The Practice of Courageous Surrender (for Challenging Times)

As I drove out of fire-ravaged Los Angeles this morning, I felt unusually heavy, sad.

Normally, I love hitting the road for a long road trip (especially when leaving LA). This time was different.

My wife & I have been in a prolonged season of loss, grief, upheaval, and looking for home. I’m driving 20 hours across our southwestern desert to Texas not because that’s where we live, but because that’s where we’re taking refuge after the Los Angeles fires have thrown us once again into the disorienting confusion of the unwanted unknown.

Since the pandemic hit in 2020, we’ve been repeatedly hit with painful ambiguous loss, which means “a loss that is unclear or hard to define or articulate.”

For example, two years ago due to infertility, we lost a baby even though no baby had yet been born. Soon after, I lost my father who remains alive. During the real estate frenzy of 2022 we spent an epic amount of money on a house that has since lost 30% of its value, and we’re likely to sell it for an epic loss so we can move on with the next chapter of our lives.

Here we are again, having somehow lost a home we hadn’t yet found to the apocalyptic LA fires. There are no ashes for us to somberly sift through. No ruins for us to personally mourn. Many would call that a blessing. Surely it is. But we’re also now confronted with having another dream taken from us by the whims of nature. These fires also took close friends away from us. Gratefully no one was physically hurt, but some lost their homes, and we won’t get to see them for potentially a long time because they’ve also had to scatter to far away refuge.

It’s complicated, which is the nature of ambiguous loss.

To others looking at your life, things appear as if everything is essentially the same. Yet for you, everything is utterly changed.

It can be profoundly disorienting because you don’t really know how to feel. After all, we didn’t lose an actual house, or baby, or father.

It can be isolating because even the people closest to you may fail to grasp the depth and duration of your grief.

It’s so tempting to let all this disorienting loss defeat me; to send me into a downward spiral of powerlessness, cynicism, and ultimately despair.

But that would serve no one.

Fortunately, all this disorienting loss is bringing me more fully into a spiritual practice I’ve been working at for years …

The Practice of Courageous Surrender.

Surrender, not as a cynical act of giving up power and agency to the chaos of the world, but as an intentional, daily, courageous willingness to be in partnership with Life; to let Life show me the way.

“My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself – because it was.” ~ Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment

In my usual egoic power struggles with Life, where I try to force my will over outcomes, I always lose. Even when I get what I want, forcing the result often only robs it of something vital and essential, like a man driven to succeed at work only to later discover the cost of disconnection from his wife and children.

In the practice of courageous surrender I simply commit to doing what is mine to do today, whatever I can discern that to be through reflection and meditation, and let Life handle the rest.

Granted, my ego doesn’t love this partnership with Life. That controlling part of me thinks Life works too slow and has dumb ideas about how things should go. It’s convinced it knows how life should be. Some days my heart still feels heavy, too, for I am still grieving so much loss.

My soul, however, thrives in the practice of courageous surrender.

For it grounds and roots me in the moment, wherever I may be, whether or not my ego wants to be there.

It connects me viscerally to the fabric of existence as I am reminded that I’m not really in control of anything, but rather I am merely a collection of a few particles in an infinite swirl of atoms dancing together as the cosmos.

My only real job is to stay present in this moment, listen deeply to the world around me, and to the soft whispers of my soul, and act from there. That’s it.

All else – especially the fruits of my actions, whether they be sweet or bitter – is in Life’s hands.

The practice of courageous surrender also reassures me that, even when the world appears to be falling apart, every difficult ending is only prologue to an epic new story.