I Surrender
This is a story about surrender.
In the spring of 2002, I was a newly re-married, very happy doctoral student halfway through the Depth Psychology program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Once a month I would travel from San Francisco for a long weekend of in-person classes. A Ph.D. was a long-time dream for me, and the program and people there made me feel that I had finally found my tribe and my happy place. In a word, Bliss.
But this particular spring, the headaches began. Month by month they grew in intensity and duration. First they hit me as I traveled home; then they began during classes; then they started on my way down to Santa Barbara and did not let up until after I was home. I tried to understand what was happening, what the message was (because, you know, psychology student). I loved school. I loved my colleagues. I loved everything except the headaches, which were not garden variety, but totally incapacitating. I could find no answer, but the pattern was crystal clear. Finally, after many months of frustration, confusion, grief and tears, I came home after the latest, horrible weekend of pain, looked at my husband and said, “I can’t do this any longer. I don’t understand why this is happening, but nothing is worth this pain.”
And I surrendered. I left Bliss.
To be clear, surrender is not quitting; it’s not giving up. To surrender means to release attachment to a particular outcome. It is aligning with the flow of energy; in my case, the flow was clearly wasn’t school. I didn’t immediately understand why, but I sure as heck got the directive.
From a spiritual point of view, surrender means to “go with the flow.” From a religious perspective, surrender is turning it over to God. (Jesus, take the wheel.) Psychologically, it means relinquishing egoic control. But however you approach it, surrender is getting out of your own way. Far from giving up, true surrender is liberation: freed from a limited perspective of “it must be this!” surrender opens us to something more, something bigger, something that is waiting to happen.
For me, that something bigger came 18 months later in the form of my now 18-year-old, beautiful son, Aidan. The journey to his arrival is a fabulous story that I love to tell, but too long to share here; suffice it to say that it involves birds, bees, bunnies, a witch, a miscarriage and a near-death miracle. It took some massive intervention to get me to surrender my single-pointed belief that a Ph.D. was the be all end all. With my fingernails pried off that limited (and fabulously wrong-minded) belief, Life whooshed in and gifted me with the biggest, best, most life-affirming, life-changing course-correction I never could have imagined and had never once considered: motherhood.
When you surrender to a particular, unwanted situation—be it your health, someone else’s behavior, or the loss of a dream—you release (the illusion of) control. You release the arrogant thinking that you know everything. You surrender the fight and the striving. And when you do this, you surrender your small story for a bigger, better one: the thing that’s waiting to happen.
KATE INGRAM, MA, is a life transitions counselor, coach, award-winning author, and a just-under-the-wire mother of two incredible human beings. Find inspiration and support for navigating the journey at kintsugicoaching.com or write kate@kintsugicoaching.com.
