The Surrender Experiment

Being a spiritual seeker and practitioner for more than three decades, I have read more than 1000 books on spirituality, meditation, and mindfulness. Finished reading another interesting book “The surrender experiment by Michael A Singer", which was recommend to me by a friend. In this book, the author shares how his own life has offered him several fantastic opportunities to grow and evolve as a spiritual seeker. The book primarily explores three key aspects:?

1-How to quiet our mind,?

2- How surrendering to the flow of life can show us the path to success?

3- How random events can lead us into spiritual insights

Oftentimes people assign meditation and spirituality exclusively to those who want to abandon the material world. Now it is well proven that spiritual principles can be just as life-changing to a business person as to a spiritual guru or to a monk.

Imagine if the phone rang every time you had a problem and on the other end of the line was just the answer you’d been looking for. From carpentry to software, life knows what it wants you to do. If you surrender to the flow of life, the right people and opportunities will show up. Well, life often works like this and has curious ways of giving us exactly what we need. Sometimes life gives us the gift of great people, who help us tremendously in our spiritual journey and progress.

Quieting the mind is one of the main goals of spiritual practices. You know that awkward feeling when you’re talking with someone and you suddenly run out of things to say? You shift anxiously, frantically searching your mind for possible conversation topics, all the while fretting about what the other person is thinking of you. Such situations are fantastic opportunities to allow your self (your consciousness) to observe your anxious mind. Instead of getting entangled in the embarrassment of the situation, observing your thought processes to see how you might continue the conversation. Slowly, you will realize that your anxious mind and your consciousness are two separate entities, as the latter can observe the former. Daily practice of meditation can tremendously help us quieten our mind and avoid getting distracted by the constant chatter of our anxious mind. Meditation can be as simple as just sitting in a quiet place, relaxing your body, taking few deep breaths, and simply observing (not engaging with) your thoughts. When we get deep into the meditative state, our awareness of self falls away.

Railing against things you can’t change, like the weather for instance, leads to that anxious mind chatter. And you probably experience the same resistant thoughts about many other things, too. What makes us think in this nervous or irritated way? The answer lies in our personal preferences. What your resist will persist. Surrender. Accepting the challenges and facing the reality of life helps you navigate your way to your astounding spiritual growth. Use life’s flow as a power to fuel your growth.

Service is more noble than solitude. Surrendering to challenges and change can lead you to unexpected places. Surrendering to the service of another fellow human being can open up tremendous learning opportunities to access answers to the most difficult facets of your life and help you grow as a teacher and a spiritual leader.

Experiencing massive success often means accepting that you’ll need to work very hard to maintain it. Of course surrendering to life also means accepting extreme adversity and giving your best to navigate the storm. When life gets tough, learning to surrender and accept are essential to keeping our sanity.?

Instead of over-analyzing what you should do with your life, open yourself up to the opportunities life is laying out for you, and start listening to people around you. Find out how you can use your unique talents to support them. Remember that sometimes people who want something from you are signs from the universe showing you how, by helping, you can lead a happier, more satisfying life. So the next time somebody asks you for help, say yes.