly important and useful tool, especially for Entrepreneurs.

Whatever stage you are in your life or whatever level of anxiety or stress you might be experiencing, the ability to live your most relaxed and pleasurable life is achievable if you can calm your ego mind - I want to assist you in being able to get that place.

The ability to let go to the point where your ego mind surrenders is such an amazing feeling; you’re able to enter a state of flow which enables you to become more creative, more productive, and you’re more able to you pick yourself up quickly from situations.

It’s also completely unrealistic to think that you should be able to remain centered and self-aware at all times when you’re living in a world full of noise and distractions, such as technology and social media.

If you’re not spending all your time peacefully within nature, it’s going to be hard to find the space to ground yourself, so you need to facilitate as much as you can the surrender of your ego mind - it will allow you to have a better day, a better connection with yourself and other people, and will enable you to bring yourself back to calibrate and course correct if you have taken yourself off path. It takes self-awareness, discipline, and daily practice to be able to do that.

When you’re on a journey with spiritual development it’s easy to create an illusion that reaching a particular place, or the top of your mountain will allow you to suddenly experience an epiphany and enable you to live a life which won’t present you with any challenges. Even when you are in growth, life will continue to throw you different challenges, but engaging in daily mindfulness practices such as meditation will bring you back to feeling yourself quicker than you normally would be able to.  

Getting your mind to truly surrender is a discipline and takes continuous practice, but there are some things you can do to get to that place. I frequently hear how people try to meditate but find it hard because their mind won’t switch off; that signals that you're in the early stages of your meditation practice.

The amount of time, consistency, the effort you put into each meditation session, and how frequently you participate in the practice will determine your results.

Just like starting out at the gym, you know exercise will be really difficult when you begin, but the results you see and feel will depend on how frequently you go and how hard you work. If you show up for five minutes a couple of times a week, your results are going to be very different than if you work really hard every single day for an hour.

It's exactly the same when it comes to allowing your mind to surrender. It takes work to get the point where you are consistent in the length of time you are meditating for and it takes effort to be able to move past thoughts that start to creep into your head so you can reach a place in your mind where time almost feels distorted.

Your ego wants to take you away from your meditative state, so you need to train it, and you have to learn to discipline that part of you. You also have to separate you from your ego mind. This is incredibly important to understand because if you see yourself as a whole, as one, you are saying to yourself that it's you that is unable to do it. That can be frustrating because you think it's you but is not you, it's your ego mind so you have to see it differently.

When you go into a meditation and suddenly experience lots of thoughts coming up you need to recognize that part of you is trying to take you out of the meditation. If you are currently practicing five or ten minutes of meditation, increasing the time will allow you to begin to get to your place of surrender.

You want to get to the point when you are able to drop into a place where time passes very quickly; half an hour feels like moments, and it can feel like you’re off somewhere else. If you're beginning to meditate it may initially feel like a struggle. It can also depend on what else you're experiencing in your environment. If you have increased stress or you have toxicity in your life you will need to spend more time to allow yourself to get to your place of surrender.

Where are you right now you with your meditation? Are you consistency meditating for five minutes three times a week, are you sitting for half an hour twice a week, or are you meditating every day for just a few moments? Wherever you are is okay, it's a great baseline to move forward from.

My advice to you is to complete your practice in the morning because you want to set up your day in the most positive way - if something has happened during my evening that I need to address, but I wake up and go about my day and wait to meditate in the afternoon, I've wasted my morning when I could have taken myself to my best place.

Being able to reach a place within your practice so time distortion happens and you’re able to reach a high state of consciousness, so you feel more in tune, aware, intuitive and creative can happen with just a few adjustments to your routine. You may just need to make a couple of tweaks to get to the point where your mind surrenders.

Even if you already use a timer, pushing it ten or twenty minutes beyond what you’re used to will make you start to notice the battle going on within you. The pull that happens within you is your impatience as your internal battle tries to take you from your meditation, so it’s very important to continue to set your timer.

The trouble is your ego mind doesn’t want to let you shut your eyes, it wants to keep you in front of the TV or on social media. It doesn’t want you to sit, quietly and still. Your ego mind wants to continuously chatter and will intensify until it gets more and more frustrated and it finally gives up.  

Sometimes you’ll feel the need for a guided meditation and sometimes you’ll want to sit in silence, but you can bring yourself into the present moment by using a mantra and focusing on your breath.

Use a simple mantra which you can continuously speak in your mind, (or you can begin by speaking it out loud to get used to the rhythm of it.) The mantra you continuously say will help to keep you in the present moment. Even if you’re consistent with your mantra and your breathing practice you will still get taken away in your mind by fleeting thoughts that are trying to pull you out of your meditative state.

Your job during meditation is to consistently keep yourself in the present moment as much as possible. If your mind goes off into another direction become aware of it so you can pull yourself back to refocus again. Concentrate on feeling your breath through your nostrils and focus on the mantra. Notice small shifts in energy; you may feel your hands or different areas of your body pulsating. With continuous practice, you will become more aware of the small changes that move through your body.

Your focus, discipline and the increased time you spend in meditation (usually beyond thirty minutes) will enable you to reach the state when your mind and ego surrenders. You’ll move from internal chatter to suddenly ‘drop in’ to your meditation so it feels like you’re in a time warp and you’ll enter the slipstream; you’ll enter into a zone where things can open up, you have realizations, and time will pass by so fast that when you come out of the meditation you just think ‘wow.’

When you come out of your meditative state you’re going to be in a very heightened state of awareness so it's even more important to be very conscious of what is happening as you go about your day.

After my meditation, I like to slow down. I don't like to go diving straight into work or training in the gym because it’s the quiet time after sitting with myself when I have had some of my biggest insights. It’s during this time when I notice my intuitive voice. It’s the sign of the next step to take - telling me the thing to do or the person to contact. Clear insights to your next steps may come to you when you are in your environment, maybe walking around, and you will start to get a feeling to do something. It’s in these moments that you can really start to separate a calling versus your mind trying to sabotage you. At this time you can really start to tap into your intuition.

Don't get caught in the illusion that every one of your meditations is going to make you feel good. Your meditations may take you to a place which brings up negativity in order to allow you to feel and release emotions. There is the misconception that meditation should be a certain way and that it should all be about feeling good. Meditation is there for you to go to, to allow the space for whatever needs to surface, depending on what your intentions are.

If you don't ground yourself or don't spend time in your practice you can get confused, especially when a question comes up for you. If you have opposing thoughts and don't know which one to follow it can be really challenging - one minute you want to do this, but you’re not sure, you have different thoughts and ideas but don’t know which one to take action. Allowing yourself to surrender to your thoughts can help unravel and answer questions.

When you allow yourself to sit in meditation for a good length of time, the discipline makes your mind surrender and gets the ego mind to admit defeat so that boom you're in your heart. Most people don't have the discipline to get to that stage because their ego mind is so active and they won’t sit with themselves long enough to push past it. This is the awareness I want to bring to you to challenge your ego and to stretch you.

It’s also the discipline of getting back to meditation if you have been inconsistent. Again, it’s the fight against the ego mind because it’s always going to want to fight with you not to meditate. Your ego mind will always want you to do something else that's ‘more important’ than meditation. The more consistent you are and the longer amount of time you can stay present in the moment of meditation while keeping with your mantra and your breath, the more experiences of surrender will happen and the more you will begin to awaken.

I've been meditating for years and not only have I increased the time I meditate for but I’ve also gone deep in terms of being able to clear things that have been going on for me and so I like to use meditation in lots of different ways.

Of course, things still come up for me in my life, but when I look back and compare myself today to where I was, I can see how certain things aren’t in my life anymore because I have learned to surrender.

Meditation has enabled me to make tough decisions. I don't tolerate so much now. My addictions are gone, I changed my environment and I changed the people I'm around so that all the things I used to encounter I don't experience anymore. Making difficult choices has allowed me to get to where I need to be.

The best ideas I have taken action on in my business have come from meditation. My Black Ball book (the story of my spiritual awakening and my process for releasing shame so you can live a happy life) came to me form an hour-long meditation because as I came out of it I felt the pull. When it comes to taking action we want to feel the pull instead of needing to force something. The pull comes from that practice, it comes from that discipline which only happens when you allow yourself to fully surrender yourself to your mind.

You want to look at meditation as the most important, powerful, significant training that you can ever do to reduce your anxiety, stress, or depression, to start to reprogram who you are and your beliefs. When you fully surrender yourself to your mind you may be amazed at what shows up on the other side for you.

Simon Lovell, founder of True Transformation & Author of The Black Ball: Does Anybody Else Have A Secret