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The Art of Surrender
Surrender: To cease trying to retain or control and agree to yield. To devote oneself entirely to 'something' without restraint, reservation, or resistance.
We begin the process of identity construction at or before birth - perhaps as early as the first sonogram when physical characteristics of gender become visible and our first description is attached. We are 'male or female'. This description is the product of judgment by persons external to ourselves, our parents, doctors, etc. Before that first moment, before that first description, we are pure potential, undescribed, unshaped. There are no boundaries, no limits to how we manifest. Until that first description. From that moment forward, we are told, 'you are this'. And, without thought, we accept this first language of identity. In that moment, we yield to survival; we 'are' something and someone has deemed fit to tell us what it is. There is no guile or artifice. We don't have those tools yet, so we simply accept. This begins a process of identity construction where we are told exactly who and what we are, so we believe. We shape ourselves into an identity as if taking on clothing. It covers 'us', the unspeakable being we are; it creates recognition, a means to control.
As we grow up, the layers of identity applied to us multiply, becoming heavier and heavier as they grow in depth and complexity until the potential, the core of the being we *are* is completely hidden. People outside of us 'see' the identity construction we have accepted through our beliefs. It becomes 'who we are'. Solved.
Except, it isn't who we are. It is how we have been described inside the bondage of other people's ideas, thoughts, and judgment. It has little to do with who we are. When the whole process started, no questions from us were asked. We have taken all our boundless potential and shaped it into the identity we have been given. We believe. We want to know who and what we are, and those closest to us have granted our wish by creating this identity, so we believe.
Somewhere along the path of our lives, we begin to feel the weight of this construction. How it bends our shoulders, drags our steps. It is hard work to shove ourselves inside this tiny construction, particularly as we evolve and grow, transforming. Staying still in our cooperation with the identity builders generates more and more frustration. Perhaps there is a moment we recognize where we must shatter the identity, perhaps deep inside we hear the voice of our core asking to be set free, to become pure potential again, where everything is possible.
So we face the conflict, the self-knowledge of choice. To be what we are, or to be what we have been described. In that moment, we see the bars around us, we understand the prison within which we exist, we feel the ache of loneliness, so hollow and empty. No one has really known us; they have only known the identity we have agreed to portray. If we shatter the identity, will we lose even those who have created it for us? We recognize our fear.
Sometimes that is as far as we ever go, to the point of recognition of fear. We want to exist, to have understanding of who and what we are, we have a lifetime of *language* - we *know* our identity. We don't know what is on the other side of the fear, under all of that stuff.
As we stand on the edge, there is a knowledge that to go further, we have to surrender our belief in the identity so carefully constructed over our lifetime. We have to cease trying to retain and control our ego, scatter it before us into the nothing/everything of our own potential.
Is it possible to manifest our empowered self if we retain attachment to any identity construction? Don't all such constructions become the limitations we seek to escape? Aren't these constructions 'resistance', inhibitors? To be our inscrutable, unnameable self, where everything is possible, where our potential is unfettered, can we possess and be possessed by any inhibitions?
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