How I Found Unexpected Anxiety Relief Through Surrender
Photo by Alice Alinari on Unsplash
I don’t know about you, but May sucked. World events triggered my own anxieties, and I could barely hold it together for two weeks, let alone try to write or post on social media. Of course, that made me feel worse about not keeping up with my schedule, which led to fears that I would never make this work as a business. It just spiraled from there.
But toward the end of those two weeks, I had a fantastic breakthrough that allowed me to release all that anxiety and more. A friend introduced me to the work of Tosha Silver, who teaches surrender as a practice. When I read her book Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead, I felt profound relief and calm I didn’t remember ever having.
Why Surrender?
Now, I know when you hear the word “surrender,” you might be thinking, “why would I want to do that?” That was me in the past. I liked control. Control felt safe. As an accountant, I’ve even been a “controller” in the past, where I kept a close eye on a company’s tight finances. Letting go of control felt like leaping into a black hole.
But trying to control everything has been physically and mentally exhausting, and I’ve been going through periods of fatigue and brain fog in the last few years. I knew that a great deal of my anxiety was sourced from this need for control, and over the past year, I have finally come to understand that it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work because the world is bigger than me. It consists of other people’s choices and impulses as well as random events that weave together in a tapestry of life. It is much greater than any individual’s well-laid plan.
When we are fixated upon having life turn out exactly the way we want, it tends to be a recipe for disappointment. Wanting too much control makes us less resilient to life. Limiting our happiness to a single outcome can make us miss the beauty in life’s twists and turns.
And let’s face it, none of us can avoid death and loss. It’s a natural part of life.
So I knew that this control was no longer working, but I didn’t know how to surrender. How could anything happen in my life without my making it happen?
Tosha Silver’s work taught me how. Her book comprised a series of short stories recounting how synchronicities happened when she, a friend, or a client practiced letting go of results. They would ask for what they wanted or needed, then leave it up to “Divine Order” to bring it if it’s right for them or to help them accept the outcome if it’s not.
Her stories weren’t just about getting what you want but also learning from not getting it. The world opens up when we let go of attachment, that desperate need to have something. We allow unexpected possibilities.
Other people become more open to us, too. If you’ve ever been around someone desperate for a relationship, a job, or a sale, you’d know it doesn’t make you feel good. Desperation can push people away.
In many ways, surrender is the opposite of manifestation practices, which have always felt like a lot of work.
These stories taught me that maybe I could trust and play with this idea of letting go and surrendering the “how” to a force greater than me (I don’t like the term “Divine Order,” so I think of it as “Flow” or “Life Force”).
In other words, I can stop worrying.
My Experiences After a Week
After playing with this concept for a week, I’ve noticed that surrender allows me to trust my intuition more. My biggest worries have been about where my writing is going and whether I could ever make a living from it.
It’s hard for me to invest time and energy into something when I don’t know where I’m going. But worrying about it makes writing harder because I’m second-guessing myself too much.
By surrendering, I started learning to follow my ebbs and flows without pushing myself to be faster and more productive, which creates a lot of unnecessary stress.
Within a week of my practice, my writing flowed like never before, and I started getting all kinds of ideas for topics. My social anxiety also became almost nonexistent, which is an utter miracle considering I’ve lived with it most of my life.
My sense of how it works is that we become more open to what naturally comes to us when we stop trying to impose a specific goal. It is a type of self-acceptance. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing with a goal in mind, but when I do that, I tend to block what feeds my soul.
The more I can let go of preconceived notions of who I have to be and how I have to write, the less anxiety I have, and the more things flow.
Every day I find ways to surrender control to small things that make me tense, such as feeling bad when I overeat and start to gain weight. I’m playing around with letting go of concrete goals, too, like how many blog posts I want to write in a month, and let my inspiration guide me instead.
It is such a different way to live.
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