Growth and Healing Series #3
The Power of Surrender
If sacrifice is giving something up, surrender is letting something go.
There’s a subtle but profound difference. Sacrifice is often active—it’s about choosing to release something for the sake of growth. Surrender, however, is more internal. It’s about yielding. It’s not just doing something hard—it’s allowing something deeper to happen.
Surrender is the next step on the healing journey. It’s what happens when we stop resisting the process of change. It’s not weakness or defeat—it’s a courageous choice to trust something larger than our need for control.
What Surrender Actually Means
Surrender is not about giving up on life(defeat)—it’s about giving in to life. It’s the opposite of resistance. Where control says, “I must fix this,” surrender says, “I will allow this to transform me.”
It’s not passivity. Surrender takes strength. It takes trust. It means softening your grip on your plans, your timeliness, your expectations, your pain—and choosing presence over panic.
To surrender is to say:
“I don’t know what’s next, but I will walk through this with open hands.”
Why We Resist Surrender
Surrender threatens our illusion of control. And for many of us, control has been a survival tool—an anchor in chaos, a way to keep pain at bay. Letting go can feel terrifying because it means facing the unknown without armor.
Our culture doesn’t reward surrender—it rewards striving, fixing, outperforming, and managing. But healing often can’t be forced. Some wounds aren’t solved with strategy. They are softened by surrender.
We resist surrender because we confuse it with helplessness. But true surrender isn’t helpless—it’s hopeful. It’s rooted in the belief that life is unfolding for us, not against us.
What Surrender Requires
Trust in the Process
You don’t have to understand everything to trust that healing is possible. Growth rarely looks like a straight line. It’s messy. But surrender means believing the mess has meaning and being in search of meaning. It is trusting that chaos can become organized. It is trusting that uncertainty can bring clarity and that certainty can be filled with illusions. Trusting the process is a skill. This is something that we should be decent at if our caregivers early in life walk along side us allowing us to use their mental strength to curb anxiety and tolerate uncertainty. To teach us that the monsters are not so scary. That process then is internalized in us and we grow to build on it slowly over time. We then can use our past successes of using this process in new situations. Trust is an outcome of feeling safe and believing that needs will be met and can bet met. This enables patience. Therefore, impatience is a product of fearing that needs will not be met or one can’t place or predict it. If one’s past is filled with moments of unfilled needs or unpredictable response to needs, then trust will be very difficult as it builds on good enough satisfaction and fulfillment of needs through consistency. Trust is built on evidence over time such that in a new situation I can generally believe that my needs will be met. Mistrust implies one is cautious about their needs being met perhaps due to fear or uncertainty and distrust suggests one doesn’t think their needs will be met based on past experiences and evidence. Thus, it is imperative that one moves from mistrust or distrust towards trust. Sometimes they can start with a person or stem from a situation. But without thoughtful reflection it can become global and one develop issues with trust in areas that had nothing to do with prior experiences or uncertainty. Often, this is born out of wisdom in some cases and safety and protection in other cases. In moving towards surrender, mistrust and distrust can interfere and it behooves one to work through their feelings that developed as their future depends on it.
Letting Go of Outcomes
Surrender is releasing your grip on how things should turn out. It’s loosening the need for guarantees. Healing might not look the way you expected—but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It is the art of trusting that one will be ok on the other side. It is showing an interest in the destination more than the way one gets there. I find it striking that the way to get there is more important to some people than actually getting there, and, as a result, one runs the risk of not getting there at all. The disappointment on the face of people when they realize their way is not working. It is as if the end is irrelevant. My grandfather would often say, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Being with What Is vs What should be
This is the heart of surrender: presence. Not escaping, not numbing, not rushing past the pain—but being with it. Meeting your fear with compassion. Letting the tears come. Sitting in the unknown without needing to resolve it. This is called affect tolerance. This is something that is easily built in children when they are sent to their room or in time out assuming they have been given the tools of how to handle that time. What we run from grows. What we face shrinks. Sometimes facing our fears is challenging because what we often see is the monster of it and not the inner lamb of it. Often visuals are mask covering up something that is beyond or lies deeper. And if we can hold on long enough, we emerge to see that the monster is not as scary as we thought. This is trusting that what I come to see is important to me and for me. Sometimes we easily run when the appearance of something is not what we wish it to be.
The Sacredness of Surrender
Spiritually, surrender is at the center of many wisdom traditions. Jesus’s words in the Garden of Gethsemane—“Not my will, but Yours be done”—embody the ultimate surrender. It wasn’t weakness. It was the strength to trust God’s plan over His own comfort. In Islam, the definition of Muslim means “one who surrenders to the will of Allah.” In the Qur’an surrender depicts surrender not as weakness, but as a propound act of trust, devotion, and alignment with divine wisdom. The entire life of the Prophet Muhammad was thought of as one of devotional surrender in action, thought, and purpose.
In mindfulness and contemplative traditions, surrender is the gateway to peace. It is in the letting go that we find the freedom we’ve been striving for. When we stop resisting reality, we begin to move with life rather than against it.
Buddhism teaches that surrender is not a moral obligation but a necessity in the quest for liberation from suffering. True surrender is the release of clinging to desires, identities, fears, and outcomes. Identifying and letting go of what causes suffering. The teaching goes as far as letting go of the past, the future, and the present. Surrender means being aware that the self can emerge as an illusion and therefore one need not defend or assert themselves. The outcome is freedom from pride, fear, and comparison. Surrendering is accepting things as they are without judgment or resistance—being present without grasping or aversion. The embodiment of Buddhism is ethical living, mental discipline, and reflective insight—outcomes of surrender.
In “A Course in Miracles” the writer espouses surrender as letting go of Ego, willingness to be taught, trusting divine order, and learning to forgive. The list provides a framework to measure one’s travel through the process of surrender. When one is willing to sacrifice the Ego that is a good sign of surrender. Here the word Ego means a part of the mind that is preoccupied with illusions and often restricted in seeing part of the truth. A few that if the mind comes into the fullness of the truth that one will lose or be defeated. Thus, the Ego goes into full effect to prevent the perception of injury and harm causing one to cling to former identities, ideas, or future fantasies.
The willingness to be taught suggest that one is trusting in something new. That there is an ability to incorporate new ideas and paradigms and that it won’t kill you. That one has enough mental tolerance and capacity to reconsider what they previously thought. That they are more interested in truth versus narrative.
Trusting Divine order suggest that my views on life are finite and limited. And that I can’t see far, not even past the next moment. Belief in this order suggest that one is apart of a larger ecosystem and although important to it, one is not the center of it. Therefore, there is a need to trust in the form of interdependence of others and one’s environment overall. Collective wisdom is better than individual wisdom.
Learning to forgive and being able to do so suggest that one is able to surrender. In “A course in Miracles” forgiveness is seen as the correction of perception. We are not forgiving others for what they did, but for what we thought they did. It invites us to see beyond the illusion of separation and recognize the innocence in ourselves and others. Forgiveness heals the mind and soul not the world and others. It is important to recognize that we see world more as a projection of the ego more than an accurate depiction of the world as it is too vast to behold. Forgiveness corrects the mind’s error—not the event—by withdrawing judgment and allowing love to replace fear. Forgiveness is unconditional. You don’t forgive because the other person apologized or changed. You forgive because you want peace, and peace is only possible when you stop clinging to grievances. Lastly, forgiveness allows for a greater reinterpretation that one can’t come to by themselves.
What You Gain Through Surrender
Surrender doesn’t always change your circumstances—but it always changes your experience of the circumstance. When we stop fighting what is, we gain:
- Inner peace
- Emotional clarity
- Strength through softness
- Ability to better organize as you become clearer about what are distractions and detractors
- A deeper connection to God or your higher self
- The ability to respond, rather than react
- Reorganization of your stress profile as you don’t need to fight or flight
- Greater awareness as your capacity and tolerance grows
- Reduction of anxiety as the conflict with reality subsides
Surrender makes space for grace. It invites in solutions we couldn’t have strategized and healing we couldn’t have planned.
When Surrender Feels Impossible
There are seasons when surrender feels too hard. That’s okay. Surrender isn’t a one-time event—it’s a daily invitation. A moment-by-moment choice to soften instead of strain. Sometimes, surrender is simply whispering, “I don’t know how to do this… but I’m willing.” That willingness is enough. Healing enters through the cracks of our control. That’s why it is important to have conversations with one’s self such as “What am I fight for? Why must I control this situation? What am I afraid of?” The answers to these questions bring us closer to surrendering. They ask us to explore the resistances to progress. What’s getting in the way? Understanding the resistance is key to moving forward. We are only able to travel as much as our resistance will allow. The greater the resistance, the greater the stagnation and often the greater the desire that is trying to emerge. Removing the interference by understanding the resistance and working through it positions us one step closer to surrendering.
Sometimes surrender feels impossible to us because we don’t know what we want. Although we can’t foresee exactly how things will play out, it is important to have a sense of what we desire at a feeling level. Those feelings then become the guide for our unfolding. Ask yourself, “On the other side of this experience or experiences, what do I want to feel? What do I want to experience? This could help center us towards surrender. It is important to resist saying exacting how it should be and unfold and make room for other reality elements to emerge and invade our experience—things that we didn’t imagine or couldn’t foresee.
Final Thoughts: Surrender Is Where Growth Becomes Grace
Sacrifice is the ticket to the doorway, but surrender is the posture that keeps us open and allows entry. When we surrender, we stop wrestling life into submission and start letting it reshape us. Which when you think about it, life is pretty big to ask it to fit into our paradigm of thinking. It is much easier for our ego to adjust to reality than reality to us. This then ushers in ego-congruence and allows for the possibility of fulfillment in life. When we ask or demand life to acquiesce to our ego, we more often than not will feel disappointed because life is too vast and we can’t see all of the elements that need to change to fit the structure of our ego.
You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to fix everything. You just have to be willing to let go—and trust what’s trying to grow in and out of you.
Release the grip. Open your hands. Let life in.
Chris Winfrey, M.D.