Caroline Birch

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Learning the art of surrender through meditation

If you've ever attended a Vedic Meditation Intro Talk with me or you follow me on Instagram, you'll know I'm big on identifying the actions that lie between us and the change we seek.

For example, daily meditation being the action between how you feel (tired and stressed) and how you desire to feel (energised and adaptable). Or, practicing clear and open communication being the action between how you feel (resentful in your relationships) and how you desire to feel (connected in your relationships). 

In order to create change, we have to do things differently. Changing how we think and feel requires us to step out of our ever-repeating comfort zone. New habits come about not only through reflection but through taking action.

This leads me to what I wanted to write to you about today. How meditation, Vedic meditation specifically, gives us daily practice at surrendering to the flow of life, and how this makes life better in so many ways. 

I want to start by saying that being surrendered to the flow of life is absolutely not always easy. Sometimes things happen (or don't happen) in life that are so counter to the way we think they should be. This is something I continue to work with (and at times, work against). It is a process. And the reality is - things are what they are - and we essentially have two choices. Allow things to be as they are, or resist and fight against reality. 

The technique of Vedic meditation literally requires that we surrender. Surrender is the practice. Without surrendering and letting go, you're not practicing Vedic meditation. This is a key part of what you learn with me during the four-session Beginners Course in Vedic meditation. How to surrender to the intelligence of your mind-body and the process of meditation to give you the exact experience you need to have in that moment. Whether it’s complete stillness, transcendence and bliss, whether it’s deep healing, cellular repair, or anything in between. 

And so you sit in meditation every day, and you practice surrendering. You follow the process of surrender that you learn on the course. 

Everything we practice, we get better at. 

What starts to happen, is we start to get better at surrendering outside of meditation. We get better at going with the flow of life. Slowly but surely, we stop resisting what is and therefore creating more friction and suffering. Resistance creates suffering. We get better at surrendering in our daily life, because we've created neural pathways in the brain, and familiarity in the nervous system with being surrendered to what is. 

Over time, surrender and acceptance starts to feel more natural to us than resistance and suffering. Through continued practice, we create a new baseline way of being with life. 

If you find yourself continually resisting the way things are, rejecting your experiences and wishing things were different to how they were, there is a way of re-diverting all of that energy and using it to create and sustain the way you want to feel and show up in your life.

In my experience, it starts with learning the art of surrender. Meditation is a training ground for life. We practice surrender and letting go in meditation, and in turn that influences our ability to surrender and let go in life. And life becomes a whole lot smoother, more frictionless, easier and more aligned with our highest expression. 🖤

Image: Pinterest