SURRENDER!

This is from a crucial Pathwork Guide Lecture on a subject that perplexes many people in the later stages of their healing work. To attain self-actualization, after all of the excavating work of revealing and releasing hidden beliefs and suppressed feelings, the next movement necessary is that of surrender.

Here is Eva Broch, channeling the Pathwork "Guide":

Broch (“Guide”): “You often use the word surrender. You sense that this word contains an important aspect of spiritual fulfillment. Yet there is also a great deal of confusion attached to this word, which needs to be explored. A human being who is incapable of surrendering cannot find his core; he cannot find his divine nature; he cannot love; he cannot truly learn; and he cannot grow. Such an individual is very stiff, defended, and closed. The ability to surrender is an essential inner movement from which all good can flow.”

“You need to surrender, otherwise you will always remain attached to your very shortsighted self-will, which produces pain and confusion. Surrender means a letting go of self, of cherished ideas, desires, opinions -- all for the sake of truth.”

“You need to surrender to your own feelings. If you do not, you will always impoverish yourself and shut out your feeling nature. You become an automaton.”

“You need to surrender to those whom you love. This means trusting, giving the benefit of the doubt, being willing to yield if this serves the cause of the truth.”

“You surely need to surrender to a teacher, in any field you wish to learn. If basic surrender is lacking, no matter how much the teacher is capable and willing to give you, you can receive very little, if anything. This indeed applies also to a spiritual teacher. If you constantly withhold with distrust and reservations, you do not allow a most important dynamic to develop. You may assume that you can absorb mental knowledge from a teacher from whom you inwardly keep aloof. And this is true to a degree. But in true learning much more is involved than the outer mental processes. There is an inner, emotional, spiritual, involuntary level which must learn too. And on this level nothing can be absorbed unless you surrender to the teacher. This applies to the most mundane thing you wish to learn. A process that is learned merely as a mental deduction is not truly absorbed. It must become an inner reality in order to become your own. How much more is this true of spiritual growth.”

“The refusal to surrender has to do with lack of trust, with suspicion, with fear, and with the misunderstanding that if you surrender, you lose your autonomy and your ability to make future decisions. The refusal to surrender creates an over-developed self-will, which takes its toll on the personality. The personality becomes truly impoverished. For the ability to surrender is such a movement of fullness, of giving over, of letting go, that enrichment must follow it by a natural law. Over-developed self-will always brings strife. You can see in your world that two self-wills clashing create war -- on a small or a big scale. If peace is to be made possible -- again, between individuals or countries -- a giving in, a yielding must occur.”

“It is quite impossible for a dependent ego that denies self-responsibility to surrender... This is why those who are secretly, often unconsciously, most dependent, those who crave for a "perfect" authority to take over, are also the most defended against all yielding. They vaguely sense that the giving away of self can occur only when the self is strong and healthy, because then the self grows even stronger and healthier as it goes through the act of giving itself away. So, my friends, I say to you: when you find in yourself or others an inability to surrender, to trust, to give over, to yield, look for the undercurrent of dependency and denial of genuine self-responsibility.”

“As you grow in true autonomy and self-creating, you will sense very clearly that there is no contradiction, no duality, in regard to surrendering and standing firm. In fact, it will be clear to you that one presupposes the other, that one is not possible without the other.”

“Surrender amounts to a certain kind of inner, involuntary relaxation. The involuntary process comes about gradually as a result of much voluntary work on the outer level. It seems to just happen. There is a phenomenon that some of you may know and that may serve as a helpful illustration. When people go through extreme states of pain, there comes a point when it is no longer bearable. Then the fight against pain is given up on the involuntary level. A total state of surrender to the pain, transcending the conscious, volitional mind and will, takes over. In that moment all pain ceases and transforms into ecstasy. This phenomenon is known to the devilish practitioners who commit torture on human beings for political or other power reasons. When they see this happen, they stop their torture so as to get the victim back into a more normal state in which he begins all over again to resist surrender. The point here is to show you how everything can be transcended if the concept of surrender is properly understood and incorporated into the soul.”