Surrender doesn't mean saying yes to everything
Around 3 years ago I picked up the most important book I would ever read.
That book was The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. The story of a regular guy from Florida who learned how to end his own suffering by surrendering to life.
His process worked like this:
Life unfolds We can choose to accept the reality of it or to reject it People with wants, desires, goals, and ambitions will reject everything that doesn't fit their perfect model This inevitably leads to unfulfilled desires, endless pain and suffering But if you say yes to life, to have no preference for how life unfolds, life will be perfect In time, you'll be free from suffering And living in a state of constant bliss Until recently I misunderstood a key concept in the book:
I believed that to surrender to life was to say yes to everything.
This is wrong.
What Michael Singer meant was that instead of saying yes to everything, we must let go of our initial reaction to events before we make a decision about what to do about it.
For almost every decision a person makes they put it through a filter like this:
"How is this going to make me feel?"
Once they've put it through that filter, they then make the decision.
This leads to selfish ego-driven decision making.
But by following Singer's path, you let go of the need to make sure everything feels the way you want it to, and just do the right thing.
Although painful at first, by doing this you'll end up free from suffering. Because, soon enough, no matter what happens in your life you'll be happy.